New Strategy for Tailored Fan Interaction and Engagement
In the modern world of entertainment, fan engagement has become a critical aspect for brands, businesses, and entertainment entities. Ab Gaur, Chief Data and Technology Officer at Ogilvy, emphasizes the importance of leveraging data and technology to create personalized, interactive, and immersive experiences that resonate with fans' passions and behaviors.
Unifying and activating data allows brands to move beyond guesswork and understand fan segments and individual preferences. This understanding, in turn, enables targeted personalization efforts and helps identify previously unseen monetization avenues. With an integrated data platform, brands can create 360-degree fan profiles that provide strategic insights and measured impact, informing the next best message and content for personalized, timely experiences.
One example of this approach can be seen at Wimbledon, where AI was integrated into its fan experience to create personalized video highlights, spoken-word commentary, and interactive match summaries. This integration resulted in "double-digit growth in engagement and content consumption across its owned platforms."
Today's fans crave deeper connections with their favorite teams and players, seek personalized experiences, and desire opportunities to weave their fandom into their personal identities. To achieve immersive fandom, brands should build and monetize their data, consolidating all available fan data into a comprehensive profile to understand fan segments and individual preferences.
Key strategies for achieving immersive fandom may include:
- Utilizing advanced data analytics to understand fan preferences and behaviors in real time.
- Crafting personalized content and experiences tailored to individual fan journeys.
- Integrating immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality to create engaging storytelling moments.
- Building communities that foster active participation and co-creation among fans.
- Collaborating with entertainment and media partners to deliver seamless cross-platform fan experiences.
- Ensuring authenticity in brand communication to build trust and long-term loyalty.
Metrics worth measuring include acquisition costs, engagement rates, conversion rates on personalized offers, customer lifetime value, and overall fan sentiment. Strong data governance frameworks are crucial for ensuring the accuracy, consistency, security, and regulatory compliance of fan data. Data governance efforts should be coupled with analytics and reporting that measure the effectiveness of personalized engagement strategies and the return on investment.
The sports industry, with its lucrative television contracts, loyal customers, strong investment returns, and fan engagement models, serves as a compelling case study for other industries to learn from. For those interested in delving deeper into this topic, the Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives.
Fandom encompasses support for various forms of popular culture, including sports teams and players, musicians, entertainers, books, movies, and more. Ab Gaur, who is also the Founder & CEO of Verticurl, is at the forefront of this revolution, helping brands harness the power of data and technology to create unforgettable fan experiences that foster lasting connections and drive growth.
- Ab Gaur, as the Chief Data and Technology Officer at Ogilvy and the Founder & CEO of Verticurl, advocates for utilizing data and technology in the sports industry to create personalized, interactive, and immersive fan experiences that cater to their passions and behaviors.
- In the realm of entertainment, brands should prioritize building and monetizing their data, embracing strategies such as real-time data analytics, personalized content, immersive technologies, fan community building, cross-platform collaboration, and authentic brand communication to engage fans more deeply and foster long-term loyalty, as exemplified by the success seen at events like Wimbledon.
