We’re about to reach escape velocity.
Not just in sports marketing — though that’s the focus here. The cycle is starting to propel itself: take in data, form hypotheses and next actions, produce outcomes, feed the results back in as new data, and go again. Continuous forward motion, driven by data-results-data.
That flywheel sounds too good to be true, but it’s very much possible today. The thing is: it won’t happen on its own (yes, there’s still a need for some human intervention! and some software, sure). The dots have to be connected; data sources wrangled from disparate platforms, some less opaque than others, and the catalysts have to be in place to generate those inputs — to invite fans to reveal, passively or proactively, more about themselves and their preferences. All of it compounding into better outcomes for the team (or league, or college program) and the fan.
This is the challenge WMT Digital is taking on with its partners. The fan engagement and technology platform serves the wider sports and live events ecosystem, with a big footprint in college sports, where it has witnessed and helped usher in the digital transformation. Big data and data-driven insights are not foreign terms to college athletics leaders anymore. But the aha has to lead to action. The flywheel has to spin.
“College is generally in a good spot in terms of the insights they’re deriving from that data,” said Chris Freet , EVP and Chief Strategy Officer of WMT Digital. “Where they’ve been getting stuck for a long time is action. So we need to step in as their provider to help them take action, and in some instances, take the action for them. There’s limited value in insight if you’re not testing that insight to see how it can drive your athletic department or your team forward.
“When we think about data, it’s organizing it and constantly recommending to our partners: here’s the next thing to do, here’s the next data point to get. Neil is in your email database but not in your text database, and he hasn’t downloaded your mobile app — do these things to drive to these outcomes. Action is where it’s been stuck, and that’s where I’m most excited about what’s coming with our partners in the next 12 to 18 months.”
So what does this all mean in practice? The first step is a mindset shift: from the basic, still-useful cohorts of decades past to data-driven fan segments derived from actual behavior. Today’s technology allows for near-endless analysis, forming hypotheses and action steps to test in the real world, then feeding the results back into the machine. It sounds technical, because, well, it kind of is. But it all traces back to real behaviors from real fans responding to real experiences. That’s the model being engineered and implemented at WMT, as President Andy Zeilman laid it out.
“Using the benefit of these smart AI agents — they’re always 24/7 on. They can bring forth new segments that might be arising in the data, even in their infant stage,” said Zeilman, who spent years in various industries, including tech, before finding his way to sports tech at WMT. “That’s learning, that’s education for an athletic director: are we seeing a trend in fan behavior? How do we test this in a real offline environment in a stadium to see if there really is a new segment of fan?…
“But it all comes back to the data,” he continued. “The digital experience and the data are so intimately and inherently connected that the digital experience has to be captured — it has to be actively on the data. It’s that round flywheel loop: data flows in, you get new segmentations, you test those segments through new content, new experiences, new outreaches, new polls — all auto-generated, [with a] human in the loop, because you never want to lose control of your experience or content, at least for now. That’s how you continue to build up and speed up that flywheel. That’s where technology fits in — on the front end, the back end, and throughout the entire flow of experience to data, back to experience.”
Understanding and segmenting a fan base is increasingly complex today, too, because fandom can look a lot different now, in college or pro. It’s all exacerbated by the movement of student-athletes, some taking fan bases with them from school to school, not just college to pro (though that presents well-known opportunities of its own). The data holds the answers, and valuable insight about these emerging fan segments, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. An ACC school isn’t sharing its information with an SEC school. Some pro leagues have more centralized cooperation; the MMRs (multimedia rights holders; i.e. Learfield, Playfly, et al.) have visibility across their properties; and many big-spending national brands may have a better read on dynamic fan affinities than the teams, leagues, and schools themselves.
Accessibility will help. But the bigger point, as Zeilman described it, is recognizing the prevalence of “fluid fandom,” the term now widely adopted across the industry. Understanding fan movement isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity.
“There’s the next-level concept of can you build a clean room across different properties and start looking at trends across properties? Are you seeing fluid fans in college like you’re seeing in pro? In pro, that’s a lot of the rage and concern — fluid fandom,” said Zeilman, who joined WMT Digital in 2024. “When you start getting into gamification, betting, and fantasy, people are becoming fans of the athlete more than fans of the team, and that creates a loyalty issue for those teams, especially with emerging fans growing up with all this.
“How does that impact college? College has been steadfast and true — I’m a fan of this college, my dad was a fan, my granddad was a fan,” Zeilman continued. “Does fluid fandom start bleeding into that market? That’s where you need to start looking at cross-property fandom and cross-property fluidity. We’re not there yet, but this is where the whole industry should be going. As there’s more and more movement to the transfer portal and more athlete affinity or college affinity, where is that line? We’re here to help figure that out and make sure you’re identifying that fluidity early and capturing that revenue within the college partners we have.”
These more serpentine fan journeys require a more thoughtful, forward-thinking approach for schools and teams to stay efficient in their development and revenue strategies. But it’s tough, especially in college, because at a time when every dollar matters more than ever, it’s hard to justify spending time and effort on the younger fan, whose lifetime value may add up to quite a bit but can’t help pay today’s bills nearly as much as the marginal older fan with far more disposable money to spend or donate.
Overcoming that challenge is part of the promise of big data and AI, Freet explained. The burden of understanding all these fan bases, devising the pathways and content to reach, capture, and engage them, building journeys that create lifelong value: AI can do a lot of that heavy lifting, all while continuously learning and improving. That’s why it’s such an exciting time.
“Your most valuable fan is still that 64-year-old that cuts you a big check,” said Freet, who worked at five Division I college athletics programs before making his way to WMT. “On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a 14-year-old that’s probably never opened an email or sent a properly written email before, at least. And for all these athletic departments, with sport being consumed in a million different ways, the bill is coming due.
“What’s exciting about the era we’re in — about AI, about where data can inform the decision-making — is you can have a path for all of these fans. None of them are more important than the other. The 64-year-old is delivering more revenue right now for a lot of reasons. But the ability to normalize your data and deliver a personalized experience that speaks to a bunch of different demographics, and understand where you’re having success and continue to test against that, is very real and not far off in the future.”
We’ve been talking a lot about collecting data and mapping out fan journeys, but there’s a big elephant in the room — the vast majority of fans are unknown. They show up as likes on social media, views on YouTube, traffic numbers on the website. Retargeting them is a legitimate play, to be sure, but the more direct connections, the golden records, the deeper profiles and fan segments, aren’t happening at the top of the funnel, on platforms where the relationship is tenuous at best.
This is the world WMT Digital straddles. The marriage of data and platform building, with content and experiences as the entry points for comprehensive connections and personalized interactions. Fans aren’t going to spend time, let alone register a profile, on owned-and-operated platforms without a good reason. WMT and its partners build those reasons. That’s how you start to spin that deeper data flywheel. Freet talked through the process, using Clemson’s big numbers to frame the latent value sitting there for schools and teams to realize.
“Clemson is one we’ve talked about today: around 8 million unique visitors on an annual basis, a database of season-ticket holders around 8,000, and a ticketing database, last I counted, of about 800,000. That’s a big delta between all those numbers,” he said. “So if every single day when the [athletic director] gets into his office he can go into a dashboard and see how many new fans they added and how many profiles were updated in the last 24 hours — that is very powerful. The motivation for that is a bit in the strengths of the athletic department; that’s where we’ve built a nimble platform. Is it gamification? Is it loyalty? Is it gated content? Yes. Is it signing in to get access, so you don’t have to sign in to all your other accounts every time you want to access something that’s part of your fandom? Yes. Are any of those the magic bullet? No, because that’s the space we live in — we all live in our own channels and have our own preferences.
“But what we’ve built in our ecosystem funnels everything in, from fan ID into fan intelligence, and is bilateral — communicating with those systems both ways, so we understand the actions worked and we can update the profile in the system. All of that is toward those outcomes we talked about: how do we get more identification, make the experience motivating and seamless for the fan, and get them to come back and continue to share with the team they’re already passionate about?”
Zeilman elaborated on the renewed vigor with which the industry is approaching owned-and-operated platforms. The big numbers on social media are seductive, and social will always post the maximum metrics. But once you understand the value of the flywheel and start minding the most meaningful metrics, the picture gets clearer. And besides, the social-versus-O&O dichotomy isn’t an either/or. It’s about making those fan touch points work together.
“That’s the riddle yet to be solved: how do you get that addiction of social media to translate off the platform back to you on an operating ecosystem? It is going to be about next-generation content strategy — interactive experiences, you understanding the fan, so they get that experience in the O&O environment versus the generalized social-media experience,” Zeilman explained. “That partnership with social media is going to have to evolve on a data-bridge-in, data-bridge-out model that hasn’t been fully solved yet, because the methodology has been ’drive to social,’ there’s so much reach on social. How do you revert that now?
“It’s going to take time, but that’s where we’re trying to work with our partners. It’s about the technology, the data, the content, and the strategy of all of it working together to drive engagement, personalization, and identification, all within the system.”
It’s not groundbreaking to state that data is powerful. That’s been the case for generations, going back to the room-sized mainframes of IBM. It’s just that now, with more data than ever, each new data point is more valuable — if it drives action. It’s moving away from “That’s interesting” and more toward “What should happen next.” That’s the promise of all this AI, engineering, platform development, and relationship building with fans.
And, perhaps counterintuitively, it’s making fan engagement, marketing, and business strategy more human. Organizations truly get to know fans as individuals, not as part of some massive, broad-based cohort; fans are treated to personalized experiences based on their real behaviors and stated preferences. It will all keep progressing, too, because data is now forward-looking, dictating what should happen next to produce the best outcome, and prompting action on every key learning captured along the way.
The future is building for fans, not algorithms. Always seeking to deliver fans what they want, and to keep getting better at every interaction. That’s how you build a fan for life. And the lifelong fan is the most valuable of all.
WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH ANDY ZEILMAN AND CHRIS FREET
