Elizabeth Silva
Research Specialist, Sports Entertainment Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

• A constant influx of new data solutions combined with closed or siloed source transactional applications create complexity and challenges when trying to integrate it together to create insights you can act on to improve fan experience, engagement, revenue, and sponsorship relations.
• You are struggling to get buy-in from your business executives for investing in off-field data applications.

• Your IT team is not aware of the data-driven digital opportunities an off-field data architecture can provide to your organization, seeing no value in the initiative.
• Your sports organization is solely focused on team performance to generate revenue; they do not see the value in shifting the focus to monetizing fan data.
• Developing a convincing and impressive business case to get buy-in from your business executives is challenging.

• Establish a working group of key stakeholders from the organization to work on this endeavor together and determine what the risks and considerations may be.
• Determine the state of your current data architecture and what data-driven digital opportunities can arise from Info-Tech's off-field data reference architecture.
• Build a business case for why an off-field data architecture is important to get buy-in from your business executives.
• Once buy-in is secured, input this off-field architecture into your next data strategy to achieve your business goals.

Deals with the business side of sports. Off-field analytics focus on helping a sports organization surface patterns and insight through data that would help increase ticket and merchandise sales, improve the fan experience, increase engagement, and more.

Off-field analytics is what creates an off-field data architecture and makes for a fan-driven data strategy.

Deals with improving the on-field performance of teams and players by collecting player statistics and patterns.

On-field analytics is what makes for a player development or team development strategy.

• Having proper fan data and integration is vital to the success of other strategies, such as a digital fan engagement strategy, as they are reliant on accurate, maintained, useable, and integrated data to make effective decisions, and to understand the fan better to create practical initiatives.
• The bottom line is that data is valuable to everyone when used right. Data empowers your organization to make better decisions, where an effective off-field data architecture and fan-driven data strategy will ensure you have the right data to make better decisions when it comes to marketing, hyper-personalization, sponsorships, and many more in the interests of your fans.
• Making better decisions in the perspective of the fan allows you to reduce the friction within the fan journey while meeting fan needs and predicting what they want next to create retention and loyalty.

“Data-driven organizations are not only 23 times more likely to acquire customers, but they're also 6 times more likely to retain customers and 19 times more likely to be profitable." (McKinsey Global Institute via Tappit, n.d)

• 8% increased profit
• 10% reduced cost
• 69% improved strategic decision making
• 54% better control of operational processes
• 52% improved understanding of their customers
  – BARC Research via Tappit, n.d.

“Data itself isn’t valuable, it’s the ability to use data to create content that fans want." (Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO, Second Spectrum)

Revenue Reliant on Team Performance Is Not Sustainable

Data and analytics have been used for improving team performance, although relying on team performance is not a sustainable choice as revenue is linked to performance. If a team is performing well, it generates revenue. If a team performs poorly, sources of revenue such as ticket and merchandise sales will drop.

Sports teams must create new revenue streams to be sustainable. By collecting data through multiple different sources, the 360-degree view of the fan will give sports teams a deeper understanding of their fans, to help them generate revenues and sustain relationships beyond team performance.

Understanding fans better is good for the long-term health of the business, as it allows for prediction of fan engagement behaviors and actions.

(Source: CIO, 2017)

Fan Intelligence Benefits

Understanding fans and their fan engagement behaviors is a key aspect of fan engagement, which every sports organization is looking to achieve.

Having the right data allows sports organizations to target and personalize offerings to maximize the potential of monetizing their assets.

Fan-driven data decision making is crucial when it comes to understanding your fan base, as understanding the data to further engage fans in order to refine and improve future activations is important.

(Source: Sportcal, 2020)

Sponsorship Benefits

Data and measurability can provide wins for sports team, fans, and sponsors. With data and analytics, it’s now possible for sports organizations to measure the impacts of the sponsorship opportunities placed within their venues in aggregated ways.

The three wins:

• For the team/venue it allows for the ability to command higher rates by providing transparency and measurability to their sponsorship efforts.
• It develops better fan relationships and more intimate discussions with brands.
• For sponsors/brands it allows for better market targeting and understanding of the impact of the dollars they are spending.

(Source: Sportcal, 2020)

As a sports organization, you are more than likely operating as a privately held organization that is owned by a larger organization/holding company and mandated to meet certain regulatory requirements from the league your team belongs to and the area you are located in.

Risk mitigation is also another driver for formalizing or optimizing your current data architecture. Your current practices and environment may be outdated, leading to potential exposure to risk.

As a sports organization, your current focus is on improving fan/customer experience, engagement, and striving for service excellence, whether by offering highly tailored products or services, upselling, cross-selling, sending targeted communication, or building fan/customer loyalty.

Stakeholders within the sports industry are fans, internal customers, sport spectators, sponsors/partners, media participants, leagues/clubs, host community, and governing bodies.

As a sports organization, you’re focused on optimizing your operational excellence and efficiency to ensure you are delivering high-quality products or services in the most cost-effective manner.

This may mean your focus is on optimizing your ordering, production, and fulfillment processes for the venue. Or you may be working on the efficiency of your operations, making them leaner, reducing waste, and optimizing resource utilization, all of which can contribute to lower costs and higher profit margins.

To maintain or establish your competitive edge, your sports organization is looking to become innovative in the product(s) and service(s) that you offer.

As an organization, you’re seeking to differentiate through product or service innovation.

You’re inventing and adapting to keep pace and/or get ahead of changing fan and stakeholder preferences by understanding purchasing habits, consumption, behaviors, more varied and larger data sets, IoT, and other disruptive forces.

Consider a comprehensive fan-driven data strategy to unlock value

• Off-field data should be at the foundation of your organization's evolution where transformational insights that executives are looking for can be unlocked with the right data strategy.
• A data strategy should be high quality, well integrated, trustworthy, and have relevant data, to create a clear form of the 360-degree view of the fan, where it is readily available to the organization when needed.
• Your organization should be able to gain a better understanding of the business, fans, and predict what fans are looking for, whether it is at home or in venue, resulting in better experiences, which results in higher engagement and revenues, through a comprehensive fan-driven data strategy.
• However, you cannot have an effective fan-driven data strategy, without a comprehensive off-field data architecture first.

"Data can be considered to be one of the most valuable commodities in today’s world - more so than gold, oil and bitcoin. It underpins most business and performance operations; and the organizations that are able to maximize its use are the most successful.” (David Ingham, Client Partner of Media, Entertainment & Sport at Cognizant via Techradar, 2021)

In the major leagues, 75-85% of single game buyers don’t come back every single year, where teams need to be investing in effective tools to better understand fans through practical insights. (StellarAlgo, 2021)

HIGHER QUALITY SERVICES

The strategic use of data can enable sports entertainment organizations to provide higher quality services.

FAN INTELLIGENCE

The strategic use of data can provide sports entertainment organizations with a wealth of knowledge on fans and you will be able to not just know the fan behaviors but also guide and predict what they may be to enhance marketing, fan engagement, and revenues.

FAN-DRIVEN DATA DECISIONS

The insights that can be found through the strategic use of data can provide intuitive information around fans and sponsorships so fan-driven data decisions can be made.

IMPROVE SPONSORSHIP RELATIONS

Make better evidence-informed decisions and improve understanding around the impact of sponsorships and fan engagement, so funds and sponsorship can be directed where they are most likely to deliver the best results.

DATA MONETIZATION

Create actionable decisions around your fan data so you will be able to monetize it.

BECOME A PROVEN BUSINESS PARTNER

If you have any business strategy, such as a digital business strategy, in place where data and integration is highly important, you will be able to effectively align with the business and be a proven business partner rather than just a business enabler.

1.1 Build an Accurate Depiction of the Business

1.2 Information Assessment

2.1 Off-Field Data Reference Architecture

3.1 Construct the Business Case

3.2 Determine the Business Case Impact to the Organization

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Call #5: Determine guiding principles.

Call #7: Conduct a MoSCoW analysis.

Call #9: Determine metrics for measuring success.

Call #10: Build business case profile.

2.1 Off-Field Data Reference Architecture

3.1 Construct the Business Case

3.2 Determine the Business Case Impact to the Organization

The challenges associated with fan data

• The level of data maturity in the sports industry is surprisingly low; however, sports organizations have realized that they need to collect data and use it effectively to succeed. Many sports organizations have invested in using their fan data to personalize fan experiences, but many basic processes are still lacking.
• Major pieces of information are missing from the game day experience, where sports teams understand who bought tickets, but not who attends the games. There are big gaps around what fans buy, when they buy it, brand preferences, and habits.
• It’s not only important to collect fan data but also to have a 360-degree view of the fan and their truth, which means connecting all data source partners too.
• “The US sports sponsorship market alone predicted to be worth $20 billion dollars in 2022, it is incredible that organizations do not understand their fans and how to maximize this revenue through data. Yet fan behavior in-stadium is still a huge data black hole." (Statista, 2021, via Tappit, n.d.)
• “Many organizations still work with a lot of separate data sources which limits marketing as well as a general understanding of the fan, where only 51% of organizations collect it in a centralized place.” (Geoff Wilson, Data Maturity Model, via Tappit, n.d.)

“Big data is exploding. But many companies are still struggling to simplify how to make their data actionable.” (CPA Canada, 2019)

Signals of Concern

37%
of sports organizations have a one-year data strategy.

32%
of sports organizations never review their data objectives.

10%
of sports organizations have communicated their data objectives across their entire organization, with 25% communicating it only to senior staff.

29%
of sports organizations do not use any form of segmentation within email campaigns.

(Source: Tappit, n.d.)

• CEO
• CDO
• CFO
• CMO
• CIO
• And the appropriate directors reporting to the chiefs.