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Everybody has data. Some of them have collected it badly – it’s not uniform and you can’t use it to spot patterns over time. Then there’s the really interesting information, but no one has actually taken time to collect and think about it. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to collect for the sake of collecting, because they think it’s going to be worth something. My goal is to look at unique and smaller data sets, and try to figure out if I add them to the material we already have – does it

make that data set smarter about what the fan is doing? Our business started with a database of ten million consumers that we collected through a partnership with a credit card aggregator, which also sells information to hedge funds or private equity companies. When I met them, I said: ‘You’re selling this to all these companies, why aren’t you selling it to sports?’ They said: ‘We don’t know how you take credit card data and make it into sports data.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, I do.’

We now have partners that give us some level of ticketing, social media and mobile data. It’s all built around the idea: if I can see what they’re buying, I can see how they spend their money – and if I can see how they consume media, I can see how they spend their time. That will give you a clear picture of how valuable a fan is. We have data scientists, engineers and analysts looking at this. Most people don’t know the difference between those three roles. Scientists are good at

NEW THINKING Sports Innovation Lab looks at fans in a fresh way, identifying them by fluid behaviours rather than fixed parameters

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 FEED:XTREME 33

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