Insights from Hisham Shehabi and Motasem El Bawab
Owning a diverse digital inventory serves a sports organization on multiple fronts. Nowadays there’s an onus on direct-to-consumer (D2C) media and how they help rights holders widen fan engagement. Whether the focus is on the in-stadia experience or the distribution of mobile-friendly content, digital platforms play an important role in connecting the organization and its fan base.
How digital products connect a business is just as important for meeting operational objectives. Therefore, the digital maturity of a sports property isn’t only measured by the levels of user engagement, but the rights holder’s ability to ingest and act upon fan and stakeholder data, so to optimize its internal communications and cross-departmental decision-making.
“A broad digital footprint is vital for connecting people with your brand,” explains Hisham Shehabi, N3XT Sports Chief Operating Officer (COO). “In order to optimize value for the fan, digital transformation and innovation must also provide value to the operational workflows within the business, and not only how the organization engages with its digital fan base and stakeholders.
“This can be achieved by integrating a data-management capability that offers a single source of truth across all of the organization’s digital touchpoints. While owning a diverse digital inventory enables sports properties to generate new revenue streams via new fan experiences, customer value optimization (CVO) depends on how digital touchpoints enhance the way they do business.”
For organizations exploring their own digital transformation, understanding how D2C capabilities will shape the entity’s internal infrastructure, including the digital literacy required to manage new digital services, is an important first step. Through expert analysis of the sports technology market, N3XT Sports continues to support organizations on their own digital transformation journeys.
DIGITAL ADOPTION BUILDS FOUNDATIONS FOR OPERATIONAL GROWTH
An organization’s digital transformation journey begins with assessing the digital maturity and technological infrastructure of the client before matching best-in-class innovations with their business objectives. At its core, a digital assessment of this kind highlights areas where digital products can enhance fan engagement, data collection and connect the property’s internal workflows.
For sports properties nowadays, business performance is just as important as their on-field success. For example, the European Elite 2022 report, published by the Football Benchmark group, named Real Madrid as Europe’s most valuable football club for a fourth consecutive year. Valued at €3,184 million, the reigning champions of Spanish and European club football partnered with Adobe in September last year to create and deliver highly personalized content to fans.
By leveraging Adobe Experience Cloud, Real Madrid is able to identify fans who visit the club’s Santiago Bernabeu home stadium and tailor the matchday experience to their personal preferences, behavior, or past purchases. For example, club members receive exclusive discounts, banners showing them what they want to see as they walk through the stadium, and receive a notification in the mobile app with updates and marketing campaigns that might interest them.
In order to optimize value for the fan, digital transformation and innovation must also provide value to the operational workflows within the business, and not only how the organization engages with its digital fan base and stakeholders.
Hisham Shehabi OLY, Chief Operating Officer (COO), N3XT Sports
This all begins with collecting data that identifies opportunities to build loyalty among fans. Just as the digital fan experience offers the rights holder a direct line of communication with the fan, mobile apps provide a platform to analyze and adapt to subscriber trends, helping the organization to improve its operational performance beyond fan engagement, including via ticketing and ecommerce initiatives, the digitalization of stadia and facilities, as well as the management of administrative tasks.
Among its client roster, N3XT Sports has supported the digital assessment and digital transformation of sports properties at all levels of the sporting pyramid, including notably the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) and United World Wrestling (UWW). Both adopted new digital touchpoints to connect clients and stakeholders, and respective customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to tailor the user journey and optimize administrative processes.
FIFA WORLD CUP FEATURES BENCHMARKS FOR DIGITAL GROWTH
Ahead of this year’s FIFA World Cup, N3XT Sports published its first World Cup Data Report exploring the digital transformation efforts of Qatar 2022’s 32 participating member associations (MA). The analysis focuses on each federation’s data collection capabilities, digital inventory, and fan engagement as part of N3XT Sports’ proprietary assessment of football’s digital maturity.
While the majority of the MAs (75 percent) have launched one or more of their very own mobile apps to meet demand for mobile content, fewer collect data via their own dedicated over-the-top (OTT) streaming service (15.6 percent) and/or ecommerce/ticketing platforms (53.1 percent). In the meantime, less than one in five of federations (18.7 percent) provide access to all of their digital, data-collection touchpoints via a single sign-on (SSO).
According to Motasem El Bawab, N3XT Sports Chief Information Officer (CIO), organizations that own and operate a variety of digital products that aggregate the consumer data and go beyond just a website and mobile application show a higher level of digital maturity, and would invest in new digital products in other areas of the business whether for commercialization or operations optimizations.
For example, the French Football Federation (FFF) leverages Dataddo technology to centralize its data management operations, while the organization also digitizes its spend management using procurement software from Oxalys. Elsewhere, the Danish Football Association (DBU) created KlubOffice, the federation’s very own membership and administration system designed to prevent the ‘duplication of work’ among Danish clubs, while also acting as a platform for managing members finances and payments, approvals and requests for player certificates, among other clubs services.
“Football’s digital transformation is making significant strides on all continents, thanks in large part to the FIFA Forward Programme, which has contributed more than US$2.4 billion to hundreds of approved football development projects since 2016,” El Bawab expands. “Just as the FIFA World Cup acts as a platform to unify national teams across the planet, the tournament presents a throttle to accelerate modernization.
“In return, FIFA’s flagship event owns the power to propel football forward, as a force for innovation, and to share learnings between federations that will help football’s decision-makers nurture interest and commercial growth within their respective markets. Whatever your standpoint, football’s transformation is showing great promise and is changing faster than at any point in the tournament’s 92-year history.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
Digital adoption has accelerated the sports industry’s global appeal and is driving economic growth in the sector. However, despite evidence that companies with high digital adoption experience twice the rate of revenue growth than those averse to change, digital transformation remains for some a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, according to Mounir Zok, N3XT Sports Chief Executive (CEO).
“Understanding when to invest and which technologies to adopt depends on the readiness of the organization to digitize its operations,” Zok says. “The good news is that sport’s digital transformation takes many different forms. Whereas mobile technology helps maximize fan engagement, digitizing information-intensive processes can also help an organization save on operational expenditure – by up to 80 percent in some cases.”
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement digital strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To learn more about how digital transformation can support the growth of your organization and how to expand your digital inventory, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.