Jared Augustine, CEO, and Jake Duhaime, Marketing Manager, from Thuzio share updates about the new Thuzio 360, a unique client entertainment platform.
As another channel to its traditional booking services and lavish executive club, Thuzio recently went live with Thuzio 360, a software-as-a-service platform that connects brands, agencies and marketers with the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of sports talent.
With more than 20,000 commercial profiles of athletes, coaches and other sports personalities, the platform saves hours and days for organizations who spend time sourcing and evaluating athletes for bookings, appearances, and commercial purposes.
Originally, Thuzio started as a marketplace similar to an Expedia, where they had several hundred select athletes offering their time for appearances and bookings. As time went on, their corporate clients created demand for certain athletes who weren’t on their website and naturally, Thuzio saw its potential.
“After a lot of those requests, we saw we’re spending a lot of time sourcing on athletes who aren’t on the site’, so let’s build every athlete a profile,” explained Jake Duhaime, Marketing Manager at Thuzio.
Over the last 2 and a half years, Thuzio did just that by creating tremendous relationships within the agent industry offline, and building their talent database that was used in-house for their client service team. Now they have made it available externally as their SaaS solution.
Sports athletes and talent can have a polarizing impact for your campaign and brand image, but for buyers who may not have a professional network in the sports world or have a friend whose sister’s boyfriend’s cousin knows the LeBron James or Peyton Manning’s of the world, they wouldn’t know where to begin to inquire for athletes.
That entire process would take considerable amounts of time for certain buyers. With Thuzio 360, it takes only minutes to have that information and enables those buyers to directly communicate with the athlete’s agent or point of contact from the platform.
“When you’re booking multiple athletes, you could be going with seven, eight different agents or you could leverage Thuzio to make it an easier and efficient process. So this database component really enables the buyer more than ever before,” said Duhaime.
One of the biggest value-added benefits that buyers will find in Thuzio 360 is actionable intelligence about the athlete – current and past information about the athlete that is insightful to the buyer, so they can be more strategic and intelligent in selecting the right candidate.
The high-level overview of an athlete profile will have relevant markets, brands that he or she has affiliated with by showing public support or endorsement, and news stories. In addition, there are also keyword tags that are tied to that individual including strengths & interests, ailments & injuries, and causes & organizations.
“We have an in-house research team who are truly sports information analysts – comparable to a team that works for STATS or ESPN, we have a team that’s focused exclusively on the qualitative, tagging of all these athletes – being kept up to date on every single publication and social media post that has to do identifying a strength, interest or cause”, Jared Augustine, CEO of Thuzio shared.
In addition to their research team, they also receive a lot of information from those who’d know best. “Our agency partners have been extraordinarily helpful in helping us build these pages in the most accurate way possible because the agency know their players in terms of strengths, interests, causes, and pricing better than anyone else. The information that they give to us to help improve the profiles is vital,” Jared attributed.
Lastly, the platform shows the number of followers that sportsperson has on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and how it ranks among their fellow athletes. Thuzio actually developed a projected retail pricing (TPR) that buyers can expect to be quoted from the talent’s representation for a booking. The TPR will give you a ballpark-estimated cost for a person’s 2-hour appearance, tweet or Instagram post.
While the pricing is not verified as it represents a proprietary algorithm developed by the team, it allows buyers to calculate their own ROI if they weigh the pros and cons of using a superstar athlete or a journeyman for their next marketing campaign – very important, depending on what you want to accomplish.
“One of the things that people don’t realize is that you don’t need a Steph Curry if you’re in the Bay Area – In fact, whether it’s Adonal Foyle or Tom Tolbert, there are other options that will get you significant reach without having to spend a lot for Curry”, explained Duhaime.
So far, the platform has been welcomed by current and new customers of Thuzio. The response from the talent agency world, in particular, has been a pleasant surprise.
“Our agency partners have welcomed the idea of a database that specifically serves the business community of being able to find the right athletes because ultimately they know that can end up being someone that they represent, which means more marketing dollars for them to generate – we’d hope that’d be the case where it’d be welcomed into that community and it’s proven to be exactly that,” said Jared.
Looking forward, Jared explained how Thuzio will start building in a social segment of the platform that represents the interests, strengths and demographics of the audience that the particular athlete reaches, which will be an important enhancement to the talent profiles. In the long-term, Jared shares their vision of expansion.
“Beyond sports, we have ambitions to take this exact tool and make it available to identify talent in other celebrity verticals from music, TV, films, culinary to business.”