What we heard at SportsPro AI

Chris Sadd and Killian Barry of our sports team spent last week at the SportsPro AI & Tech conference at the London Stadium. The agenda was action-packed, but one recurring challenge stood out to our team:

Fragmented data is preventing sports organisations from truly understanding their fans.

One fan, multiple data instances

Despite improvements to the data they hold on fans, many sports organisations lack a unified view: a club might have a clear view of ticket sales and a separate view of merchandise sales. Because the two views are not aligned, matching a single fans behaviour becomes impossible. A supporter who renews a season ticket and buys a new shirt every year can look like two unrelated customers.

That limits what an organisation can understand about how fans really behave. It also makes it harder to target them effectively and to identify opportunities to deepen relationship and greater monetisation.

It’s an easy position to end up in. Each team measures what it sells, so the picture of the fan remains fragmented.

Understand the fan and the behaviours will follow

AI could unlock potential solutions to this challenge, finding connections across datasets to begin building a more unified view. But there’s also a bigger issue than matching. Once the records are joined up, an organisation still has to decide who to talk to and what to offer them.

This is where audience segmentation from MTM comes in. We take a fan-centric approach, building out from the needs and motivations that drive fans to understand their behaviours, rather than the other way around. Not only does this ensure you better understand your audience (as well as your potential audience), but it delivers a clearer picture on the totality of their behaviours, why they occur, and where further engagement (and monetisation) can be encouraged.

Identifying ‘types’ of fans in this way makes them much more targetable. By building a holistic view of your audiences – what they want, how they think, and the other activities that form part of their lives – allows you to develop more sophisticated strategies for communicating with them; where to reach them, with what messages, for what purpose.

We ensure that the human comes first, but there’s still a role for AI. Our synthetic personas platform AudienceGPT was also presented at SportsPro; it turns the audiences into something you can chat to and interrogate, so your team can put questions to a segment directly rather than reading about it on a slide.

Talk to us about fan segmentation

If your fan data is split across ticketing, retail and other systems, and you want a clearer view of who your fans are and what they could be worth, we’d like to hear from you.

Contact us to talk about fan segmentation.