This Olympic gold medalist is providing fan data to the sports industry

This story is the second in a series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the first profile here, and keep reading Marketing Brew for more profiles to come.

When she was a professional hockey player, data and analytics were a big part of Angela Ruggiero’s life: monitoring her heart rate, measuring fluid intake, and searching for ways to perform better on the ice. When she joined the business world—with three degrees and four Olympic medals in hand—she quickly realized that not everyone operated like she did.

“Big decisions are being made with very little data, very little insight,” Ruggiero told Marketing Brew. “It always seemed really fast and loose, like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve always worked with that vendor. Oh, that’s just how we do it…’ It just seemed kind of archaic.”

That realization inspired Ruggiero to co-found Sports Innovation Lab, a market research company focused on providing fan intelligence data and strategic advisory services to clients that have included leagues like the LPGA, NFL, NHL, and WNBA, as well as brands like Google, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Fan data still isn’t the easiest sell, Ruggiero acknowledged, but she anticipates it’ll become increasingly important over the next few years, especially in the growing world of women’s sports.

On the ice

Ruggiero first started playing hockey with her dad and her siblings when she was seven. Her sister stopped playing after a couple of years, leaving her as the only girl in California in her age division. She loved the sport, so she played on boys’ teams, which resulted in “a lot of adversity,” she said. Luckily, she added, “The boys on my team were always super supportive, including my brother.”

Ruggiero said she imagined she would grow up to play for the LA Kings, the NHL team based in Los Angeles. Instead, as a senior in high school, she was selected to compete on the first-ever US women’s Olympic ice-hockey team as its youngest member. After the team won a gold medal in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, Ruggiero went on to play and study at Harvard, where she got a bachelor of arts in government, and, later, an MBA from Harvard Business School. She also has a master’s in sports management from the University of Minnesota.

“I always knew I was going to have a second career after hockey,” she said.

Off the ice

It was during her second stint at Harvard and her time on the IOC that Ruggiero began thinking about the lack of data in the business of sports. In 2016, she and co-founder Josh Walker, who has a background in data from working at companies like Forrester Research, started Sports Innovation Lab to help sports properties like leagues and teams, as well as media companies and big brands, use data to better connect with fans.

“Seeing a need is different than thinking there’s a need,” Ruggiero said. She recalled, in some leadership roles, paying seven-figure sums for consulting firms to “tell us what we already know.”

At the outset, demand for fan data wasn’t very high, Ruggiero said, but she was already seeing signs that sports businesses would want to better understand fans to keep them tuning in. In one of its first reports, the lab declared that “traditional sports marketing — using personas and static segmentation — is inadequate in the New Age of Sports,” and that better data and metrics were needed.

Today, “it’s still a sell,” Ruggiero said, although she hopes that will change in the next two or three years. “When we started the company pre-pandemic, we were out there trying to convince people this is important. Everyone knows how important it is now. It’s just a matter of how aggressive the ownership group, the leadership group, is willing to be…We’re educating the market as we go.”

For the girls

Part of educating the market means highlighting the potential in women’s sports, which has seen audience and brand interest surge in recent years. In addition to her role as chair of the board, Ruggiero heads Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club, which brings together executives and creators with the goal of increasing investment in women’s sports.

At the core of that is data, which is particularly important for helping to convince businesses “that there is a real opportunity here,” said Assia Grazioli-Venier, an investor in Sports Innovation Lab, the Washington Spirit NWSL team, and several other sports properties.

“None of the progress that we’ve seen in the last few years could have been possible without the data that Angela has provided,” Grazioli told us.

In a recent report, which Ruggiero unveiled during a panel at Advertising Week New York, Sports Innovation Lab found that, while 83% of agency and brand representatives surveyed plan to increase their spend on women’s sports in 2024, they still spend an average of just 9% of their total media budgets in that space. But brands have to “play the long game here,” Ruggiero told us.

“Women’s sports are playing catch-up to the men,” she said. “The men have had decades, if not centuries, of building their fan bases, and the women are expected to turn a profit in two years…We’re trying to show that it’s a different fan base, you got to treat it as such, but there’s an enormous amount of growth potential on the horizon. It just has to be nurtured.”