From the Copa America Finals to the 2024 Olympics and all sports in between, fans of all stripes have had plenty of reasons to cheer this year. Sports is having a moment and it’s reflected in the fact that everyone is vying for the air rights for everything from Formula 1 to the WNBA.

Sports fans are a large, diverse, and passionate group of consumers, providing a range of ongoing opportunities for brand engagement. In the US alone, 71% identify as sports fans and 46% say they’re watching more sports on streaming than they did five years ago.

We recently spoke with Gina Waldhorn, Chief Marketing Officer at Sports Innovation Lab, to talk about the value of sports fan data, the challenges marketers face in connecting with sports fans, and the benefits our partnership brings to the market.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about Sports Innovation Lab?

Sports Innovation Lab is an insights, analytics, and data company that enables brands, properties, and retailers to improve targeted advertising, build more effective sponsorships, and enhance the consumer and fan experience.

We defined the Fluid Fan™, and now we’ve built the only platform that definitively finds these modern fans at scale. More accurate than surveys or cookies, and anchored in real consumer purchasing data, Sports Innovation Lab’s solutions significantly improve our clients’ marketing performance, accuracy, and effectiveness.

Our unique Sports Data Cloud is anchored in a deterministic, transaction-based dataset, which captures the purchasing habits of over 140 million US consumers and 8.5 billion behavioral signals across 250 million US adults. Our sports & entertainment expertise comes to life through our more than 2,500 unique Fluid Fan™ merchants – which include every league, team, sports venue, merchandise retailer, gear provider, betting platform, sports OTT, and more – as well as across our more than150 fan communities, including Youth Sports Parents, Sports Bettors, Values-Driven Fans, and more.

Sports Innovation Lab has the unique ability to capture fan data across all major leagues and teams allowing us to build detailed audience profiles for each sport, league, team, and entertainment outlet. Our rich dataset provides insights far beyond basic engagement metrics, offering a full view of fan spending behavior and specific transactions across the entire sports ecosystem.

Additionally, we provide granular insights into niche and emerging markets – including collectibles, specialty retailers, secondhand shops, youth sports, and long-tail merchants – extending our reach well beyond traditional data providers.

Q. Why did you choose to partner with Equativ?

We both prioritize a client-centric approach. To provide the best level of service and access for all our clients, we need to collaborate with top ad tech companies and ensure our data is ubiquitous in the space.

Secondly, Equativ has great inventory reach, particularly in the realm of CTV, which gives us access to specific inventory that we can offer our clients. Finally, Equativ’s partner rates are quite competitive in the market and your team has been amazing to work with too!

Q. What benefits does this partnership offer the market?

The key benefit of our partnership is that it enables clients to seamlessly combine data with inventory. This reduces data leakage and minimizes impression waste by making connections at the pre-bid level. Moreover, serving relevant ads to a deterministic audience on contextually aligned publishers fosters stronger brand resonance.

For example, you could serve Gatorade ads to consumers on Vogue, but the message would be far more relevant on ESPN, creating a deeper connection and resonance with the audience in the right environment. When you combine the proven performance of Sports Innovation Lab’s deterministic, transactional dataset with Equativ’s unparalleled inventory, it’s a one plus one equals ten for clients.

Q. What challenges do you often hear from marketers when working with sports fan data?

The greatest challenge when working with sports fan data is that it is often siloed and fragmented. As an example, viewership data is owned by Nielsen, merchandise data by Fanatics, and ticketing data by Ticketmaster, among others. Even the major leagues and teams tend not to share data with one another, as they operate as separate franchises. Additionally, sports fan data is often derived from surveys, interests, scraped information, viewership, or behavioral data – all of which are probabilistic at best.

Our approach to addressing these common issues is to create a Sports Data Cloud, where we aggregate these previously fragmented datasets into one unified consortium. Backed by an identity spine of over 250 million addressable individuals, including 140 million with transaction-level data and 8.5 billion behavioral signals, we can deterministically identify and understand who sports fans truly are and map their consumer journey.

Q. What’s the most interesting trend you’re following closely?

Emerging sports, such as cricket and rugby, as well as startup leagues, such as Unrivaled, are truly captivating both existing sports fans and consumers new to sport. These leagues – many of which are women or co-ed – are being built with the Fluid Fan™in mind, taking an entertainment-first approach, getting creative with merchandise, and shortening the distance between fans and the athletes they love.

These emerging sports and leagues are also savvy about their consumer data, enabling them to create more personalized fan experiences and offer sponsors higher-value partnership opportunities. We work with many of these leagues and are eager to watch their already impressive trajectory.

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