The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Matt Madrigal
Company: Fanatics
Position: Chief Technology and Product Officer
Matt Madrigal, Fanatics’ Chief Technology and Product Officer, and his team are tasked with ensuring the infrastructure to run Fanatics’ 300-plus sites can handle the demand of millions of fans around the world as they shop across all devices.
1) What utilization of technology in professional or college sports has recently blown you away and why?
Something I’ve been very impressed with over the past few months is the evolution of VR technology specifically related to the training, coaching and improvement of sports on the field of play. One company that stands out in my mind is STRIVR; as a University of California graduate, I closely follow their football team and have noticed how much QB Davis Webb and the coaching staff has been utilizing STRIVR. The technology truly is an efficiency driver, especially when you are able to impact arguably the most difficult position in sports — it lets you constantly understand and hone the speed of the game, practice situational tendencies at game-speed, course correct bad tendencies you may not be aware of and utilize the software’s data to enhance predictive analysis, all leading to furthering the evolution of preparation and performance. All in all, it’s awesome.
2) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
At Fanatics, our teams are passionately committed to creating an unrivaled shopping experience for sports fans around the world, whether it’s online, from their phones, in stadiums or while attending one of the top sporting events around the world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the limitless opportunities that are being unearthed with machine learning really gets me excited, especially as it relates to helping our teams better understand consumer shopping habits and tendencies. If used correctly, AI can help Fanatics better predict merchandise swings, ensure top products are always fully stocked and readily available, and adapt and grow individual customer personalization — whether it be showing their favorite teams or using responsive design to instantly adapt to the correct screen size.
We are already proud to be at the forefront of many of the innovations happening across the ecommerce and physical retail channels, and implementing more of these learnings into the day-to-day business operations would only continue to let us improve the fan shopping experience. Finally, for our internal employees, AI can provide insights that will drive “micro-efficiencies” to inform our teams of how they can be more productive for the same amount of time, giving them a better work-life balance.
3) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?
I am someone who relies heavily on second and third screen viewing experiences when watching sports, especially at home where I am balancing three young children who sometimes take over the main television. This year, I’ve learned to depend on Twitter to watch livestreams of the Thursday night NFL games, a partnership that I believe has been a game-changer for fans, particularly younger audiences. For me, it’s also an opportunity to follow the conversation of fans around the world to help gauge the appetite for products, such as Color Rush uniforms, which have been hot items across our network of sites all season.
4) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will most fans purchases their favorite teams apparel?
“On-demand” is a term that is becoming part of the vernacular across all commerce industries — Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, Seamless — these companies and more have helped shape what we now think of as real-time convenience. At Fanatics, we believe the next-gen model for licensed sports merchandise is also “on-demand.” Through major investments in tech, mobile, data and by bringing more agility to the market via advanced “made-to-order” capabilities to quickly respond to hot team and player trends, we are also working hard to revolutionize the way fans buy their favorite team merchandise. Even executions, like our recent partnership with Uber to deliver Cubs championship gear to fans in Chicago following the team’s incredible World Series win, illustrate this evolution, so much so that a “30-minute” delivery option will be the norm in the future.
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5) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will be integral to sports in general over the next 12 months and why?
The rise in mobile shopping that we are seeing across the Fanatics platform of sites continues to skyrocket each year, and it is becoming less about search and more about making actual transactions. In my opinion, mobile commerce will become the primary shopping option for our customers over the next 12 months, and it will finally overtake desktop for purchases on a consistent basis, which we actually saw happen on several consecutive days for the first time last week around Black Friday weekend. Phone sales jumped 60 percent this year on Cyber Monday vs. last year, helping set a record for our best sales day in company history. I also think that mobile sales, not traffic, for one of our upcoming championship hot markets will break the 80 percent threshold in the hours immediately following the win, which would be a record for our company.