AWS re:Invent 2024 - Launching a new league: The blueprint for tech-driven sports (SPT210)

afternoon everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm uh John Bradway with captech here today to talk about the future of data and how will impact uh Sports so we'll quick do a quick overview of who captech is and why we're here uh the role of data in sports to set some foundations talk specifically about data and golf and then what we see uh going forward and where the opportunities might be in sports and Beyond so first uh captech is a national consulting firm we work across uh every sector uh across mostly primarily in the United States uh but do a lot of uh Greenfield complex technology custom development projects a lot of modernization work um across data technology design product um we we're very uh values oriented and cultur driven and uh I think we're a delivery first organization which helps us to deliver you know partner with our clients in the best possible way I have the uh the luxury of working in sports media and entertainment um it's a really fun topic uh Lots going on in the space uh in sports and media we primarily work with sports leagues uh the rights holders uh but also with teams media companies uh Sports marketers and the sports technology firms that power a lot of the Innovation that's occurring um we work across our Full Slate of services uh to BU to build those new products as new Services modernize the data and Technology platforms that are enabling them to grow uh and uh really excited to uh to talk about some of that today um as for me I uh have a background in sports and media started my career at turn broadcasting I've done two data and media oriented startups uh Batten 500 on those so have uh some level of success there um and we influence that in today so that's that's a little bit of the back ground and we'll start with just kind of basic Foundation of what we see and how we see Sports uh impacting uh how data is impacting Sports so first uh competition data so think about scoring the attributes of play uh what what are the conditions uh on the field of play that are impacting the outcome of a game uh what's important there is accuracy timeliness uh to to get the shelf life of the data to be able to use it and consume it while you're while you're watching the game uh second fan data this is about how you as an individual follow the sports the teams the players that you love uh so that that we can create personalization for you obviously the data is very uh much uh it's much more private that help you don't want that out there people to know things about you but it can provide a lot of context for how a sports League or a team can engage with you uh to to make your experience on game day whether you're in the arena or at home better and then finally operations data so what's happening about the event how much time is left in the game uh what's the weather what's the traffic outside the venue all of those uh you know secondary and tertiary data sources can inform how you're going to perceive the game and how you're going to uh enjoy it and we can use that to help create lovers uh to drive engagement and drive context in the on the field so at captech uh We've everyone's heard about Moneyball uh how people are using all this data to improve performance on the field that's great we love it we uh Supply a lot of the data work with Partners to supply the data uh to those entities we focus more on The Fan Experience and how the data can drive engagement around the product of sport and even expand what that product of sport looks like that's where we play so a click deeper on competition data for a moment um it's been around for a long time right so we I remember you know looking at the newspaper growing up looking at box scores understanding uh you know what happened in the night before where my parents would let me stay up late um that's still there it's the same data what's changed is now it's available in real time so the ability to to innovate and you know build products that augment the game experience uh on game day and Beyond is is right there for us so that's what's Driven uh the growth in digital that's what's Driven the growth in gaming and sports betting you start to see different stories being told on TV because of the data if you watch the NFL you see next Trend stats as a big part of their broadcast and there's even secondary multi diecast uh that that bring that data forward fantasy football something we all a lot of us probably play um all of that drives deeper engagement in and around the game on game day um but it also creates new Revenue sources uh and that's where uh whether that's from a director consumer type play like a fantasy football or you're licensing the data out uh all of those create new opportunity and sponsor opportunities uh for sports league and rights holder so this is football there's lots of examples of this type of data around the room if you if you experience this and walk around you can see some pretty compelling examples of how data is being applied so that's competition data and there's fan data this is newer so historically the way sports are distributed is through Media Partners and then through a cable or a satellite distributor so the league was multiple steps away from the fan and you know now it's very important that League start to develop that direct to Consumer relationship and opportunity to engage with the fan so they have to to find ways to bridge that so you can see what the NBA is doing with the NBA ID um you need that if you want to have NBA league pass but there's other benefits that are increasingly tiered uh that create opportunity for the fan of why I might give you my information about my fandom as a as a basketball fan a Steph Curry fan an Atlanta Hawks fan um so that that's a really compelling example I'm starting to see some of the fun things they're doing with that and then certainly as you go as you attend a sporting event at places like the Sofi Stadium it is increasing ly Tech driven and how they're using that the data for you about you as a fan to personalize your experience even before you arrive is a big Focus um this is new and it's pretty transformational because today you experience Sports on game day with fan data you're not just a fan on the day of the game you're not just a fan if you're at the game you're a fan all the time and we can really start to use that data to expand that fandom to be 365 days a year home away on the go in your house at the stadium so that is a very uh big opportunity that the sports leagues are looking at we're happy to partner with them on that uh the challenge with that is it's complexity it goes back to the Privacy the distribution and use of my data as an individual and all of yours is not something we just want to get out there we need to understand how to control that uh to drive that upsize and that opportunity so our belief is uh disruptions on the horizon you if you watch the news you're starting to see stor about media rights being retained uh people wanting to go direct to Consumer have uh League owned and operated TV networks and TV platforms all of that uh is driving data um private Equity flowing into sports uh they're looking for returns they're looking for new monetization levers they're looking for data right so how do we uh maximize the value of the data that's ex that's available and create new revenue streams off of it uh data is going to be a big part of that so the the areas where we see opportunity and we'll talk about today are new competition formats how do you create uh if with existing Sports how do you create additional storytelling around it and new ways to play and how do you create brand new sports which is the story of tgl um with with the uh with personalized fan experiences how can we reimagine what the fan what that Fan Experience looks like again 365 days a year there's a lot of emotional connection and and brand that's been built with the teams that you follow how do we pull that out of you and get it into your get it into your everyday shopping experiences uh B2B to see use of that data and use of that fandom is something that we think will be will grow over time um then on that point marketing Partners people spend a lot of money to associate themselves and their brands with sports they're increasingly asking for data data and profiles about people that like their brands as much as they are marketing Impressions we've talked to a major team who is talking with a major Advertiser about the need they they rather have 500 data profiles about their product at the end of game day than incremental 100,000 Impressions that's a big step that's a big move forward we know how to deliver deliver Impressions we don't know how to reliably deliver data profiles so that's something that we think is uh on the frontier so uh we'll shift now uh into two examples that show uh some of the items that I've talked about first uh we'll talk about competition data which is the story of tgl which is a brand new data driven Sport and then we'll follow up with the PGA of America and the PGA Championship and how they're using data to drive uh robust fan engagement at this year's championship so tgl just show a hands who's heard who's heard of it a few um it's a really cool concept it's launching on January 7th the backstory on this is uh Tiger Woods Roy moloy and Mike McCarley who's the CEO former CEO of the Golf Channel came together to think about how they could build a tech driven Tech infused concept they started a company called tomorrow Sports which has some very notable investors some of which you can see here uh that are all interested in that same uh same passion how do we bring technology into sport to bring new audiences engage them in new ways uh so tgl in partnership with the PGA Tour is that first investment that they're making um it's a team golf format which I'll talk about uh in a moment there's six teams of 24 PGA Tour players uh the best players in the world world are are part of this and they are some Marquee owners so Arthur Blank the founder of Home Depot Falcons uh finway Sports Alexis oane and the founder of Reddit there there's some big hitters that are coming in here and very excited to see how technology can drive the future of sport and it's it's made for TV so it's Monday night golf is probably is the best way to think about it this starts it says here on January 7th with after the Monday Night Football window is over and it goes through uh through the winter uh it's a pretty compelling open TV slot for ESPN so it's 2 hours live action competition uh made for TV what's interesting about it is it's played indoors uh most of the time people think about golf being played Outdoors that's certainly what happens with the PGA Tour this isn't an arena you can see the field of play there on the right roughly the size of a uh football field um and it brings some you know different data it's purely driven by data and Technology from start to finish um it creates a very different type of experience so we'll go a little bit deeper into into that so this is the screen Zone you start by hitting off of that's real Turf that's real rough where I usually hit from and then sand where I also hit from frequently and you hit into a huge monitor um and you start you start there these are all uh data Rich virtual courses that you that you play in so you we can as we design these you can remove the constraints like mowing the grass or um you know you could never put a golf hole here all of those types of physics just go away and we're able to create very different very exciting holes so I'll show you what's right now is my favorite one which is called Temple this is the temple a par for approximately 500 y that we found in the mountains and this is a very special design because again it talks about the Simplicity how with just two forms two triangles pinched in the in the center can give us so much excitement where the strategy concept trates depending on what approach shot you want to create you can either lay back and you will have to make uh longer shot more than 200 yard onto the green zone we have placed the green to reward the uh most aggressive shot take a little bit of a risk and find yourself rewarded with the shorter shot onto the green zone I think we're in for a treat with this home t cool right you're never going to build a golf hole on top of a mountain that you can't access it creates some interesting risk reward types of challenges and we think it'll really build some cool gamification so that's that's the screen Zone uh what's interesting about this is so you start playing in this virtual environment in those virtual holes but then you end up in the green zone right so the idea here is that you can see the you can see the the simulator at the end of the at the end of the uh Arena here you hit into that and then you end up in the arena and we we'll click into that here in a second but it's intimate it's very very close you can see how close the fans are um it's imagine NBA courtside type experience where fans are rooting you on and you know there's a Boston team there's a New York team and we know what happens when they come together and how they interact how do we how do we build that experience into the golf world um so that all happens in the green [Music] zone tgl isn't simulator golf it's much more after teams hit their te or approach shots into our massive screen and are near the green they'll walk over to the green zone opposite the screen Zone area the green zone which is the size of four basketball courts has a 360° rotating turntable with real sand filled bunkers and a tech infused green it's adaptable surface and multiple pin locations create whole to- hole variations offering thousands of possibilities this is tgl presented by Sofi coming January AR on ESPN so you can see the the players are playing golf they are hitting real golf shots into virtual and simulated environments and they finish in real life there's data that's captured all along the way and that's what's driving the new sport so the sport wouldn't exist without data um you know in other sports you can you can keep playing when the technology breaks in this case you can't right so it's a very different uh type of experience that we're really excited about to see and you know a lot of the work that we've done is around how do you you create a compelling to our TV uh cast to uh to utilize that format and really tell a story create drama so um the format here you can see explained um there's uh triples matches alternate shots so you think about the the temple and and the you know the risk reward scenario where you put your long hitter really is going to matter and how you approach the whole from a team mentality is is going to uh matter a lot um and then everyone wants to see tiger play right so you want to see him play a one-onone match at the end so you play the triples matches first uh this is all team scoring so you you earn points along the way and the end of score is you know s to four 7 to six typical baseball type scores that you might see um shot clock there not a shot clock and normally when I play golf uh some people get on the clock but uh there is uh there's a shot clock to encourage pace of play um it also encourages team Dynamic so one of the things we've been seeing in testing is somebody will hit a shot we know where it's going to land in the simulator and their teammate is going over and starting to read the putt before the player comes up to hit it they it takes them a while to understand how to how to play it so the team aspect of this is really interesting timeouts I seen a putt taking more time to read it on a critical putt that those are all things uh that we're excited about and then the hammer is it's basically a points multiplier so if you have the advantage of a hole and you have the hammer you can throw it and it now doubles the point total so there's a lot of strategic thought that it needs to go into how and when you use the hammer if you hold it and and you're winning do you bet it or do you just hold it and and keep the team from uh other team from be able to come back there's a referee to manage all of this and we know that they can also become part of the game so we did a lot of the work here to test this out to get the right Cadence to is it how what is the right number of holes all of those things to fit into the block to create the right to create the right drama and then all of this as you as we said creates a lot of data um a lot of it and uh this is so this is all built on top of AWS what's exciting about this is It's an event uh driven architecture um there's multiple events that we're tracking it's all built on top of a ledger that's all forward uh forward written so we have every piece of data we're able to Stage it in different ways and really manage a very complex data model that's coming out of it for the broadcast the gaming Partners the fans um and so forth so there's a lot going on here um that we're really excited about and happy to talk about more so what's next um we have a lot of work to do still we're launching on January the 7th um brand new sport um we're learning a lot as we go um so we're very focused on the launch I encourage you to go to tg. golf.com there's a lot of content you can click on it all the holes and watch it and you follow along uh as we launch but I think longer term this can be a catalyst for growth uh for simulator golf you we have the full swing simulators back here in the corner and thinking about your ability to play along or play with or play against tiger and some of the best players in the world it it changes the Dynamics of how um you know participatory Sports could potentially work so uh very excited about that also excited about other sporting formats that could come to bear um you know through tomorrow Sports and through this type of format so we've got an activation over here behind that huge golf ball come visit us we're happy to talk more about tgl and we can help you pick your uh pick your new favorite uh sports team so that's all about competition data again creating a new a new product um this is a story more about fan data and how personalized fan experiences are driving a deeper connection with the fan and a greater uh for for their day so the PGA championships an annual tournament is one of golf's four majors uh this year was played in Louisville Kentucky at Valhalla uh the PGA invested in new uh app infrastructure which we helped them with uh that had a greater uh much greater capability for notifications a lot more uh Geo fencing and location tracking uh for us to to drive engagement so you can see you know what you might experience uh here on the screen in terms of you know navigating uh navigating your day um so with that capability we went through and mapped out across seven different personas so you can see here they a casual fan and a a corporate executive who's being entertained and map their day across 52 different touch points understanding the things that they might be interested in engaging with and where they might start and your start point then impacts how we engage you going forward so if you're coming in from out of town we have geofence the airport if you're coming in in the parking lot versus ride share it means different things if you're on whole seven versus whole 12 something different's happening for you and we can take that data um and what we did here was we we pre-programmed logical triggers that that would be data driven that then would just fire once you walked into that Geo fence um so that that was all done before the uh Championship arrived and then we sat in the command center and watch what happened right so we had heat mapping and the ability to then customize and change the the data notifications that were sent out um along the way so we looked at competition data so what was the score we looked at where the fan was and what we knew about them and we looked at operational data to then inform contextual messages that we could drive the one you see here is the Tiger on the right is the tiger tracker so you started on whole 10 which is about halfway in the middle there and you can see the fan base following tiger along and we sent messages along the way so the one you see that's that's uh as the example is hey you're coming towards the end of your round you also happen to be coming up on the merchandise tent so how can we send you a subtle a subtle notification that as you're done following tiger There's an opportunity for you to go in and do some shopping we also sent forward messages if you were hanging out on whole 16 and you know he was on whole 12 it may be a good time to go to the uh go get a beer and come back before the crowds arrive and you can see him come through so very contextual messages that gave us an opportunity to uh to to plan out now if you remember uh Scotty Sheffer had a little incident there in uh in Kentucky and you have to plan for chaos I mean and that it was really great because we're able to to to harness all this data and understand where fans were and informed them of what was happening to kind of to keep things moving so that was a big learning there for sure so here's a quick video of you know what what it look like my day at the PGA Championship was a breeze when I got on site I downloaded the app and texted a friend to meet up and watch a JT and Xander I wasn't sure what time they teed off so I asked the chatbot and found him on 8 green over lunch I got a notification to check out the PGA shop and now my husband owns this Nifty hoodie because he totally needs another one in the closet I met a girl outside the shop who kept saying how sweet this Speak Easy was and despite speak Easy's being intentionally hard to find I had no trouble navigating my way there the PGA Championship app came in clutch all day long thanks to PGA of America and its partnership with captech I was able to enjoy the day my way at the 2024 PGA Championship so results um our Target uh from previous years was to get a 2% open rate um and then of those that opened it we wanted 50% to come back and re-engage in the app what we achieved on for for the audiences were able to identify and then get into our you know optimized fan pass we drove four and a half acts that so 450% Improvement eight and a roughly eight and a half% open rate on messages that we sent and for then those that opened it they came back on average three and a half times so way way deeper engagement they came back looking for opportunities to engage and you know navigate uh navigate around their day and this was all done with just remember two Dimensions where you were and then the messages that we fired to you via the app so as we add more data in we think we can do more interesting things and this one other thing to note out here is the partner message we we did pretty well in terms of optimizing uh messages to get better impressions for the PGA Championship marketing Partners as well um which is a pretty good strong result so where we going I mentioned we're adding more data into it um the amount of data that's flowing through uh is not manageable without the use of AI so um as we're expanding into the women's PGA Championship into some of the other year-long uh PGA of America events like the PGA Junior League we're looking at how we can build uh AI agents to help us do our job better how do we so the example you see on the left there uh is uh AI interpretation of uh use a fan flow in and out of popular places such as the bar um so these are where people are pouring drinks um and we were able to understand how this is AI interpreting what was happening where they're coming from and where they were going so we can use that uh to inform what's the next Journey so I told you we built seven Journeys the middle image here is uh AI or gen AI uh Journey Maps so we're able to put in context of a a a golf course or any sporting venue to identify the the you intricacies and nuances of that venue uh and then how we where different things are going to be staged and how we put them together and then AI can begin to create the journey maps for us so we can create them at scale and then uh optimize those Journeys in real time to then create personalized content out so this is an AI agent that we'll build and and use uh over the course of the winter but for next May's PGA Championship so super excited about that all right so those are two examples that one uh fan fan data how we're using that how TGA championships using that and then how tgl is thinking about re using competition data to change what sports looks like uh bold bold prediction for me is uh data rights will overcome the value of media rights uh not so bold as to say when uh I would say five years maybe probably not 20 years definitely um you know as you look at the trends of you know reclaiming media rights um going direct to Consumer what partners are asking for to get more integrated data Partnerships all of those things are going to converge and create new opportunities to use and monetize the data um and I do think that that that that that relationship will inverse and becomes a major Revenue SP stream in sports um it's a generational shift in how we think about it both as uh you know Partners in the in the in the sports world but also just as fans um and it could be a pretty fundamental shift to how marketing occurs given the the value placed on uh Sports Marketing so see here in 20 years maybe um so how we work with that uh our framework is is pretty simple you can see it here um a lot of modernization work needs to uh be done to get your data and Technology platforms both on the competition operations side as well as on the fan and partner data sharing uh domain to be able to service and enable all those you know cool Innovations to occur so um a lot of work is being done on that today a lot of investment um you know in that uh and then data Rights Management so how that data is distributed governed and managed uh critically important uh to to get the right value placed on that data um for scoring data that's a little straightforward as it will be in the future for fan data uh clean rooms data sharing all of those things are coming into play and there just some pretty exciting uh data Rights Management uh conversations occurring there and of course once all that's in place the ability to create new products uh and business model Innovation is is is is is very clearly there um it'll be exciting to see you know how Innovation and you know startups continue to emerge to uh fuel the growth so our keys uh and guiding principles as we partner with uh rights holders as well as Sports marketers that are looking at this from a slightly different angle is are these five here so own your data if you don't own it and control it you can't fully monetize it and that that trend is is very clear that people are working towards it uh know your fan we work a lot in Banking and Financial Services the idea of know your customer um to get your money from a bank is a pretty important one um and we're applying a lot of the same principles with our clients uh in this domain so if you don't know your customer better than anyone else or you know your fan better than any anyone else it's going to be pretty hard to build the right experience for them and if you don't somebody else will so really hard on that uh it's all about value Creation in the PGA Championship example we didn't really think about how to drive the next marketing impression we thought or the next transaction we thought about how to tell the fan what was interesting for them to make their day better so we created value for them and then that turned into an outcome so uh start there not on marketing Impressions uh and then start now um this is not going to be a hey next year everything's change it's going to be a five or 10 year Journey but you got to start investing into it learning um we'll certainly make some mistakes along the way but we can learn together on how we do it and then uh finally Ingenuity and creativity on how you're using the data take a chance I mean tiger tgl that's a big swing uh very different approach um we'll see how it turns out but it could be very transformative and you know how you use the data will be a defining uh competitive Advantage we think uh going into the future and with that data you're going to have to have ai and AI agents around it to help you scale thank you that's what we had for today um really appreciate uh the time and the audience uh this is fantastic thank you be around over here for questions thanks

2024-12-13 03:08

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