This document discusses how new generations of fans have different expectations for live sports experiences due to their use of technology. Younger fans expect content to be delivered instantly on their terms via mobile devices. They also engage heavily with second screens during events. As a result, event owners must enhance the total fan experience with better WiFi, mobile content, and engagement technologies like beacons to provide a seamless experience and stay relevant. A case study showed how beacons increased fan engagement and purchases at a soccer match in Poland.

1. FAN EXPERIENCE New Generation of Fans, New Expectations, Implications for Event Owners.
© 2014 IQ Sport

2. NEW GENERATION OF FANS
•Generation Y fans have totaly different expectations towards the quality of experience when attending and following live sports and entertainment mass events.
•These expectations are driven by the heavy usage of techonology – mobile, social, wearables etc.
•For the first time, mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic, representing an ever- increasing trend in the world of technology.
•New fans want to have content delivered on their terms, instantly, quickly, with high quality. It becomes even more important than just being on the venue.
•Second Screen became widespread. Sports and 2nd screen are a winning combination because 2nd screen can give fans exactly what they want: an enhanced viewer’s experience.

3. NEW GENERATION OF FANS
Source: http://mesalliance.org/
Source: Hashtag Sports – Rise of Beacons Report

4. NEW GENERATION OF FANS
Source: btd.de
Today’s sports fans are mobile, social, multi-device, and multiplatform. A 2014 survey16 commissioned by Sporting News Media, Kantar Sport, and SportsBusiness Group titled “Know the Fan” found that 75% of U.S. adult internet users accessed sports content via a mobile device at least once a week vs. 36% accessed daily.

5. BTD recently carried out an extensive online survey of over 5800 match-day visitors to the Allianz Arena.
NEW GENERATION OF FANS
Source: btd.de

6. NEW CHALLENGES FOR EVENT OWNERS
•Attendance is going down…
•Convenience of live television coverage being the most obvious factor competing for fans’ attention and impacting their decision to attend (or not attend) a game
•Infrastructure is not good enough (even new stadia don’t have WIFI)
•Not being connected negatively impacts the willingness to attend live events
•The cost of attending vs the quality received – not enough, peolpe choose to stay on the couch, TV provides great coverage…
Source: Q1Productions / sporttechie.com

7. RE-IMAGINING THE FAN EXPERIENCE
•Refining touchpoints and entire service experience to make the event experience nice and smooth (smile industry).
•„You've got to have the games be more than games”.
•Last but not least – technology enabled event experiences
Fans’ expectations for the game-day experience have evolved to include points of contact that extend well beyond the action that takes place on the field or court.
Event owners must focus on enhancing and perfecting the total fan experience.
Source: Disney Institute / sbssports.com

8. RE-IMAGINING THE FAN EXPERIENCE
Source: Julian Jenkins / Cardiff City FC

9. RE-IMAGINING THE FAN EXPERIENCE
Extreme Networks Named First Official Wi-Fi Solutions Provider of National Football League
„We've given all our clubs a goal of the 2015 season to be up to par with Wi-Fi in the bowl areas as well as upgrading their mobile carrier networks. Most are on track to do that."
NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle

10. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES
IQ Sport and Xperiology have recently conducted a study researching fan engagement technologies, services and applications.
•Targeted personnel of manager level and above
•Divisions: Ticketing, Media, Commercial, Stadium Management, Operations, Partnerships
•Markets: UK, USA, Germany, Spain
•~ 100 responses

11. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES
Survey Part 1: SOCIAL MEDIA & MATCHDAYS Researching the way how event owners use social media, which channels and networks, how they engage fans, what challenges they meet.
Survey Part 2: OPERATIONS & MATCHDAYS Researching the way how event owners tackle the challenges of fan in-venue experience to make the fan experience smooth.
Survey Part 3: NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Researching the fan engagement technologies event owners use or plan to develop in short time.
Survey Link

12. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES

13. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES

14. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES

15. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES

16. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES

17. FAN ENGAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES
Infographic summing up the survey results.

18. TRENDS
MOBILE First!
•Mobile Traffic > Internet Traffic
•New San Francisco 49ers’ stadium (68,500 seats). 2,13TB of data transfered during the game (25K fans in peak moments), 17K on average.
•Super Bowl (New Jersey stadium), 3.2TB of data transfered, mostly via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

19. TRENDS
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
•Finding your way – parting, seat, closest POI.
•Seat Upgrates
•Social Ticketing
•F&B Purchases on-site
•Video Replay
•Traffic Insight
•Social Hubs
•Fantasy Games

20. TRENDS
CURATED, EVENT-RELATED SOCIAL MEDIA TIMELINES
•Snapchat our story feature.
•Twitter dedicated timelines for big events (FIFA WC 2014)

21. TRENDS
iBEACONS
•Beacons are BLE transmitters notifying BLE devices, like smartphones, tablets, etc about their presence if the device stays in the range of transmitter
•Beacon transmits unique ID.
•Digital coockie for physical world
•Beacons make possible to biuld micro-location and proximity services

22. iBEACONS POTENTIAL
According to a June 2014 study10 by mobile ad-platform inMarket, the use of beacons in retail stores caused a 19x increase in interactions with advertised products, a 16.5x increase in app usage in-store
BEING CONTEXT – AWARE MAKES THE MESSAGE MORE EFFECTIVE
A study from beacon platform company Swirl analyzed "tens of thousands" of beacon interactions with customers over the past three months.
Of the interactions analyzed:
•60% of shoppers opened and engaged with the beacons-triggered message they received, such as a promotional discount offer.
•And a little under one-third (30%) of shoppers ended up redeeming the beacons-triggered offer. This is to say that half of those who engaged with the beacon campaign ended up redeeming the offer.
•73% of shoppers said that the beacon content increased their likelihood to make a purchase during their visit.
•61% said they would visit the store more often.
•60% said they would spend more money as a result of receiving a beacon-triggered message.
Source: Business Insider

23. •Georgetown Basketball – after beacon deployment: app check-ins jumped 22%, seat upgrade purchases increased 25%
•Golden State Warriors beacon test case:
 average seat upgrade revenue increased by 69%
 message engagement ~35%
 conversion ~10%
 average transaction value for a fan with the beacons offer 93% higher than a fan without
HOW MUCH EFFECTIVE?
iBEACONS POTENTIAL
Source: Hashtag Sports – Rise of Beacons Report

24. iBEACONS APPLICATIONS ON EVENTS
Context Aware, Location Based Messaging, highly personalized, based on real-time information about who and where the fan is when attending the event. Thanks to sending the right message to the right customer base in the right time the effectiveness and conversion rates can significantly go up!
Traffic Insight, making fan smarter when attending your events, giving hints about the shortest lines and less crowded event places.
Event Navigation, helping fan is finding different venue areas, places, seats and destinations.
Mobile Ticketing Fullfilment, generating e-tickets on mobile devices in front of the gates.

25. iBEACONS APPLICATIONS ON EVENTS
Easy Mobile Ordering and Seamless Payments, making the on-site event purchasing experience more comfortable.
New Sponsorship Inventory, conveying new, engaging, proximity aware, rich sponsor - generated content to better impact fans on- site and find new effective ways to activate sponsorship deals.
Easy Check-Ins and Input to Loyalty Programs, analysing fans on-site behaviours. Awarding points for desired actions and check-ins.
On-Site Customer Analytics, understanding of fans’ behavioural patterns on match-days, how they move around and consume the event to incorporate findings into new, more efficient event and venue configurations.

26. TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA
eFAN rollout for Lechia Gdansk game in Polish Football League at PGE Arena Gdansk
•16 beacons deployed around the venue: entrances, stands, VIP areas
•9 different proximity messages defined
•29 unique proximity interactions defined in the system
•Welcome and goodbye messages, concessions related messages.

27. 9 Proximity Messages
•Message capping = 1, event timeline sensitive, different proximities.
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA

28. 29 Proximity Interactions
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA

29. SOME STATS – OVERALL (Time Period 07.12.2014 – 08.12.2014) – Matchday on 08.12.2014
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA

30. SOME STATS – OVERALL (Time Period 07.12.2014 – 08.12.2014) – Matchday on 08.12.2014
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA

31. SOME STATS – BEHAVIOURS: SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND BEACON INTERACTIONS (Time Period 07.12.2014 – 08.12.2014) – Matchday on 08.12.2014
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA
•Beacon Push Notification CTR 83% 83% of the fans with bluetooth on who received push notification, clicked on it and saw the proximity message.
•Proximity Message Engagement Rate 82% 8 out of 10 fans engaged with the proximity message, scoring it or sharing with others

32. SOME STATS – BEHAVIOURS: SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND BEACON INTERACTIONS
(Time Period 07.12.2014 – 08.12.2014) – Matchday on 08.12.2014
TEST CASE – LECHIA GDANSK, PGE ARENA
•Social Activity = on average every second user created a post on matchday.
•Content Engagement = 103 matchday posts displayed in details 1163 times (each post displayed 10x) .
•Content Type = 35% text posts, 57% including image, 8% including audio.
•Average Engagement Rate = ~45% (on average almost half of all matchday post engaged fans, who scored or shared it with others. Audio content most engaging ~70%.

33. eFAN – About The Solution

34. eFAN - MOTIVATIONS
Our research has identified 3 major pain points when it comes to fan experience:
•Access to social content and resources on-site is too distractive and time-consuming.
•Due to existing generic social media, there is a huge and annoying content clutter related to events fans attend.
•Frustrating on-site traffic which reduces the event consumption experience

35. eFAN - MOTIVATIONS
This pain points affect many fans consuming event-related real-time social content
Mass events generate close to 50% of Twitter activity on TV. More than 60% of fans admitted using social media during mass events.
As Nielsen’s latest Year in Sports Media Report17 explains, sporting events made up just 1% of all TV programming in 2013, but accounted for nearly 50% of TV-related tweets.

36. eFAN - MOTIVATIONS
This pain points affect many fans consuming event-related real-time social content
According to the “Social Media Scorecard”, a study conducted by Wasserman and Navigate Research24 to help brands, agencies, and properties better understand the value of fan engagement in sports:
•95% of sports fans use social media during a typical day and
•over 50% of sports fans take action as a result of social media.
•This report surveyed 8,000 sports fans and focused on seven major U.S. sports including 141 teams, 40 athletes, and over 700 sponsorships.

37. eFAN - MOTIVATIONS
FAN EXPERIENCE IS CRUCIAL
Fans want to improve their core event experience, which is a performance consumption being followed on and off site. They want to improve both by interacting socially and by absorbing and consuming the event resources quickly and easily.
HOWEVER, THE KEY IS TO HAVE THE OVERALL EXPERIENCE SEAMLESS.

38. eFAN - MOTIVATIONS
FAN MONETIZATION CHALLENGES.
•Monetizing fans emotions in real-time.
•Having more attractive marketing inventory for business partners. Upselling sponsors providing new effective digital assets.
•Communicating to fans with better conversion rates on game days, generating relevant mobile experiences on-site.

39. eFAN - FEATURES
•First beacon-enabled live event experience platform.
•No more content clutter, only well designed event specific timelines, reinvented live-streams with well delivered, crowdsourced real-time content.
•Receive best, personalized proposals and updates from your event owner thanks to iBeacons.

40. eFAN - FEATURES
Curated Event Specific Timelines
•Conversations and emotions are grouped by things that are just happening during a game – so every user generated content is given an emotional and observed fact-based context.
•Audio content to express event flow and atmosphere.

41. eFAN - FEATURES
Curated Event Specific Timelines
•Timeline easily filtered aby content type, user presence (on-site/off-site), popularity, performer, etc.

42. eFAN - FEATURES
Curated Event Specific Timelines
•Retreiving all tweets from fans attending the game meeting given hashtag requirements and being on-site (geolocation).

43. eFAN - FEATURES
Curated Event Specific Timelines
•Quick and easy content creation to express emotions and referring to specific event facts triggering fans reactions.
•Emotions expressed by intuitive swipe moves.
•Text, images and audio content.
•Integration with FB and Twitter.

44. eFAN - FEATURES
Comprehensive Event Management & Communication Tool for Official Event Owners
•Event Data
•Feed Communication & Monitoring
•Push Communication
•Proximity Communication
•Fan Support – Q&A in realtime
•Fan Support – Event Navigation

45. eFAN - FEATURES
Proxmity Communication – Beacon Enabled Communication Tool
•Beacons Inventory Management
•Beacon Content Management
•Interaction Definition
•Triggering Rules
•Segmentation – Demographics, Behavioral History, Preferences, Feed Engagement, Event Time Window Triggering, Fact Based Triggering

46. IQ Sport Advisory Group
rafal@iqsport.co
marcin@iqsport.co
FAN EXPERIENCE New Generation of Fans, New Expectations, Implications for Event Owners.
© 2014 IQ Sport