Any athlete’s stat line can tell you that data is abundant in sports. But when it comes to fans, that’s not always the case.
In early 2024, the consensus seemed to be that most sports properties weren’t yet taking full advantage of the fan data at their disposal. In the year and a half since, there have been signals that it’s starting to shift, at least when it comes to the big leagues. Younger and more niche sports, though, aren’t as well off as the Big Four when it comes to data and measurement, according to several sports execs who spoke at Cannes Lions.
While newer and emerging leagues are starting to build out their fan data sets, they’re also embracing other methods of setting up campaigns and measuring performance for sponsors in the meantime.
“At the beginning of the league, we don’t really have all the first-party data, so I think one of the tricks for us is to really lean into the storytelling,” Omer Atesmen, CEO of The Snow League, a pro winter sports organization founded by Shaun White, said while speaking during a panel at Cannes Lions. “I don’t know if grown men and women are crying if Maddie [Mastro] doesn’t win our final against Sena [Tomita] in the women’s championship. It’s not like the NFL. The results do matter, but ultimately…they care more about the person than they do the box score.”
Synch up
Between a wave of new leagues and expansion teams emerging across sports, fragmentation of streaming services, and the decentralization of sports media, even some of the biggest and most entrenched entities in sports are having to think differently about packaging data.
Matthew Jamison, SVP of ad sales strategy and partnerships at Fox Corp., said during a panel at Cannes that “social media and data from digital platforms” is becoming more important to Fox’s business.
For younger sports companies, too, data can be integral to everything from connecting with audiences to shaping their products.
“I like to use data to run our leagues,” Dan Porter, CEO of sports media company and league operator Overtime, said onstage at Cannes. “The best kind of margin of victory in basketball is about nine points. If that starts to creep up—we own all eight teams [in the Overtime Elite league]—we just move the players to different teams so it stays competitive.”
Fan data can also be a draw for sponsors. The US Olympic & Paralympic Committee has been working to help brand partners better connect with fans and measure their sponsorships, including audience segmentation work that will ideally allow for better targeting across the 1,000+ athletes that compete each four-year cycle, according to Chief of Strategy and Growth Katie Bynum Aznavorian.
“The main reasons folks invest in the Olympics and Paralympics and Team USA are the IP association and the global nature of the sporting event,” Aznavorian said during a panel. “That’s still a very strong value proposition, and…there’s many audiences within that. Our job now is to help brands connect with those various audiences within the Olympic world and fanbase.”
Don’t hate the player
Not every sports organization has the reach of an Olympic committee, though, so some are getting more creative when it comes to compiling and analyzing the data surrounding their sports. In its earlier days, the Snow League turned to “syndicated data” to draw insights about the audience for skiing and snowboarding, Atesmen said.
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“We have 125 million skiers and snowboarders around the world,” he said. “They’re very affluent, they’re very multigenerational, they’re men and women, and you can really start to understand the psychographic, the behavioral data, all of that, before you can capture all that first-party data yourself.”
As emerging sports properties grow their fan bases, they can start to gather first-party data about their fans by offering incentives like free merch or early access to tickets, Mark Abraham, North American leader for Boston Consulting Group’s marketing, sales, and pricing practice, told us at Cannes. Sports fans, he said, tend to be hyperengaged with their favorite teams, so they are often willing to offer up information like their emails or phone numbers.
“As a sports marketer, you can use that data to make their experience better,” he said.
If big brands choose to tap into emerging sports, they might have their own first-party data to bring to the table. When United Airlines was first considering sponsoring US Ski & Snowboard, sports that have much larger TV audiences in Europe than in the US, it looked at internal data to find that, although the majority of its customers are based in the States, some of its “most valuable travelers” engage with skiing and mountain sports, Luc Bondar, the airline’s COO and president of MileagePlus, said during a Cannes event about sports measurement.
Without major TV viewership, United turned to athlete partnerships, including one with alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, to activate that sponsorship, Bondar said; her posts for the brand, he added, tend to perform “off the charts.”
For brands that aren’t able to run ads with properties like the NFL, there’s an appetite to “get in early with some of those smaller sports,” Cara Lewis, chief investment and activation officer at Dentsu Media US, said during the same panel. But there are still obstacles like measurement constraints that can have a discouraging effect, according to Sophie Goldschmidt, president and CEO of US Ski & Snowboard.
“That’s what we’re all trying to solve,” Lewis said. “We don’t have that measurement piece circling around the full sport.”