Any article whose title starts out with “The Creepiness Factor” these days usually has sports fans thinking of Penn State, Syracuse, or Bobby Petrino. In this instance, The Atlantic is writing about something a little more benign - how much information political campaigns have about current and potential voters. The “creepy” part of the article is that political pollsters, strategists, and candidates have access to so much data that they can determine which behaviors, actions, or values are associated with specific individuals or groups of individuals. More importantly, political candidates and their staffs can use this data to see how these behaviors translate into voting behavior. For example, this article cites that drinking Diet Dr. Pepper means you are a person who is more likely to be a voting Republican while drinking 7up means you are a person who is more likely a non-voting Democrat. For many people, it understandably seems bizarre that these political campaigns have access to what soda you drink and can tell how this reliably translates into your voting preferences.
For sports organizations, however, understanding and employing microtargeting is one solution to attracting and retaining customers in an increasingly competitive environment. For example, many colleges used to rely on the fact if you put “if you put up enough billboards and sent out enough brochures, people would show up” to games according to Central Florida's DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program professor Bill Sutton. Yet, large schools like Georgia Tech and the University of Tennessee saw dramatic declines in their season ticket base 2010 and 2011 according to a recent article in USA Today. If these schools are experiencing declines in season tickets then it is likely that numerous smaller institutions without significant resources to spend on ticket sales are suffering to an even greater extent.
With traditional techniques no longer producing necessary results, it has become time for schools (and professional teams) to look at new solutions. Sports organizations have access to a significant amount of information about their fans, media, sponsors, and employees. For example, professional sports organizations have the opportunity to collect information about season ticket holders when they apply for tickets, from fans on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, or through promotions that include calls to action (i.e. when teams ask fans to text them the play of the game). Collegiate and high school teams also can have access to databases kept about alumni or current students. In addition, all organizations can buy information from third-party vendors who track the cookies (markers that track users internet histories and search patterns) to learn more about who is visiting a team or league site and what other sites these users view.
Simply obtaining this information is not enough for it to be valuable to sports organizations. Data mining and analytics allow sports organizations to identify audiences that are most lucrative to a team or league. This gives organizations the opportunity to discover which fans that are most likely to be interested in season ticket solicitations and most likely to make purchases. Organizations at all levels can purchase CRM solutions that allows them to aggregate all of their sales information in single application (such as B6A’s CRM Module) and complete basic analysis on which current and potential customers are most valuable to an organization. In addition, there are numerous organizations (like B6A) that can provide more sophisticated data mining and regression analysis to identify which factors drive sales and how much impact each factor has an organization’s bottom line. Once sports organizations identify which audiences are more likely to contribute revenue to a team or league, it can create customized messages in specific channels that increase the possibility of future sales. Microtargeting and data mining can make any sports organization much more efficient with its limited marketing dollars.
Despite all of these benefits, organizations must make it very clear to all audiences that are doing some form of microtargeting analysis with the data that customers knowingly or unknowingly provide. When American are informed about how data mining works, 86 percent want it to stop even if the data is used to make targeted appeals according to The Atlantic article. This number is misleading because people still routinely visit sites ranging from Facebook to barackobama.com which state that data can be used for the type of microtargeting and data mining described in this blog post. However, one Facebook’s biggest strategic missteps as a company was that it was not clear from the beginning what it is doing with user data. This is mistake that still haunts Facebook and has been one of the biggest blows to the company’s brand image. Sports organizations must be clear with their fans, media, sponsors, and employees that this type of analysis can and will occur with clear privacy statements on their websites or any area where they are collecting data.
While they may seem creepy to some, microtargeting and data mining are important tools that all sports organizations should have in their strategic arsenal.
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