Sports, as ever, is on fire. The figures behind current growth are staggering for an industry as longstanding and established as sports. The global industry is projected to grow from $506.93 billion in 2024 to just under $630 billion in 2028. Within this spending umbrella are global media rights, which broke the $60 billion barrier for the first time, reaching $62.61 billion - a figure we can expect to grow in the coming years as fierce competition from the streaming and media giants continues to bid up the price. Revenue generated by elite women’s sports this year is projected to be 300% higher than in 2021. And in terms of the global fanbase? A recent report from Two Circles noted that it will grow from 3.2 billion to 4 billion by 2033.
Sports fans are an audience that needs no introductions. They’re arguably the most loyal and passionate consumers on the planet, often forming lifelong relationships with their favorite teams and sports. So it makes sense, then, that sports teams and leagues are investing heavily to boost fan engagement and acquire fans to ride the wave of this growth and capitalize on the revenue opportunity.
But the sports media landscape is changing. And so must the strategies employed by sports organizations.
The shifting sports media landscape
As sports fans, we’ve never been more spoiled with options to engage with our favorite sports, teams, and athletes. Live sports, highlights, behind-the-scenes docuseries, exclusive content through team and athlete-owned channels and properties, social media, games, and mobile apps means we can consume sports wherever and whenever.
While this is great for us as sports consumers, it represents a significant challenge for major professional sports leagues, teams, and other organizations. The task of delivering engaging and seamless experiences across channels is increasingly difficult. For an example of how complex this can be, take the lead-up to a game alone: Buying a ticket on a ticketing platform, buying official merchandise from a retailer, using a train or ride-sharing app to get to the game, betting through an app, sharing the experience on social media, buying food at the stadium, checking scores of other games on a sports news app, and then watching highlights of other games on-demand later in the day.
The result is that data and insights are siloed across channels, different companies, and even within different compartments of the same organization. Sports organizations need these insights to be unified to make them valuable and actionable.
Moreover, the sports industry hasn’t been immune to the seismic shifts in the broader advertising ecosystem. The dwindling third-party cookie can no longer be relied upon by these organizations to reach and connect with fans (which they were never really any good at in the first place), and rising global data privacy legislation, of course, applies to all.
What are sports teams and leagues doing to combat these challenges? Investing time and energy into bolstering first-party data assets. However, as Deloitte noted in its 2024 Sports Industry Outlook, ‘gathering fan insights may not be enough. Collecting and aggregating fan behavioral and interaction data—alongside relevant second and third-party data—to build out a database with a single, comprehensive record for each fan is step one. Using the data and monetizing it is step two.’
How can sports organizations do this while prioritizing data privacy?
First-party data collaboration: The MVP in the fan data game
As we’ve discussed, fans engage with sports across many online and offline touchpoints, and bringing these together to build unified fan profiles is the key to delivering personalized and engaging fan experiences. This is made possible through secure data collaboration, where sports organizations can collaborate across fan data, as well as second- and third-party data sources, bringing together disparate data sources spread across channels to augment fan data and unlock new revenue opportunities - with all the benefits of data clean room technology: Privacy, performance, and precision. Let’s dive into the opportunities.
Harnessing new insights to build a 360-degree understanding of fans
Teams are taking steps to build their first-party data assets through loyalty programs, which is a crucial and important step in enhancing fan engagement. However, this can take time and will only give teams insight into the direct interaction with the sports team. Data collaboration enables teams and leagues, regardless of whether they have little or meaningful amounts of first-party data, to win big by building a data network of strategic partners.
By collaborating with brands, media owners, and data providers, sports organizations can tap into behavioral, transactional, and consumption insights to learn more about who their fans truly are, what media they consume outside of owned properties, understand existing partnership synergies more deeply, and which sectors their fans have a high affinity with to deliver engaging fan experiences across channels.
Growing revenue opportunities
With this newly equipped knowledge, teams and leagues can understand what matters to their fanbases in order to build partnerships with high revenue potential. For example, considering game-day touchpoints mentioned previously, clubs could partner with ride-sharing apps to deliver tailored powerful moments-based marketing. This could be in the form of offers to fans on their way to the game, such as discounts for the stadium shop or combo deals for food and drink during the game. The same audience could be activated across social channels, reaching fans while they consume and share content in the pre-game excitement.
Of course, fans spend considerable time interacting with other media and on channels outside those owned by teams and leagues. Consider the gaming audience, which naturally has a high affinity with sports, with 6 in 10 gamers being sports enthusiasts. Teams and leagues could collaborate with gaming publishers of popular sports titles to create custom audience segments of gamers who regularly play but haven’t bought official merchandise from owned stores. This audience could then be activated across InfoSum’s premium network of media owners to drive revenue.
Driving fan acquisition in new markets
You’ll no doubt have seen Premier League Clubs touring the US during pre-season, playing in mini-tournaments and friendlies. There's a good reason for this. Research from The CLV Group, a data and insights company for sport, media, and entertainment, estimates that 36.5 million soccer fans are undecided on which team to support, representing a huge opportunity to acquire fans and drive new revenue. The same can be said for NFL teams playing games across Europe.
Through partnerships like the one InfoSum has with The CLV Group, professional sports organizations can utilize clean rooms to understand regional nuances and make sure they are equipped with the local market insights they need to deliver meaningful direct-to-fan experiences that foster lasting relationships.
Maximizing sponsorship revenue
Data collaboration brings a new light to sponsorships and puts the teams and leagues in the driving seat to maximize deal value and also helps organizations retain lucrative sponsorship deals. Utilizing a data clean room, sponsors can match their first-party data to that of a team or league’s fanbase to enable both parties to understand the audience overlap and identify high synergies in interests and characteristics. This allows sports organizations to quickly and easily show the value of their fanbase to new sponsors and maximize revenue.
Furthermore, data clean rooms can help sports organizations and brands understand the effectiveness of sponsorship deals. Outcome data and insights can be analyzed within a clean room environment to validate the business impact of sponsorships. Check out how a Premier League football club collaborated with Starcount to do precisely this.
Responsible and smarter co-marketing opportunities with sports betting companies
Since a federal law was overturned in 2018, money has been flooding into sports betting. With some form of betting now legal in 38 states, revenues attached to sports betting this year are forecast to be triple what they were in 2021. For sports betting companies to flourish in this highly competitive landscape, data clean rooms can help them drive customer acquisition and foster loyalty - crucially while protecting customer privacy and honoring strict gambling regulations.
With data clean rooms, sports betting companies can bring compliance processes and management in-house, allowing them to manage opt-outs for marketing activity across external marketing partners safely. For example, they can collaborate with sports teams and leagues to reach engaged fan audiences while accurately suppressing consumers prohibited from gambling.
The outcome is a mutually beneficial partnership between collaborating parties, responsible marketing, and positive business outcomes.
Time to kick off your collaborations? Get started with InfoSum
The sports media landscape may be changing, but there are big opportunities and rewards for organizations that can adapt and operate in the first-party data world. As CLV Group’s report notes: "Given the scale of the market and increasing popularity of the sport—not to mention advances in consumer targeting—now is the time to capitalize.”
Data collaboration is quickly becoming a star player in the sports industry. Organizations are empowered to collaborate across multiple datasets to unlock crucial insights and advanced targeting capabilities to create better fan experiences - all with zero data sharing and ensuring data privacy at every step.
Today, InfoSum works with major professional sports teams and leagues across football, basketball, wrestling, racing, hockey, and golf, as well as betting companies, empowering them to harness the full potential of fan data to drive commercial growth. Ready to start collaborating with them? Let’s start a conversation.
