As sports marketing spreads across platforms and fandoms, it’s become increasingly important for broadcasters, sponsors, leagues and teams to know their fans.
Manny Puentes, GM of advertising at sports data and analytics firm Genius Sports, has been in advertising for 26 years and has watched sports fans’ online experience evolve. From fans reading whatever publishers offered to brands capitalizing on user-generated content and data-heavy “conversations” with consumers, Puentes has mapped the expectation change for all parties.
“That conversation is based on your interactions with the product, and it remembers that conversation as you’re going through and scrolling,” Puentes said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, you know me … I like this feeling.’”
As Puentes pointed out, each ensuing generation expected more out of that data conversation, especially when they were marketed to as a result. “Banner blindness” set in, and patience with broad, impersonal ads thinned.
Now, companies like Genius Sports are trying to push that conversation forward.
The pursuit of data personalization has led Genius Sports to consider audiences within identity graphs. It looks at profiles from a user’s TV, laptop, smartphone, and tablet and how they used platforms such as Meta, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok across devices. Puentes explained that this is all to ensure, at the very least, that there’s no fandom confusion.
You don’t ”want to think on this device you are a [Las Vegas] Raiders fan, and on this device, think you’re a [Buffalo] Bills fan,” Puentes said.
In addition, in sports, an increased investment in streaming platforms (the Olympics on Peacock, Major League Baseball on Roku, the National Football League on Netflix) has unlocked “all of the reporting and analytics and insights that you need to understand the lifetime value of the audience.” While companies like Nielsen have attempted to broaden linear viewing measurement, direct access to that data helps power tools like Genius Sports’ Fan HubID—which builds fan-based profiles for marketers and broadcasters based on information from live game feeds.
Such tools not only allow brands to narrow the focus of game campaigns but also let broadcasters and leagues see what grabs their fans’ attention. During a conversation at ADWEEK’s Brand Play Sports Marketing Summit, Puentes told Andy Kauffman, svp of marketing strategy and science for the National Football League (NFL), that increased fan focus on players and disappearing third-party cookies give leagues an opportunity to stop “talking at the fan.”