What makes fans tick?
Media agency Elevate is using AI to try and answer that question with a solution for targeting specific sports and entertainment fandoms.
On Friday, Elevate announced the launch of a new AI-powered insights platform called EPIC, which stands for “Elevate’s Performance and Insights Cloud.”
EPIC is comprised of a cloud-based suite of apps available as a managed service and on a self-service basis. Brands can use the tools to generate consumer insights, property insights – as in, insights related to physical properties, like venues or stadiums – and ticketing management.
The platform relies on a custom large language model (LLM) built using Anthropic and Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies. The model can sort and analyze data based on simply worded queries and key phrases (i.e., “college football fans”).
The data itself comes from a variety of first- and third-party sources, including 8,000 nationally representative, self-identified “fans” that Elevate launched with The Harris Poll in December.
The data “gives us this really well-rounded view of who people are, what they care about and what the behaviors are that we want to influence,” said Jim Caruso, Elevate’s chief innovation officer.
Catering to fan demand
Elevate was founded in 2018 with an investment from Al Guido, president of the San Francisco 49ers. The goal, Caruso said, is to tackle (pun not intended) challenges around revenue generation that are typically encountered by sports venues, teams and leagues.
Although most of Elevate’s clients still come from that world, the company has since expanded to work with other brands, not just to help them better understand sports but also the nature of fandom as a broader concept.
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After all, “a brand doesn’t want users, they don’t want customers, they want fans,” said Caruso. “They want people who are passionate, who have a reason to buy.”
Fandom, Caruso said, also represents the most “transcendent and applicable way to determine someone’s behavior” – more so than demographics or web viewing patterns.
But fandom isn’t just one thing. It encompasses everything from NFL audiences to tabletop RPG players. So, rather than offer curated audiences or data sets based on verticals, the EPIC software allows brands to create custom audiences for each individual client.
Beyond fandom, this level of customization can also be used to drill down on other kinds of audiences. For example, using Elevate’s technology, wine brand O’Neill Vintners & Distillers, discovered that younger wine consumers prefer shopping in person and older consumers prefer shopping online – the exact opposite of received wisdom.
According to Justin Erb, O’Neill’s director of marketing, this has helped the brand to rethink its approach to targeting and structure tests so that it can learn faster.
Take me out to the ballgame
In addition to providing brands with consumer insights, Elevate also works with stadiums and venues to generate property-specific insights, such as data on sponsorship performance, ticket pricing and business operations.
And EPIC also has a ticket management system, which houses the actual tickets themselves and serves as a middle-man between venues and ticket-selling platforms like StubHub or Ticketmaster.
Getting tickets onto these platforms and into consumers hands is pretty similar to how most agencies sell media. “You’re packaging up inventory, you’re pricing it, you’re selling it through the DSP and SSP, and then you need to report on it,” Caruso said. From there, the consumer can hopefully find the tickets online (ideally via a targeted ad) and buy them.
But ticket vendors often don’t share quite as much data as ad platforms do, he said, which makes the audience targeting and behavioral insights that EPIC provides all the more valuable.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t multiple measurable touch points throughout the ticket-selling process.
Some of these touch points are internal, such as where and when a ticket was sold. Others, meanwhile, are external or even downright ephemeral, like the weather, how well a team is doing, who they’re playing against and even how the sport is configured. For example, a traveling hockey fan might want a seat on the home team’s side so they can watch the away team score.
“Those things don’t come through if you’re just looking at a blank stadium map,” said Caruso. “We have to do a lot of that analysis and work with our partners to understand how we want to break up this inventory.”
