Sport has a massive global following of passionate fans. So, it is no surprise that a broad range of consumer brands and companies want to associate themselves with sport’s huge ‘engagement’ value to benefit their own commercial endeavours.
The pathway to effective fan engagement is complex. Fans have many entertainment options and greater access to sporting events across a multitude of channels and devices. The industry’s biggest players have long understood that to cut through the noise, they must deliver personalised content relevant to a fan’s specific interests and preferences. But to do this, they need to understand who they are, what they want and where to find them.
Up until recently, brands and rightsholders have been heavily reliant on third party cookies to target
sports fans with engaging content. The third-party cookies enable websites to capture visitor data and content preferences to allow advertisers to track a user's browsing history across multiple sites. This information is then used to serve customers with content relevant to their interests and across the sites they visit most often.
However, due to increasing concerns over data privacy, third-party cookies are being phased out.
Firefox and Safari have already done so and Chrome plans to do so by the end of 2024. The concern
across the industry is that removing these cookies eliminates valuable insights into users’ digital activities and behaviours, making effective engagement more challenging.
However, this development should be viewed as an opportunity for marketers as it will, in fact, lead to better personalisation. The industry is already becoming more focused on capturing and connecting first party data. This identity data is collected directly and consensually from fans, delivering far greater accuracy and reliability than third-party data.
To maximise the value of this first party data, Sportradar has developed a unique fan insight and engagement platform that combines the first ever sports industry specific data clean room with its
already established sports-specific marketing activation platform.
This proprietary data clean room provides a secure, centralised repository, where different partners can share first-party insights around the same fan. This is achieved without compromising the safety and sovereignty of each participant’s owned data. It powers uniquely effective data collaboration
between sports federations, leagues, teams, media companies and brands, for the benefit of all
involved, while, at the same time, enhancing the fan’s own experience.
Furthermore, for the rightsholder, the data clean room brings order and control to cross-partner data utilisation, enabling them to more effectively manage multiple partner and sponsor access demands. Critically, each clean room participant can stipulate their own ‘rules of engagement’ related to their own data, sharing only as much as they choose and maintaining full control over how it is utilised.
More than 20 years of providing scaled data and technology capabilities to all the main stakeholders
in sport makes Sportradar expertly positioned to lead the innovative progression toward first party
fan data collaboration.
Mike Falconer, VP Fan Engagement Strategy, Sportradar
