The following interview is part of our ongoing Expert Series that asks C-level professionals, team presidents, league executives, athletic directors and other sports influencers about their latest thoughts and insights on new technologies impacting the sports industry.
Name: Adam Zimmerman
Company: Atlanta Braves
Position: Vice President, Marketing
Adam Zimmerman joined the Atlanta Braves in early January as the Vice President of Marketing. Zimmerman’s responsibilities include the management and strategy for all marketing and branding of the Braves; he also focuses on consumer and digital marketing, community affairs and game entertainment for the team. The University of Florida graduate plays a vital role in the development of technology offerings for fans as well as the use of data analytics.
Prior to the Braves, Zimmerman spent 18 years with CSE (formerly Career Sports and Entertainment), most recently as agency president, successfully generating new business, managing their existing portfolio and leading the agency with cutting-edge programs and fan engagement through technology. While at CSE, Zimmerman also crafted a partnership with MIT and created CSE Evolve, an in-house lab to keep up on the latest technologies.
1) What utilization of technology in professional or college sports has recently blown you away and why?
Augmented reality. You’ve seen the Broncos and Patriots nod to it, and it’s something the Braves are strongly considering for SunTrust Park. AR will provide a new platform for engagement — it’s literally a new way to watch and interact with the game.
Provided you have the connectivity to enable it, you can scale an entire building. It’s easily deployed to fans because they enable it through mobile. Most importantly, it gives fans a whole new medium, an added dimension, to engage with the game. We can’t even imagine what placing a digital layer over live action might yield over time. While AR provides a new creative canvas for untold use cases, at a start teams can unlock convenience, immersion and gamification. Fans didn’t ask for it, which makes it innovative and different. Fans don’t know what augmented reality can do yet, which makes it really exciting and innovative for marketers.
AR is akin to when LED’s became a fixture in stadiums. LED’s fundamentally changed how games were presented — it was a new medium for game enhancement, fan engagement, sponsor activation and ultimately, a new and lucrative revenue stream for the team.
2) If money were no object, what technology would you build or buy to help you do your job better?
All things to enable data and CRM applications and the human capital to analyze, provide insights and work closely with the creative team to deliver campaigns and amplification in real-time. I think we’re still in our nascent stage in the sports industry of using the copious amounts of data we have at our disposal. We’re able to generate multiple data points on an individual fan to service better and most importantly, anticipate need. So, not only is the infrastructure needed to collect, organize and store data but you need the human capital to not simply overwhelm with information but rather deliver insights that are actionable and easily understood.
Data also allows for real-time decision making, not historical analysis. Timely analysis allows the marketer to discard aspects of a campaign that aren’t working and amplify the parts that are. Again, it’s not enough to simply meet the needs of what your fan wants. The power of creativity and innovation demands that you lead, that you introduce things the fan didn’t know they wanted; then, they will reward you. A huge win is in the realm of social — we really need to put rigor against the yield and mine the data for creative breakthrough. Let’s move past the current KPI’s for social and build new models where the data yield and the use of data in campaigns is quantifiable.
3) As a sports fan, what sports-related service, app, product, etc., could you not live without and why?
As a sports fan, I would say Twitter. The platform has become my companion for live events. Twitter provides a view to the event from multiple perspectives in a real-time environment. Twitter captures the raw emotion that sports engenders and gives a voice to everyone.
As a sports professional, SportTechie is incredibly valuable to me. Digesting articles and learning about innovation across the globe in the sports industry is essential. SportTechie saves me a ton of time and research by easily letting me find case studies to reinforce a current path or inspire a new one. I’m really intrigued when SportTechie does more of the futuristic pieces or demonstrates to me how a team/property is using technology to reinforce and amplify brand and brand essence which for me is the cornerstone of fan experience.
4) If you had to project 20 years into the future, how will most fans watch their favorite sports teams?
I don’t think the fundamental “job” of sports will change; it will still uplift, provide moments of transcendence and build community. And I believe sports will always be a shared experience — it will still bring people together. Even eSports, which has seen great success in gathering fans in a traditional venue, will thrive on the communal and social aspects that sports provides.
People want to connect, share, give opinions — cloud social and mobile will continue to drive engagement — create content, have their voices heard, curate how they experience the game with all of the realities at your disposal, mixed, AR and VR. Be your favorite player, choose your viewing, gamification and perhaps ultimately influence the action on the field in some manner. We will continue to define what constitutes a spectator and stadiums might extend into living rooms with fans able to be surrounded by the sights and sounds and energy of the field of play and shared experience.
5) What are some of the ways in which the Braves have incorporated technology into its new stadium, SunTrust Park?
Our team is doing what you would expect as a world class organization opening a state-of-the-art venue. Best in class IT, security measures, data infrastructure and thanks to our partner, Comcast, we will have multi terabit capabilities throughout SunTrust Park and more bandwidth per person than any other sports venue. That will enable us to engage our fans like never before.
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By carefully defining the role of technology, we’ll aim to deliver our core product of a baseball game and amplifying our brand attributes of friendliness, family oriented, fun and atmosphere. Technology is a key aspect, but not a panacea, to solve “fan experience.” For us, we have put a lot of texture behind that. Experience, at its core, is about memory and emotion. We ask ourselves, and our partners, “How can we enable memory and emotion?” At the end of the day, that is our job — wrap as much memory and emotion as we can around our core product. We want people to celebrate our super fast Wi-Fi, but we’d rather have technology help tell the story about how someone met their spouse at our game and now they take their kids, and they love the Braves because of it.
The industry spends too much time thinking about features and benefits. You have to have state-of-the-art platforms, but you must know that you will eventually be superseded as new buildings continue to built. So, it’s more about what the technology can enable: memory, emotion, knowledge. To help us achieve this, we surround ourselves with best-in-class technology brands like Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Comcast and Cisco but spend a lot of time with Atlanta’s booming tech community: Georgia Tech, Atlanta Tech Village, Tech Stars, Experience, LLC and many others. We want to be pushed by the energy and creativity of start-ups.
6) Give us your bold prediction about a form of technology that will be integral to MLB over the next 12 months and why?
Over time, I can see wearables, perhaps in baseball, perhaps in other leagues, becoming real-time — using the data captured by wearables to influence the game as it’s being played, not simply used as historical analysis tools. Ultimately, as teams and players become comfortable with wearables, that data can be shared with fans to provide another layer of information and knowledge to further their enjoyment and interaction of the game.