Inside year two of the NFL’s AI partnership with Adobe

During the first week of the NFL season, the matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers averaged 18.5 million live viewers, a smaller audience than the opening night game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, which averaged 25.1 million viewers.

But notably, the Rams v. 49ers game was played in Australia—marking a first for the league, which has been emphasizing international audience growth in recent years.

To help maintain personalized relationships with NFL fans around the world, the league has partnered with Adobe to leverage the company’s AI products in the NFL content pipeline. The organizations had previously worked together for over a decade, according to Chi Ogbuehi, the NFL’s VP of marketing technology and consumer products, but an official partnership wasn’t announced until last year.

In the second year of the deal, Adobe and the NFL are focusing on quickly creating personalized content for fans at an international scale, execs told Marketing Brew.

“Our fans are expecting us to engage with them in ways that are relevant, in ways that are timely, and in ways that are tied to what’s happening in the moment,” Ogbuehi said. “To deliver that value at the speed of need that our fans are expecting, our traditional, manual processes can no longer sustain that.”

Content machine

About four years ago, the NFL started instituting changes aimed at better understanding its fanbase, including centralizing data from all of its 32 clubs into a proprietary database, Ogbuehi told us. Other leagues and sports organizations have undertaken similar efforts in recent years.

From there, Adobe helps the league put that data to use by building “content supply chains and experiences” that are used to produce, personalize, and distribute hundreds of thousands of assets for platforms like social media, Adobe Enterprise CMO Rachel Thornton said. For instance, when the NFL creates tune-in messaging for Sunday football, “that’s probably 350,000 assets right there,” between various teams and channels, she said.

“Once upon a time, a single campaign…maybe required a couple thousand assets,” Ogbuehi said. “By the time you factor in…different languages, variations, different types of experiences, [for] a campaign that typically would have required about a couple thousand assets, now we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of assets.”

To push out that content, the NFL established a new “AI-powered content ecosystem” that it’s currently piloting with teams. That ecosystem allows marketers to use Adobe products, like a self-serve tool that creates different versions of a marketing asset based on approved templates, Ogbuehi said.

It’s personal

League and team marketers can also create personalized content based on fan profiles built using information from across platforms, Thornton said. She used her son as an example: He’s a teenager living in Seattle, so he’s primarily a Seahawks fan, but he also follows the 49ers, and many other teams and players for his fantasy league. As a Gen Zer, his football viewing experience heavily involves social media. The league, Thornton said, wants to reach him (and its millions of other fans) wherever they are, with all the information they want, like schedules and stats.

“The NFL and their teams understand that, especially for that younger demographic, it has to be [a] multi-platform, multi-screen” experience, she said. “All of those touchpoints matter, and they differ from person to person.”

To further protect personalization and customization across teams, the NFL’s content ecosystem uses a “zero-trust visibility model” that essentially means marketers from different teams don’t have access to each other’s work, Ogbuehi said.

As the league’s following grows around the world, its marketers are seeking to deliver information to a growing cohort in a way that still feels individually tailored to each fan, making AI tools more integral to its marketing.

“It starts with understanding the context of that fan relationship,” Ogbuehi said. “Who is the fan?...Understanding the context of the relationship allows us to better deliver more relevant experiences to that fan.”