One on one
between participation, viewership and fandom? As I said, I’m a data scout and continuously evaluating. We’re working with our investors Elysian Park Ventures, who own the Dodgers and are the group that bought Chelsea. There’s a whole ecosystem of sports around them and a bunch of companies that work in youth sports. We are evaluating how to partner with those companies. But what they’re able to track is only sort of interesting. They can tell me that two million kids play youth softball in the US. But what can I really do with participation data? Now, if you can tell me what those two million kids wear – like if they are Nike or Adidas customers – that’s more interesting to me. And if you can tell me that those kids also subscribe
sustainability. Those are really thorny challenges. You can’t get to youth sport preferences because it’s usually the parents’ data and not the kids’. With sustainability, we really only have a proxy for whether or not fans care about the climate, diversity or any equity issues. We do think that those are two very large areas of growth for the industry that they can’t figure out, so we’re trying to help. There’s a thesis that if a child participates in youth sports, they become a fan of that sport – that’s one thing we’re still working on. We’re not positively convinced it’s the case – that if my children play Little League, for example, they’re immediately going to sit down and watch four hours of Red Sox footage. I don’t see that in our data just yet. So we’re still trying to get to grips with: is there a link
to YouTube TV, now I’m even more interested. But they don’t really have that data yet. We’re helping them think about how to go back to the consumers that registered for youth sports and get more information – or consent-based data – and then it becomes more valuable.
WINNING TEAM Angela Ruggiero (above) looks on as Team USA win gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 FEED:XTREME 37
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