Mark Cuban is one of the NBA’s most progressive owners, and has always thought about what’s next when running his team. The 30 franchises that make up the league have generated a revenue pie in excess of $5 billion. The digital age has enabled this game to reach its worldwide audience anywhere, anytime. Teams can build up their own local fan base through the sundry of platforms available.
Much like our #NFLTechSeries, this time SportTechie delves into the digital strategies–from web, social media, mobile apps, and any other technological connection–of each team and analyzes them, including insights from some of the digital executives involved. Today, the #NBADigitalSeries 2013-14 continues with the Dallas Mavericks. Stay tuned to SportTechie for ongoing coverage of the #NBADigitalSeries.
As we all know, the Dallas Mavericks are in the forefront of technology with their owner Mark Cuban being a “SportTechie” influencer himself. With him at the helm, the Mavs will always be above the curve when it comes to digital initiatives in the NBA. He is a very hands on owner.
For instance, the Cuban and the Mavericks launched the first totally responsive website in professional sports this year with a redesign of Mavs.com. “Mark told us we had to make a change. The website was too cluttered, too busy. We are doing the fans a disservice with the website the way it is and we need to change it ASAP,” said VP of Mavs Digital Ken Bonzon. “He leads the way for us.”
Now the site presents a clean user-friendly feel for Mavs fans to easily navigate pages. It is more fan focused with most of the content driven by the fan but in a very visual way as opposed to informational. In a way, the website feels like an interactive infographic with seamless video interaction that also looks great on mobile/tablet devices.
The home page displays a full screen slider for bold call to action items. The site also turns into a live social feed during games with photos, tweets, and videos along with real time score updates and a live box score.
With the site, Cuban wants to increase ticket and merchandise sales. By making the website more clean with organized interactive information, it gives the fans a better picture of where to go to get Maverick’s items, especially on mobile. “Making mavs.com more user friendly lets us reach our fans in the spare moments of life that are now filled with mobile devices,” Cuban said. Tickets are available for purchase on Google Wallet and Apple’s passbook.
The Mavericks have made purchasing tickets and being a fan seamless by offering them an MVP card for digital ticketing and the Dallas Maverick Fan Pass for exclusive offers and discounts to local retailers in Dallas, TX.
Mark Cuban has also used his blog and crowdsourcing sources to make improvements to the organization. When the site was first launched in August, Cuban tweeted out that he would give out Maverick tickets to anyone who can find bugs on the new website, therefore creating a crowd sourced debugging solution.
Then Cuban launched a crowdsource campaign for the fans to design the new alternate uniforms for the 2015/2016 season, showing his unique approach to business. With an announcement on his blog, fans were given the opportunity to submit jersey designs to Cuban. 10 finalist were chosen and allowed to be voted on by the fans towards the end of 2013, but no official announcement of the winner has been made. Possibly Cuban is saving the suspense for the beginning of the next season? Either way, this was a great way to give the fans an opportunity be involved with the decision making for the Mavericks.
The Mavericks have also made investments in technology for their players. The Mavericks are one of eight NBA teams that have invested in Catapult Sport’s GPS tracking devices for athlete analytics.
“We just want to be able to get smarter about our players and how to train them and how to put them in a position to succeed,” said owner Mark Cuban. “So that’s just one component of a lot of different things that we’re doing.”
And he was right, that was only the beginning. Just recently, the Mavericks announced how they are using Fatigue Science Readiband to analyze the sleep patterns of their players. The benefit of the technology for team and players is that they get real objective data on fatigue sleep patterns and how they impact performance. This data gives the Mavericks more ways to manage their players throughout the season.
It is safe to safe that if there is a technological way to figure out how to maximize his players’ abilities, Cuban will figure it out. After not making the playoffs last year, Cuban is determined to bring the Mavericks back to winning form, even if it is without the arrival of high profile free agents.