Features

The final piece in the jigsaw of data-driven communications is timing – sending the right message to the right person, in the right way, and at the right time.

English football club Leicester City took a data-driven approach to season ticket sales for the 2015/16 Premier League season, with a specific focus on improving communication with groups identified as at risk of not renewing.

The big data of today will be even bigger tomorrow: the importance of data analytics in commercial sport strategy is set to keep on growing as the volume, variety and velocity of information available continues to expand at pace.

The new data sources that have opened up for sports organisations in recent years have been primarily digital, as it is online where the pace of ‘datafication’ has been fastest, and costs of capture lowest.

One of the major challenges currently facing data-driven sports organisations, and particularly those who are new to the game, is pulling together the disparate sets of information to which they have access.

Velocity is one of the key identifiers of big datam and relates to the speed with which the information in question is generated and the speed with which it can be captured.

The focus of data-driven commercial sports strategy has so far been firmly on the fan side of the revenue mix – looking primarily at ticket sales, merchandising and secondary expenditure beyond the stadium gate.

One of the major barriers to the wider utilisation of data throughout the commercial departments of sports organisations is the complex nature of the – often raw – information being presented to them.

When people think of big data, they tend to think in numbers: how many, how much, how often. And the tendency to do so is potentially stronger in sport than in many other businesses: results, records, league positions and personal bests. In the playing arena, it is the numbers that really count, but on the commercial side of the industry, sport remains a people business and its USPs are built around the human qualities of passion, emotion, pride and community.

Despite difficult times, experts believe the upward trend is a permanent one for the Irish sports industry

Ireland, and in particular its capital Dublin, has positioned itself as a popular European base for global digital giants such as Google and Facebook, while also acting as a breeding ground for homegrown technology companies. 

The Irish sports industry is on the road to recovery after the economy unravelled following the 2008 financial crisis. We asked a series of experts to explain how it is happening.

Dominic Bliss looks at how major media companies are turning to unmanned aircraft to give fans never-seen-before footage.

Digital billboard replacement (DBR) – technology that enables a television viewer’s location or interest to dictate the brands they see on advertising hoardings in the stadium – has been hyped for decades, but has yet to reach the mass market. Has one tech company finally made a breakthrough?

Richard Gillis, author of the Unofficial Partner blog, on the sports marketing trends that characterised the past 12 months.

In just under a year’s time, ice hockey will stage a World Cup again for the first time in 12 years. The World Cup of Hockey will take place in Toronto, Canada, between September 17 and October 1.