Connecting with Sports Fans: How Brands and Rightsholders Leverage Iconic Moments

From split-second, in-game action to landmark tournaments and seasonal events, sport offers unrivalled windows of opportunity to reach highly engaged audiences and associate brands with rare moments of historical and transcendent virality.

But in today’s fragmented digital world, how can brands and rightsholders harness the real-time passion and scale that makes sport one of the greatest commercial growth opportunities? And how can brands with smaller budgets and limited resources compete with corporate giants in the industry’s ruthlessly competitive marketing landscape?

The answer lies in the same phenomenon responsible for radically reshaping fan consumption patterns and content preferences: technology.

The triple combination of omnichannel marketing technology, sport and customer data, and real-time activation are the great enablers to effectively connect with tech-savvy fans.

Present-day fans access sport via countless digital devices and platforms, offering multiple avenues to deliver advertising. Omnichannel marketing technology turns multiple digital touchpoints into highly flexible, hyper-targeted advertising opportunities around sport, so audiences can be reached at every step of their commercial journey.

Messages are orchestrated across all major channels to cut through the marketing noise and interact with fans when engagement is at its highest, on their preferred and most frequented platforms, offering seamless, authentic, and non-intrusive connections.

Examples include serving pre-game mobile ads on apps or social media, via internet news sites and results pages when web searches spike, audio messages on popular sports podcasts, or across digital-out-of-home screens outside venues and on major travel routes.

But to transform fan emotion into consumer action, a key differentiating factor is the quality and depth of the data available to power such technology. Amidst the “attention economy” where brands from all mediums of entertainment are fighting for customer interest, delivering real-time marketing experiences tailored to the specific interests and behaviours of the individual is imperative1. To capture this scarce commodity of customer interest, brands must have data-driven understanding of what consumers want, and how, when and where they want it.

At Sportradar, we have amassed more than 20 years’ worth of sports, betting, and fan data, providing an anonymous and contextualised understanding of behaviour and transaction tendencies. This invaluable resource is the blueprint for our omnichannel marketing services, informing the technology to serve the right fan, with the right message, on the right platform, at the right time.

As fans enjoy sporting moments faster than ever via live streams, odds, and feeds, the final piece of the puzzle to unlock sport’s full marketing potential is activating opportunities as they occur, when the number of eyeballs on an event is highest.

The integration of live sports data into marketing technology triggers hyper-relevant and targeted ads as meaningful events unfold, from goals to player milestones, activating creative instantly to optimise the influence and impact of the moments that matter. Messaging and creative now react instantly to live scores or developing news, accelerating brands’ ability to interact with fans when emotion and purchase intent are at their peak.

The result? Brands are thrust into the thick of the action whenever a goal is scored or record broken, producing more relevant advertising, greater visibility, and a winning recipe for customer awareness and acquisition.

Sportradar has witnessed firsthand the success of this approach. By incorporating odds informed by live data into ads, our more than 150 sportsbook partners have decreased cost-per-acquisition by 40% on average. Similarly, a renowned sponsor of a NASCAR team doubled clickthrough rates for campaigns that activated key race day moments, including the live race positions of sponsored drivers, compared to standard campaigns.

This impact can all be accomplished through tech and data – without manual intervention, official sponsorship deals, or significant resources or budget. Gone are the days of needing heavily staffed ‘war rooms’ to rapidly respond to sport’s biggest events. The playing field is being levelled, and marketing democratised, enabling smaller brands to compete with their multinational counterparts.

Speed, scale, targeting, and personalisation are of the essence, and pioneering marketing technology provides the playbook. Omnichannel services, data-driven fan understanding, and live activations enable marketers to keep pace with the unique time sensitivity and ever-shifting nature of sport to capitalise on fandom.

Through scalable and contextual storytelling, any brand can insert themselves into the inescapable cultural phenomena of sport’s biggest moments and optimise these split-second periods of global resonance.

We’re entering a new era of marketing, one where brands are ascending from passive spectators to playmakers in the live sports experience.