Building an amazing experience for sports fans with data.

I have to come clean. I don't have a passion for sports. In fact, I am probably the worst Australian in the world when it comes to sport. I don't know much about cricket, I thought that the New York Jets was a new airline company, and I could not tell you the difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union. However, at CluedIn, we know data. So at the start of this year when we had multiple different teams approach us across NHL, NFL, NBA and more, we realized that there was a thirst from these companies to provide their fans with the most amazing experience, driven from data.?

As the story commonly goes, the challenge was that the data they had on their fans was scattered around multiple places and had a lot of holes in the data, making it close to impossible to offer their fans a better experience.?

Talking with these different teams, one thing was very clear. They all had a common culture, that the Fan was the most important aspect for them. They knew their fans from a conceptual level, but didn't know them from an actual level. This gap was what they were wanting to bridge. A gap, that if conquered, would provide these teams with ways to personalize the experience for their fans in an immensely positive way for all parties involved.?

One particular company, MLSE, was in a unique position where their desire to please their fans went all the way down to making sure that the fan was always update to date on the movement of their favorite players, providing guidance on when they were playing next, where it will be and easy access to tickets to be at the game. Essentially, the more loyal the fan, the more benefits they gained e.g. exclusive tickets, first in line for tickets and better experiences during the game, access to non-game benefits – meet and greets, in venue upgrades and so much more.

I don't have a passion for sports, but THIS aspect of it excites me and the CluedIn team to no end.?

So, enter our fantastic relationship and partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft Azure is the standard for a majority of the leagues. It forms the foundation of the data ecosystem of which use cases like "Single view of Fan" are established. And so starts the journey of building what I would consider one of the most value generating use cases I have experienced at CluedIn so far.?

The lifetime of a sports fan, is exactly that, a lifetime. Unlike other industries, (from what I am told), when you are a kid, you pick a team and you stick with that team through the good and the bad. Hence I believe (and have also experienced) that the leagues have the biggest opportunity in the market to give a great experience for these Loyal Fans.?

For this to work properly, we needed to make sure that this web, network of relationships was more organic than defined. What I mean by this, is if we were to upfront model the data how we thought it should be, we would miss out on the huge opportunities for the relationships to evolve themselves. If we were to sit there with the teams and formulate that a fan will have a relationship to players and that fans will have relationships to shops, then we would miss out on the possibility that in fact players have a relationship with the shops and in turn that could help provide insights in that direction.?This is becoming even more relevant as teams are working on building more 1:1 relationships between the players and the fans, instead of the 1:Many relationships that were more prevelant in the past. In fact, what I learnt from working with these different teams on their data was that fans can love a team, but have a real dislike for certain players on that team.?

From here, we had essentially the ultimate source of data across fans, players, stadiums, events, tickets and more. Now, we were ready for insight. Microsoft Azure provides a plethora of services for generating insights. All they require is access to data that is rich and ready to use.?

With Microsoft and CluedIn, we are now providing these teams with engines to fuel the perfect fan experience. An experience that knows their fans, knows what would excite them and gives them a simple way to experience it. Whether it is new 2022 jerseys are now available for their favorite player and there are 500 limited editions of signed jerseys, or it is stadium seats for every game in their favorite seat - the insights and the possible experiences are endless. We even see some teams looking into NFT's (Non-fungile tokens) as to associate ownership to digital assets associated with their teams.?

We think we have something special here with CluedIn and Microsoft for the sports industry and look forward to working with more teams on building an amazing lifetime fan experience.