Nick discusses the insights picked up throughout his career, including stints at NASCAR, as a senior leader of sports partnerships at Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and Verizon, and Charlotte FC / Carolina Panthers.
Nick discusses the insights picked up throughout his career, including stints at NASCAR, as a senior leader of sports partnerships at Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) and Verizon, and Charlotte FC / Carolina Panthers.
On episode 306 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, Neil chatted with Brian Hough, Co-Founder and CEO, PressBox.
Hough discusses PressBox’s technology that automatically produces personalized, multi-modal content experiences for fans of any sport. Hough also talks about the insights and lessons he’s picked up throughout his career, including a stint working on Bleacher Report’s technology.
Watch or listen to episode 306 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Brian Hough, Co-Founder and CEO, PressBox.
Hough discusses PressBox’s technology that automatically produces personalized, multi-modal content experiences for fans of any sport. Hough also talks about the insights and lessons he’s picked up throughout his career, including a stint working on Bleacher Report’s technology.
Sports may capture an outsized part of the zeitgeist, increasingly prominent in pop culture, but when it comes to understanding and maximizing the lifetime value of their consumers, their peers in other fields are ahead.
That’s starting to change, thanks to an infusion of new leaders, strategic capital, and a convergence of technological developments positioning sports to reach new levels of sophistication and new heights of efficiency and effectiveness.
Shripal Shah has spent years in the sports industry, including a long stint with the then-Washington Redskins, ascending to Chief Strategy Officer. He’s also spent years out of the sports industry, highlighted by his time with shopping rewards platform Shop Your Way. He’s seen the way retail and hospitality analyze and engage customers, and the how those industries govern and operationalize data in ways that the sports industry is just starting to conceive. Shah is well-positioned to understand this inflection point at which sports finds itself, and the lucrative opportunities it presents.
“I think the one area [that] I think sports could adopt towards, is retail is much further ahead in this idea of true personalized marketing, like use of personas, segments, data enrichment,” said Shah, who today is Chief Digital Officer of Next League, a software development and technology solutions company specializing in sports and media. “And in retail, there’s a concept called RFM marketing…It’s an approach and a framework to drive people, based off this idea [of] how recently have they shopped with or interacted with you, how frequently and the monetization. And it really touches on this idea not just going from awareness, consideration to purchase, but this idea of how do you really create higher lifetime value from your customers? How do you create a higher share of wallet or a higher spend?”
The sports industry is built on long-term fandom. When the operation is working as expected, generational customers are cultivated, lifelong fans who aim to pass on their favorite sports and teams to their kids. And yet, while plenty of effort is put forth around season ticket renewals (though the traditional concept of season tickets has diminished appeal for younger generations), sports organizations are more often than not in pursuit of the next fan, the marginal fan and incremental dollar. There is merit in that, no doubt. When media rights deals are dictated by one more fan watching for at least a minute, it makes sense to chase increase the overall pool.
But there’s also untold riches to surface in the deeper end of the pool. There’s more value to mine among the diehard fans and those closer to the bottom of the funnel than the top. And the methods by which organizations learn more about, and activate, those fans compound in value. Shah has seen it play out with customers in the retail space.
“Once you’re at a real scalable retail, because at that point you could have — like at Shop Your Way we had over 50 million users — you don’t actually need to go acquire more users, you already have a lot of their info,” said Shah, whose recently published book, Unlocking Fan Loyalty: From Frequent Flyers to Fanatics in the Age of AI, breaks down how sports organizations transform ordinary customers into passionate fans by harnessing the power of data, personalization, and artificial intelligence. “You could always try to get more people in the funnel, but if you can also retain those users and convert more, [get people to] spend more, that can also drive not only your top line growth, but better bottom line profits. I think that nuance is starting to show up in sports, as you’re seeing the advent of these holding companies that are now cross-team, the insertion of private equity.
“And now with AI democratizing and bringing more of these mature marketing tools to the budget levels of sports teams, I think that’s going to also lend itself to really leverage those tools and those data sets and technology. It lends itself to another marketing approach that I think ultimately could lead to a higher lifetime value for the fan base.”
AI is everyone’s opportunity. As Shah told me, artificial intelligence can have a democratizing effect for marketing teams in sports and beyond. Every conversation about marketing tech stacks and roadmaps now includes myriad mentions of AI. There’s a sense of excitement, amplified by FOMO, as the sports world grapples with understanding how to implement AI into their systems. The interest is higher than ever, but there are some prerequisites for effective implementation of AI. And that’s part of this inflection point, as Shah sees it; more excitement than ever, coupled with a forcing factor requiring organizations to upend their old systems of thinking and do a deep audit, and deep cleaning, of their data.
“I think AI just kind of came and became a thing,” said Shah, whose aforementioned book is part of a three-book series on AI in sports business. “I was talking with the major LLM providers and they said it was almost like what they called an awakening, that demand for an LLM [such as] ChatGPT and Copilot went up 1,000% this summer, which was more than the request to buy enterprise licenses the prior nine months or year combined. So that kind of came over the top.
“Before that, when I first rejoined Next League and I was talking with CMOs, this idea of creating a more mature marketing tech stack for personalization was really everyone’s number one priority…But now I think that some people are waiting to see how AI changes what their plan was for the marketing approach…it is about personalization, propensity, predictability, going from like, 40 personas to 400 to 4000 to to infinite…
“I think that’s going to ultimately lead towards more automation because what existed outside of sports was people already had marketing automation and workflow automation. That was the concept that no one ever invested in in sports, and AI is going to really force that. Because to really have good AI products and workflow, you need to have good data governance and you need to really focus on automation. And I think AI is going to sort of be the forcing mechanism that really should cause this level of maturity, because it’s going to force the data to get better.”
The move towards exponential automation is also disrupting decades-old paradigms in sports business, as org charts and team compositions evolve to make the most of new AI-infused capabilities. The days of armies of inside sales reps and smile and dial at high volumes aren’t completely gone, but they’re waning. When it comes to investing in the sales and marketing operation, the first thought goes to tech before headcount now, Shah explained, and that’s a marked change.
“Earlier on, I think there would have been a question like, ‘Well, why are we spending $400,000 on this tech stack when we could just hire 3 or 4 other ticket people? Alright, let’s go hire three, four ticket people at $35k each, fresh out of school, why are we going to spend half a million dollars [on tech]?’ Like you would run into that type of thinking as recently as a few years ago,” he said.
“I think the AI discussion is now throwing that out the window where it’s saying ‘No, what could be done with AI before you ask for headcount?’ AI is not replacing people, but it’s forcing a new conversation which is now forcing an investment into these other tool sets because the tools are going to help people do better, more impactful work, more deeper work.”
AI, and its forcing mechanisms vis-à-vis data infrastructure is just part of a greater transformation Shah sees taking place in sports business. In the same way that AI is not going to replace humans, but empower them to focus on deeper work, it’s allowing the content operations to maximize the value it gets out of each creator and manager. The future of content operations, he told me, can be likened to a ‘portfolio strategy,’ with some tasks and ‘baseline’ content work largely done by AI and the more complex work being done by humans.
But perhaps the most exciting future, and where the sports industry can most emulate the retail and hospitality industries, is in loyalty programs and more integrated and improved partnerships. As Shah described earlier, bringing in principles from the retail industry, like RFM marketing (recency, frequency, monetary value), coupled with the leap ahead in data governance ushers not just better, more nuanced understanding of fan profiles and consumption behaviors, but also allows them to tell a richer story. A well-oiled loyalty program that directly shows purchase behavior and funnel conversions to partners is among the holy grails in sports — and it’s more attainable than ever, fueled by multi-directional, open-loop loyalty programs.
“It gives the teams the ability to get real data points to then describe and demonstrate that fandom and the value of that to their brand sponsors, which then ultimately should lead to higher revenue,” said Shah. “Because by being able to have that data and the proof to be demonstrated, that’s going to ultimately lead towards more spend, because then the sponsors can look at this versus other media channels and say, ‘This is going to give me a much deeper connection that’s going to help me so that I’m not always having to reacquire my customers. I’m also building long-term customers at a much lower acquisition cost.’ It creates that flywheel effect.”
Shah lights up discussing the promise of open-loop loyalty programs making their way into the sports world. Such programs thrive in the retail and hospitality fields. Among the many examples Shah cited, the Marriott Bonvoy program is a shining beacon, where points are transferable from one partner program to another, where spending with Starbucks, Uber, and BetMGM can be redeemed for rewards with any of the aforementioned programs, and points can be transferred back and forth, including from credit card programs. The intermingling of earning and redeeming presents an incredible value proposition. The opportunity is even greater now, as sports organizations invest in multi-club ownership and retail ecosystems around their venues. Spending on sports remains a non-necessity, a luxury or entertainment expenditure, which only adds to the appeal for sports to more effectively integrate into the everyday purchases and journeys of its fans. Shah explained why open loyalty programs are such an exciting opportunity for sports and why he believes loyalty programs may become among the most valuable assets sports organizations hold, as the programs are for other businesses.
“[Open loop loyalty programs] work beyond just a single retailer or partner. They’re cross-currency,” he explained. “So what that’s done is it has driven more value to the currency because now it has value in multiple places, which then creates higher liquidity because now there are more people who are earning more. But then they’re also redeeming more, so therefore they’re spending more. Now, that drives higher potential frequency. The person who came twice a year somewhere might come three, four times a year without having to pay for acquisition costs. The person who came once a month might come one and a half times a month. And that is what everyone outside of sports is seeing.”
That’s the promise of RFM marketing in action, and why Shah is so excited about bringing those principles to sports. Shah continued, noting the significant value proposition this all represents, broadening the aperture for fan engagement and consumption capture.
“This idea of cross-industry collaboration is happening in industries and verticals that have much higher spend. People spend a lot more with their grocery stores and their gas, because they need it, than they do with their sports tickets,” he said. “People in some places could be spending more on travel, so they’re using it for personal and for work than they are for their sports tickets. So it’s just a matter of understanding market size and TAM, and I think it’s an education.
“I’ve had many conversations…That’s the premise of the book; this is a reality where, for airlines, their loyalty programs are considered more valuable assets than their entire fleet of airplanes. Full stop.”
The sports industry’s long-awaited business evolution is finally here. AI has emerged as the ‘forcing mechanism,’ compelling the data maturity and automation that organizations have long desired but deferred. This new foundation allows sports to adopt the proven playbooks of retail and hospitality, shifting focus from chasing the next marginal fan to maximizing the lifetime value of their most loyal fans through sophisticated, open-loop loyalty programs.
This transformation is more than an operational upgrade, it’s part of a grander vision. The goal is no longer simply to fill a stadium, but to build a powerful economic flywheel effect where a team is embedded in a fan’s daily life, capturing value far beyond the stadium or arena. The organizations that embrace this change are redefining their very identity, marking the final evolution from a sports team that has fans to a fan platform that has a team.
What if your best-performing content isn’t actually your best-performing content?
We’re in the era of big data and analytics, a time of greater appreciation and comprehension of measuring success than ever before. And yet the metrics we use to understand content performance are still evolving, still open to scrutiny, and we continue to chase the meaning of a post or piece of content’s value.
Nick Cicero has spent much of his career leading measurement frameworks and evolving, even revolutionizing, the paradigms we use to measure and analyze media. Along the way, the platforms, packaging, and consumption patterns have necessitated changes in how we consider content; however, the longstanding models, as well as the companies hosting or presenting content themselves, often lag behind their platforms’ own evolution.
Cicero has watched the evolution at the front of the pack, seeing the shifts happen in real-time, and understanding the need for measurement to evolve, too.
“The biggest challenge that we always had was we would have to use engagements as a proxy for interest,” said Cicero, founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics. “But we know that only like the 1% of people are really engaging, for example, relative to everybody. That’s why whenever we look at things like engagement rate and we use followers as the denominator, which a lot of people do, that is outdated and old, right?
“That’s a metric that has now evolved because, one, you can game it, but two, it’s not really relevant if all of your followers don’t have the chance to see all your content, and that’s changing. So we were using all of these proxy metrics to help us understand that…”
Engagement worked well enough in the early days. There weren’t any better options, anyway. But then the form factor for content diversified, making content trickier to measure. Video exploded and each platform decided what constituted a video view. Snapchat came along and disrupted everything, with the 24-hour lifespan and taps forward (and back), completion, and exits entering the picture. Cicero saw all this happening and sought a solution.
“We said, ‘Hey, what is a Story but a compilation of videos that you’re just playing back in a row once again over a 24-hour window of time?’ So if the first frames of the video and the day expire, and I’m missing the point of telling the Story, my Story is incomplete,” said Cicero, whose previous company, Delmondo (later acquired by Conviva), was the first to provide analytics for Stories. “So that’s where it gave us the inspiration to say, ‘Well, maybe we should be measuring completion rate. But how do we do that?’ That’s what caused us to start to blow things apart and look at what are new metrics that we can combine and relationships that haven’t been there before.”
The new models required new ways of thinking. But it was also just the industry, influenced by ideas espoused by leaders like Cicero, catching up to modes of thinking that should’ve been there all along. Does the sum of the views of the first frame or two of a cohesive Stories package really matter as much as those sessions where users actually complete the Story? Does it make sense to celebrate a ‘viral’ 3-minute piece of content that earns over a million views as a massive success if the majority of those views are only watching a minuscule portion of the video? If one team’s content grabs a few seconds at a time while another’s gets a few minutes, but they both display the same number of ‘views,’ is that really an equivalent result?
An oft-referenced remark offered by Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings in 2017 was that the streaming platform’s primary competition was sleep. While that thinking takes things to an extreme, it’s directionally accurate; we’re all competing for the discretionary, finite time people have in their social media sessions, their content consumption time, and the waking hours overall in their days.
“They all want to capture attention; they want to measure the most attention,” said Cicero, referencing Mondo Metrics’s work with podcasters, sports teams and leagues, and other brands and creators. “They want to take the biggest share of your attention from somebody else at the end of the day, and that’s why what we really try to preach is that we need to prioritize for watch time and quality time spent on these platforms, the amount of total consumption that might occur in a day, for example. Because those are the numbers that add up.”
Cicero elaborated further, adding another wrinkle to that ubiquitous term ‘engagement’: “I keep going back to that [idea] of depth of engagement,” he said, “and it’s like when I go into a viewing experience, and this is what we thought with Stories as well, like when I go into this experience of consumption, what am I doing? What are the other options that I have? What are the different paths that I take to continue on and move through that?”
Getting a user to watch the first few frames of a story or the opening part of a video is something to be celebrated. Retention, completion, and overall time spent make up a fuller picture, but you can’t consume content without starting it. You can’t completely view content without watching the middle, and you can’t complete it without watching the end. That’s the point, Cicero explained to me, articulating the anatomical makeup of content into discrete slices that can each be analyzed and optimized.
“I like to think about it in like those three buckets,” Cicero said. “If you look at a video, what metrics are at the beginning, middle, and end? And depending on what my goal is, I’m going to look at stuff differently, right? Like, if I’m struggling to get viewers on my channel, I’m probably going to look at the first [elements] — what is it in the title? What is it in the thumbnail? What is it in the hook that is working or not working? Okay, cool, so what if I’m getting millions and millions of views, but people are only sticking around and watching my YouTube videos for like 7 or 8 seconds? Well, then I might look at the middle to the end metrics, like, okay, well, how long is my video? What’s the retention?
“It’s so crazy sometimes that people will spend all this time and energy to make a 20-minute video and get a million views and have an average watch time of 10 seconds. What you’re basically telling me is that probably 90% of the people left, and you just had a few people who were really invested in it. You’ve got to try something different. It’s cool that it might have gotten a million views because it might have been a viral hook or something , but there’s no substance to it. So, depending on what your goal is, you almost need to look at a different slice of the video in that sense.”
It’s not just social media that’s experiencing a reckoning for measurement. Remember ten years ago, back in 2015, when Yahoo made waves broadcasting the first-ever NFL Game exclusively on a livestream? They reported massive numbers, buttressed by the fact that anybody landing on the Yahoo home page had the livestream autoplay, racking up those ‘views,’ along with the industry grappling with how to define viewership on such a new platform. Recall that traditional TV ratings like Nielsen generally report the average minute audience (AMA), the number of viewers watching, on average, every minute of the broadcast. How many social platforms report a view as a minute of watch time? Yep, none. As content delivery platforms converge, the concept of viewership and performance is evolving by necessity. And as sports teams and leagues, along with other digital-first content creators, mold themselves into media companies in their own right, they need to think less in terms of the old metrics.
“If you’re like a true media executive, you’re going to look at your time spent on YouTube and try to think comparably to television, right?” said Cicero. “Because if you’re ESPN or whomever, you’re like, ‘Okay, these many people spend this much time on television, but then they’re going and watching Pat McAfee live every day, they’re going and watching this. So we can’t not look at the depth. We can’t not look at the total consumption time that they spend with our brand.
“So executives see that, but then content teams see that now too, because they realize that, for the most part, it’s helpful to tell executives big numbers, vanity metrics. But as you start to dig in to look at what’s really effective and what’s not, that’s when you have to really dig into the details.”
Anyone working in content in sports grapples with the daily hamster wheel, the never-ending battle to produce the next piece or post in the battle for eyeballs and attention. The fortunate part of working in sports is the cycle is amenable to such constant output, where there’s always another game. But whether the sport plays over 160 games or fewer than 20, that still leaves a lot of blank space to fill. There are only so many mini mic questions (Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah?) and manufactured tentpoles (hey, schedule release content is fun and awesome).
But, again, as the transformation of sports teams and leagues turning into media companies continues, the opportunity arises for sports to think in catalogs, to consider longer shelf-life content that can capture fan attention (and drive incremental revenue) for weeks, months, and even years to come. Cicero addressed the challenges of the inherent ‘rat race’ nature of the daily battle for attention, as well as the opportunity to appreciate the LTV (lifetime value) of content. It doesn’t mean every piece of content needs to capture engagement for years to come, just that, where it can, that should enter into the strategy and ROI calculus.
“Sure, you’re going to pump out some highlights,” said Cicero, who, in addition to running Mondo Metrics, teaches digital analytics at Syracuse. “And definitely that works for TikTok and Instagram and those short half life platforms. But now as we move into YouTube, well, we need to start thinking about, is that piece of content going to have staying power, years from now?…
“When you go back to the evolution of measurement, I think now people are starting to realize that, yes, I have the churn and burn of the algorithm that I have to fight every single day, that kind of rolls with the flow of the world, the way that the media cycle works, the way that we’re hyper short attention-driven in that sense, because we’re in this rat race of the world that we live in.
“But then at the end of the week, we are here on a Friday afternoon, if you really take a step back when you have some free time to breathe and think of a piece of content that you want to watch, then that’s where people are starting to think about this more. That’s when people really care about average watch time, and the minutes consumed, the quality of the content that’s going out there. And I’m excited by that. Because it means that people who would typically have been making a lot of social content, or maybe never got the chance to get on TV, are bringing really quality storytelling into these platforms and spending more time. So I see this as a really strong evolution.”
Next time you see a video popping off with “views” or a post that racked up impressions, remember that’s not the full story. The era of vanity metrics is fading; depth of engagement is where true value lies. The ways we measure content have changed for the better, and there’s no going back.
We’ve mastered the science of capturing attention; the real challenge now is keeping it.
Watch or listen to episode 304 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Nick Cicero, Founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics.
