Heat, Bucks Develop Data-Driven Platform Partnership To Drive Revenues

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

In The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High-Performance Industry, my co-authors and I showed how teams in the same league are often on-court foes can and off-court friends. While they are both competing for the NBA Eastern Conference title this year, the Miami Heat and Milwaukee Bucks demonstrate how sharing best practices and products can help both organizations maximize revenue generation through data analysis.

As context, the Miami Heat wanted to better understand both short-term and long-term fan purchasing habits in everything ranging from in-game concession purchases to season-ticket usage. To accomplish this goal, the team “developed a new platform that gathers data on everything from attendance numbers to sales of tickets and food and beverage items, and processes that information more quickly than ever before.”

This challenge is common one faced by sports industry professionals. More specifically, virtually every sports organization wants to know as much as possible about their fans through data aggregation and analysis. In addition to driving ticketing, merchandise, concession, and event revenues, understanding fan behavior is critical corporate partners looking to target and activate sponsorships in ways that maximize return on investment (ROI) on their spend.

The challenge is that many sports properties work with multiple different vendors and have multiple different technology platforms that house information about fans across these different revenue streams. Aggregating and analyzing that amount of data across so many different systems at speed and scale of driving in-game purchasing decisions is not an easy task.

That is in large part why the Heat decided to address this challenge particularly after Lebron James left the organization in 2014. The team spent a significant amount of time (five years) and resources to build a platform solution. It then realized that other NBA teams had similar use cases to the Heat such as not being solely dependent on winning to drive revenue. Therefore, it created 601 Analytics (a tribute to the team’s American Airlines Arena address) with the goal to having its platform be the standard across the NBA.

The Bucks became the first team to adopt the platform in a multi-year, six-figure agreement announced last week. Bucks Chief Technology and Strategy Officer Robert Cordova stated one of the primary reasons for working with the Heat was “the fact that they had already [used the platform] was great…I didn’t want to do it myself and take five years, so it was a great win-win where the Bucks could leverage all of their lessons learned and their platform and get there in a much faster time frame.”

Most sports organizations are looking to become data-driven but do not know the best ways to get started when it comes to aggregating and analyzing information. The Heat and Bucks partnership shows that not every team within a league needs to develop their own solutions. Leveraging an already-built platform means that the Bucks can scale up its data analysis much more quickly than it could on its own while Heat can continue to monetize its investment in this technology.

We are seeing the desire for already-built technology solutions that aggregate and analyze information to drive revenue permeate throughout the sports industry. In the NFL, for example, the San Francisco 49ers have partnered with SAP to create Executive Huddle. This solution enables the team to aggregate and analyze information in real-time to drive decision-making at Levi’s Stadium from everything including ticketing, concessions, and restrooms. It is a solution that all NFL teams can examine as they become more focus on data-driven insights.  

In the corporate partnerships space, B6A’s Partnership Scoreboard enables our clients to use our pre-built, scalable technology platform in ways that specifically address their needs. Properties, partners, and agencies can leverage our years of working on solving the challenges of determining cross-channel ROI valuation in ways that drive revenue for both the sellers and buyers of sports sponsorships.

Big data can often seem like a big problem to those trying to find insights that drive decision-making in the sports industry. The Heat and Bucks platform partnership highlights latest newest solution to this problem. Because they are mostly never competing for the same fans, media, partnership, and event dollars, the Heat and Bucks can share technologies that enable both to use data to generate incremental revenue growth.