Genius Sports Joins Los Angeles Rams and Verizon to Blitz Fans With Data

Genius Sports and the Los Angeles Rams know that just because you have fans in your building on game day doesn’t mean you have their undivided attention.

The growth of fantasy sports, gambling, short-form video, and streaming content means fans are still deferring to their devices regardless of what they’ve paid for admission or what’s happening on the field. That isn’t great news for sponsors like the Rams and National Football League (NFL) partner Verizon, but Genius Sports has a game plan for that.

As the official league data distributor for the NFL—and data partner to 400 organizations in sports leagues around the world—Genius Sports teamed with the Rams and Verizon to build upon in-stadium experiences and get more fans into the game.

During Sunday’s matchup between the Rams and the Las Vegas Raiders at SoFi Stadium, fans will see replays and highlights using the NFL’s Next Gen Stats (NGS) data and Genius Sports’ GeniusIQ machine learning and AI. Those clips will feature player locators, identification, and speeds; the time it takes a quarterback to throw a ball; and a minimap of the field and player routes—all with the Verizon logo and branding included.

The site of Super Bowl 56 in 2022, SoFi Stadium displays the Rams and Verizon’s data-integrated highlights on its 120-yard, 70,000-square-foot 4K LED Infinity Screen suspended over the field, as well as on numerous screens in lounge areas and easements through the facility. Those 18 to 20 replays per game—as well as a highlight package at the game’s end—join a mariachi band, house guitarist Nita Strauss, and a social-savvy mascot in creating an in-stadium experience that bolsters the Rams’ argument for fans to leave their screens and couches.

“We program a robust and diverse experience for those five hours, from gates opening to gates closing, to support and enhance the football that’s taking place on the field,” said Sarah Schuler, the Rams’ vp of game presentation. “But it’s that next level of near-real-time [data] with things like speed leaders, route trees, and time-to-throw that’s giving you that info before you knew you needed it [that] rivals, if not beats, the at-home experience, and that’s the goal.”

Facing an enhanced reality

In March, just as the NFL’s offseason began, the Rams approached Genius Sports about working stats into the team’s game-day plans.

Genius offered its package of “hustle and performance” stats with the promise that they could be added to replays with graphic overlays almost immediately. So if Rams quarterback Matt Stafford threw a pass less than two seconds after the play started, the Rams’ instant-replay producer and stats producer could turn on player augmentation and locator features and track the throw from multiple angles.

“Instead of looking to some other location or digging in your phone or trying to understand sort of the immediacy of what you just saw, we display that within seconds of that actual play taking place,” Schuler said.

Schuler compared the in-house replays to the increasing advances in technology fans see in NFL coverage each season. She specifically pointed to the overlays seen on Amazon’s “Prime Vision” Thursday Night Football alternate stream (which also uses NGS) and CBS’s Genius Sports-Powered RomoVision NGS visuals.

Those similarities come by design, according to Manny Puentes, gm of advertising, Genius Sports.

“The arena goes from ‘The Arena’ to your digital ecosystem that you spend your day-to-day life in,” Puentes said. “The arena is a global arena.”

At SoFi, the replays and graphics give casual fans another means of experiencing the game, while real-time stats from around the league—highlighted in Rams blue for the action on the field—provide more avid fans some additional value. For Verizon, meanwhile, it shifts fans’ eyes away from their devices and back to the partnership and message the brand is invested in.

“Every year when we align a partner with a feature opportunity, we obviously take a look at the partner’s KPIs for that upcoming year, the brand messaging that they want to get across, and how can we align our desire to be the most innovative sports team,” Schuler said. “When we can integrate a third-party partner into the mix to provide data, insights, and displays that are the first of its kind in an NFL stadium, you’ve got a bullseye.”

The bigger game

The Rams and Verizon’s partnership is just part of Genius Sports’ broader strategy to connect leagues and their sponsors to fans with help from game data. Earlier this month, Genius Sports took its more than 20 years of amassed sports information and poured it into a new platform—FANHub—designed to streamline the sports media buying process for marketers.

The platform encompasses Genius Sports’ fan identity graph—FanHub ID—to help brands and marketers identify audiences. It then matches marketers’ preferred brand profiles with sports inventory in programmatic and social channels, including display ads, video, audio, and digital out-of-home. It uses live-game data to monitor ad performance and lets brands change campaigns instantly based on both the on-field action and fan preference.

Timing is increasingly important to partners like the Rams and Verizon. Puentes noted that more than 60% of Gen Z will buy products from a brand aligned with their favorite team. That number jumps to more than three quarters when a brand associates itself with their favorite player. If that player gets hurt, a campaign with them at the center won’t be nearly as effective at wooing their fans. 

The stats and graphics at Rams games give fans something to look at, but they’re also feeding a sports marketing database that can help teams and brands hold fans’ attention long after they’ve filed out of the stadium.

“If you’re a marketer and you’re trying to get brand affinity, we want to make sure that everything that you’re actually engaging the fan with is up to date,” Puentes said. “Not just scores, not just the time of the event, but specifically what is happening within that creative.”