AdWeek hosted an informative webinar with Sportradar’s EVP of Global Marketing Adam Azor and VP of Fan Engagement Strategy Mike Falconer, examining how to effectively connect with sports fans in the post-cookie world. We’ve put together a concise collection of our top five insights taken from ‘The Sports Marketer’s Post-Cookie Playbook’ webinar.
Be sure to watch the on-demand version of this webinar and read through Sportradar’s latest white paper As the Cookie Crumbles: How First-Party Data Will Fuel The Future of Personalized Marketing.
1. Compared to other consumers, sports fans are influenced more by personal connection
Sports fans are a unique audience, deeply loyal to their favorite sports, teams and players, who continually invest in their fandom. And, while sports consumption has evolved, passion and emotion remain at the core of this deep loyalty.
This emotion has been a key driver in facilitating lasting connections between sports fans and brands. Sports fans are more inclined to support a brand that supports their favorite team or player. When they feel that a brand understands their fandom, they feel more personally connected. Therefore, it is paramount for brands to leverage this passion and extend it beyond sports into brand loyalty to form that coveted personal connection.
2. Brands need more than just sports association to engage with modern sports fans
In the past, to build connection with sports fans, brands only needed to build an association with a sports team or league, or a partnership with a player. However, to achieve this same connection and strengthen trust with this audience, brands nowadays must retain relevance among sports fans. To build the coveted mutually beneficial relationships with sports fans, brands must demonstrate an intricate understanding of this audience, and how they engage with, and act on, their specific fandoms.
3. The dawn of the first-party data era has created a unique opportunity for innovation within the sports industry
Cross-industry adoption of a first-party data ecosystem opens new opportunities for innovation and improved marketing strategies – especially within the sports industry. First-party data utilization ensures the improved ability to deliver contextually relevant advertising to the right audience at the right time. This means that both sports-interested brands and sports rightsholders need to prioritize strategies that fit into a first-party data context.
New technologies within the sports industry specifically, designed exclusively for this new first-party data ecosystem, allow both brands and rightsholders to engage with sports fans on a completely new level. Furthermore, these technical innovations have created new opportunities for ANY organization to connect with and build loyalty with this high-value audience.
4. First-party data is becoming the currency of the digital landscape, and data collaboration between sports rightsholders and sports-interested brands is key to unlocking this currency
There is a seismic shift across all industries to first-party data utilization. First-party data is consensual and offers a more accurate and privacy-compliant channel to engage with sports fans, compared to third-party cookies. This allows advertisers to build deeper connections with fans without compromising their trust.
The key to utilizing this data effectively, however, is facilitating the collaboration between the first-party data held by both the rightsholders and the brands. In connecting these data sets, rightsholders and their partners create richer profiles of these audience members, which then propels the deployment and monetization of these data sets.
5. An industry-specific data clean room facilitates highly accurate first-party data collaboration, then fuels industry-specific activation tools – delivering the most effective advertising content
The purpose of an industry-specific data clean room is to join first-party data sets within the context of that distinct industry. In the context of sports, within a sports-specific data clean room, every piece of data is concerned with sports-specific behavior and aims to extract fans’ intentions in and around the sports, teams, and leagues they follow. This includes ticket purchasing behavior, streaming subscriptions, apparel purchases for specific players or teams, and more. With this data clean room, these behaviors can be accurately and safely identified at the individual level and extracted as patterns on the aggregate level.
Then, using industry-specific activation tools, such as sports-specific contextual targeting, advertisers can effectively activate these rich behavioral profiles and serve the most relevant advertising content to drive conversions.
To learn more about marketing to sports fans in a post-cookie world, read Sportradar’s latest whitepaper As the Cookie Crumbles: How First-Party Data Will Fuel The Future of Personalized Marketing. And, for more information about Sportradar FanID, visit sportradar.com/fanid.
