For professional sports teams, the game has changed when it comes to how they market tickets to fans. More than ever, teams are turning to technology to gain insights into how to best market ticketing opportunities to their fans. One team leading the charge in this area is the Ottawa Senators.
“We want to improve our retention on season ticket renewals and grow net new business and sponsorships. We need to know how to reach out to these segments based on their past experiences with the team. In doing so, we hope to convert that into a better offer based on what they did in the past,” Ottawa Senators chief marketing officer and vice president of ticketing, Peter O’Leary said.
To gain a better understanding into the team’s customers and sponsors, the Senators–like a growing number of other sports teams–turned to analytics. Recently, the Senators began applying a behavior-based, predictive analytics technology from IBM, called IBM Fan Based Insight, to combine data ranging from weather, geospatial information and Twitter sentiment to determine how to best market ticketing opportunities to their fans.
“In looking at our first predictive models, we saw some unsurprising things, like that the closer you live to the arena, the more likely you are to renew your season tickets. However, we found some surprising things. For instance, if you’re a pure hockey fan who only purchases hockey tickets from us, you’re less likely to renew after a bad season than a hockey fan that also experiences our concerts and other promotions. From this, we learned that our best clients from a renewal standpoint are the clients that use other parts of our business,” O’Leary explained.
For IBM, in creating its Fan Based Insight product, the goal is to provide analytics solutions that can be implemented by any professional sports team.
“There is a base line platform that we are creating that will be relevant to any sports team so that they can leverage analytics and look at data of individual customers. The solution generates different insights for every team from their data. We are developing it in close partnership with the Senators and they are helping us be able to provide the real-world business requirements of a sports team,” said IBM’s general manager of analytics solutions, Alistair Rennie.
While teams are able to receive significant amounts of analytical data from the current version of IBM Fan Based Insight, Rennie notes that future will allow teams to gain even greater insights into fans and their purchasing tendencies.
“The initial release of this solution doesn’t include external data. We have plans to include external data. Teams will be able to look at how things like weather, news and local events have significant impacts on people’s spending patterns and what they buy and where they go. While some have looked at how this data impacts things, what we’re finding is when you combine multiple different forces the predictive power goes up exponentially. If it’s raining outside, people are more likely to buy umbrellas. If it’s raining and there’s an outdoor sporting event taking place, umbrella sales may go up by an extra factor,” Rennie explained.
As technology’s use becomes more expansive, its role in marketing and selling tickets to sports fans will only continue to grow. Through technology, teams are gaining better insights, which will allow them to streamline the process and methods by which they target ticketing opportunities to fans.