Eagles sign with KAGR, plan personalization push
The Eagles have signed with KAGR for analytics, planning to use the Kraft Group-owned company to better target and monetize their wide range of fans. That ranges from high rollers to multigeneration season ticket holders, from occasional single-game buyers to overseas followers who have never been to Philadelphia. “To blanket throw everything at them just doesn’t make sense in this day and age, and the personalization track is why we started down this path to find the right partner,” said Eagles VP/Business Data and Analytics Tanmay Patel.
All NFL teams have access to KAGR tools on ticketing data through the NFL league-level relationship, but the Eagles are the first NFL team outside of the Patriots to access the full suite. Along with building a central data warehouse for all Eagles business-side information, KAGR is debuting a new service with the Eagles: a fan segmentation and activation tool designed to quickly create groups of like-minded customers inform strategy and sales. “That to me is very powerful, that’s the next level of where all sports teams need to go,” said KAGR CEO Jessica Gelman.
“I remember saying, ‘One of the most promising paths for the Eagles will be sharing KAGR-driven insights with sponsors. For instance, the Eagles and KAGR will be able to tell pouring rights holders at Lincoln Financial Field what kind of customers are buying beer and soda by cross-referencing card purchases with other databases, and whether purchasing patterns are changing over the course of a season. Another example: They will also be able to narrowly target Eagles fans who are also active players of the Madden video game franchise, said Eagles Senior VP/Revenue and Strategy Catherine Carlson.
“That fan segmentation really allows us to tell a story when we’re out there with partners,” Carlson said. “We know who all our fans are, but we’ve had kind of a blurry picture of them until now.” Patel said they’ll also use KAGR to parse data on content consumption, to better plan content strategy on owned-and-operated media.
Trends coming together to maximize the role of data
The Eagles decided to sign up with KAGR now because of how much more data is being generated by consumers and transactions compared to just a few years earlier, Patel said, citing the proliferation of direct-to-consumer business models, cashless points of service and the ubiquity of mobile phones and app usage. “It’s a ripe point for us, as we look at this massive data set, we ask how can we organize it better?” Patel said.
The NFL and its teams are rapidly adding new names to their customer databases, driven by relationships with Fanatics, EA Sports and a concerted effort to gather email addresses and other information at fan-facing events. As useful as the ticketing data from the NFL deal may be, ticketing “should make up between 5-10 percent of your customer base,” Gelman said.
KAGR’s lifetime customer value tool will further help segment and personalize the club’s outreach to fans, allowing sales teams to spend the most effort on the highest-potential value customers while still providing value to the rest, Gelman said. Patel said KAGR’s rare blend of analytics excellence with firsthand experience in the team business won the business. KAGR shares common ownership with the Patriots (with an investment from JP Morgan Chase), but sits outside of Kraft S&E and doesn’t receive football operations data in these deals.
By Ben Fischer
March 3, 2022