6 days ago
The New Playbook For Personalized Fan Experiences
Ab Gaur is the Founder & CEO of Verticurl and also serves as Ogilvy's Chief Data and Technology Officer.
Fandom is a powerful force. It's a tremendous outlet for energy, enthusiasm and community, creating connections that otherwise wouldn't exist and unlocking unparalleled economic potential.
It also has many expressions. Fandom encompasses support for sports teams and players, as well as for musicians, entertainers, books, movies and other forms of popular culture.
While sports are not the only fandom that matters, the industry's lucrative television contracts, loyal customers, strong investment returns and fan engagement models make it a compelling case study in the power of fandom for sports entities and industries with their own fans to emulate and learn from in building sustainable and highly engaged communities.
In many ways, the sports industry serves as a case study in fandom's potential to drive significant economic growth and cultural engagement, offering illustrative lessons for the industry itself and other fandom entities seeking to cultivate loyal communities, generate substantial revenue and create lasting cultural impact.
Understanding Modern Fandom
Today's fans, much like consumers across all industries, are no longer content with passive spectatorship. They crave deeper connections with their favorite teams and players, seek personalized experiences and desire opportunities to weave their fandom into the fabric of their personal identities.
It's both a challenge and an opportunity that is best accomplished by unlocking fandom's full potential and creating "immersive fandom.' This is an environment where being a fan is an active, engaging and integral part of life, fostered by rich, dynamic relationships with the team, the broader fan community and the brand itself.
As chief data and technology officer at Ogilvy One—where I work to find data-driven relationships at the intersection of creativity and technology—I've had the privilege of leading efforts to innovate and deliver personalized fan engagement solutions for major sports leagues globally.
Based on those experiences, here are three strategies that brands, business leaders and entertainment entities can take to achieve immersive fandom:
1. Build and monetize.
Data is an abundant resource, and entertainment entities collect valuable insights at every customer touchpoint. In other words, the problem isn't volume; it's fragmentation.
Information about ticket purchases, merchandise sales, app interactions and marketing engagement often resides in separate, disconnected silos. As a result, brands have a disjointed view of their customers, which produces an incomplete understanding of individual fans.
To this end, experiences and interactions feel generic and mundane rather than novel and individualistic.
For one leading North American sports league that I worked with, the challenge was to break down data silos and create a unified view of their fans across the league. They aimed to move from siloed communications to 1:1 real-time fan journeys and from fragmented physical and digital experiences to connected experiences.
With an integrated data platform, the league was able to create 360-degree fan profiles that provide strategic insights and measured impact, informing the next best message and content. This approach can reduce time to market and enterprise costs through orchestrated marketing experiences that are governed centrally and executed locally.
To try it yourself, start by unifying and activating your data. Then, consolidate all available fan data—including demographic details, behavioral patterns, transaction histories and stated preferences—into a comprehensive profile.
This actionable data will help you understand who the fans are, what they value, how they interact across various channels and what motivates their loyalty.
This process allows you to move beyond guesswork to intimately understand fan segments and individual preferences, which enables the first wave of targeted personalization efforts and helps identify previously unseen monetization avenues.
2. Deliver personalized, timely experiences.
With a unified data foundation in place, the next step is to move beyond one-size-fits-all messaging and cultivate truly individualized engagement. Today's sports fans expect interactions that recognize their unique history with the team, acknowledge their specific preferences and are relevant to their current context.
To achieve this, leverage the latest technologies—yes, AI—to deliver these personalized experiences at the scale required by large fan bases. These technologies can analyze the unified fan data to predict individual needs, anticipate behaviors and automate the delivery of tailored fan journeys.
For instance, Wimbledon integrated AI into its fan experience to create personalized video highlights, spoken-word commentary and interactive match summaries across its owned platforms. This produced 'double-digit growth in engagement and content consumption across its owned platforms.'
These personalized and timely interactions significantly enhance engagement (and revenue potential) across the entire fan lifecycle.
3. Embed measurements, governance and optimization.
What gets measured matters, and what matters is improvement over time, ethical data governance and continued improvement through optimization. Building a sophisticated fan engagement model is not a one-time project; it's an ongoing commitment to refinement and improvement.
This starts with strong data governance frameworks. They ensure the accuracy, consistency, security and regulatory compliance of fan data. This mitigates risk and builds and maintains the trust needed to ensure that fans willingly share their information and continue engaging with the personalized experiences that information enables.
Couple data governance efforts with analytics and reporting that measure the effectiveness of their personalized engagement strategies and understand the return on investment. Metrics worth measuring include:
• Acquisition costs
• Engagement rates across various channels
• Conversion rates on personalized offers
• Customer lifetime value
• Overall fan sentiment.
This work is never finished. Fan engagement strategies that work well today can become stale tomorrow as expectations and desires inevitably change over time.
Rewards Worth The Work
Tapping into fandom's full potential is hard work. It's also worth it.
The rewards are transformative: Deeply entrenched fan loyalty, the conversion of casual supporters into passionate advocates, the creation of new and diversified revenue streams and the establishment of a sustainable competitive advantage.
Fandom is a powerful force. Immersive fandom is the best way to make the most of this valuable asset.
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