Bill Simmons had this unforgettable facial expression when David Stern announced Anthony Bennett as the Cleveland Cavaliers’ first overall selection in the 2013 NBA Draft.
A lot of fans that follow the game closely can recall the top pick of any draft over the years. What is forgettable though, is just about every other player that comes after that. No matter how much hype the NBA Draft manufactures or fabricates leading up to this night, the real discussions evolve beyond the five minutes between Stern speaking in front of the podium. One can have a great social media guide or engaged in the league’s digital media upgrade, but these efforts don’t completely encompass the volume of draft knowledge one may seek.
“We were watching a Clipper game and discussing how bad Kenyon Martin’s draft class turned out and whether it’s the worst draft class in recent NBA history. Joe (Sarafian) and I were both on the couch, with our laptops far out of reach, and neither one of us wanted to search Google for the information. Joe wondered why there wasn’t a mobile app with draft information (since we found ourselves discussing old drafts so often). Less than ten minutes later, the Clippers announcer, Ralph Lawler, began discussing Martin’s draft class on the air. That was the impetus to get off the couch and start researching the market.”
That’s the precise moment how David Rabie described Draftpedia’s inception to SportTechie. Rabie is the Co-Founder of this app that intends to simplify and make it convenient to peruse countless draft-related information. It has been available for free since April 17 on iOS, ahead of the NFL Draft and this NBA Draft. The key features include: over 40 years of historical data between both of these leagues, over 25 years of rosters, college affiliations, NBA players’ nationalities, and present day statistics. Thus, the app lives up to its “pedia” suffix of an encyclopedia through covering the gamut of draft intelligence virtually imaginable.
Who could have guessed that the Los Angeles Clippers, K-Mart, and the venerable Ralph Lawler would all be at the center of an innovative app about the draft?
Rather than having to go to Google or Wikipedia for this draft info any more, Draftpedia concatenates everything into digestible, efficient, and accessible bits of columns within the app. The content is aggregated from a sundry of publicly use outlets throughout the web. The driver, however, is how and what’s displayed to the user with respects to the UI. Hence, the draft information is the primary feature emphasized, which is visible on every screen. And since most of the data is historical and permanent by nature, there won’t be many updates on a regular basis. In the near future, when the NFL season rolls around, facets like current rosters and stats will be up-to-date through a new system in place to synchronize it all.
Of course, as with any app, there’s always technological barriers that may impede the progress. Taken into consideration the robust data needed, the proper infrastructure had to be laid out accordingly. The very foundation of this app predicates that the processes filtered everything in concert with each other. Otherwise, the expedited time saved from Googling the plethora of factoids instead would be a moot point.
As ComputerWeekly mentioned, “there are considerable challenges to new database technologies in coping with high availability, guaranteed consistency, and tolerance to hardware failure, things which many organizations had previously started to take for granted.”
For Draftpedia, the most common tech issues revolved around speed to prompt content, player names and uniquely identifying stats corresponding to the appropriate player.
“The app appears to be much simpler in the surface than it really is. There is a ton of data stored in a variety of files and it all needs to interact and link within itself. Our initial plan was to actually build two separate apps, but we soon realized that from a marketing and growth standpoint, that was not a good idea. In essence, we’ve still built two apps, but maintained complete uniformity in terms of design and presentation, and grouped them under one umbrella. The biggest difference between the two apps lies with player statistics. In the NBA, every player has the same statistical categories. With the NFL, there are so many different positions and statistics that gathering and organizing the data proved to be a much bigger challenge than we anticipated,” Rabie elaborated further.
There were two intriguing examples, specifically, that stood out as it relates to these problems, the ABA and players drafted twice. The former meant excluding that era’s stats for the time being in order to present the more pressing NBA ones. Rabie acknowledges that George The Iceman Gervin and Julius Dr. J Erving maybe be “irk” about the decision. As for the latter, this occurrence used to be commonplace during the 1950’s and 1960’s but diminished by the ‘80s. “Due to constraints of the iPhone screen and our design, we chose to select the draft information that was most ‘memorable’ (on a case-by-case basis),” said Rabie. Sadly, Bo Jackson’s career would be the casualty to lose out on this interim iteration.
Once these technological issues have been addressed, Draftpedia focused a lot of their efforts on marketing. That’s something a lot of the sports apps in the marketplace fail to do well or at all. Just simply having a stagnant Twitter presence won’t suffice. There should be branding implemented in order to evoke a persona users can affiliate with it. Because, when these same users leave an app, in what other ways is there a meaningful connection?
Rabie explained: “Gen Y sports fans want specific information fast and easy to digest. That’s our competitive advantage; and it’s why companies like Bleacher Report are thriving. The challenge for us is we need to build our brand, but at the same time do things that will drive downloads. Unfortunately, those two do not always go hand-in-hand, particularly when it comes to the mobile space. Our plan is to continue building out our social media presence, keep coming up with guerrilla ideas, like our draft-day campaigns, and to put the majority of our marketing dollars behind Facebook mobile ads.”
The first two points mentioned by Rabie aligned to speak to the kind of brand Draftpedia is establishing. For both of the NFL and NBA drafts, the app partnered with Draw Play Comic to create cartoon campaigns featuring the first round draftees. These visuals were live-tweeted as each of the players’ names were called; it didn’t take any more than two minutes between picks to publish them. This content conveys the app’s “character”. And ensures to reach and resonate with its growing audience.
“We don’t see Draftpedia as just a simple data app. We’re building a brand with personality; and our partnership with with Draw Play Comic is just the beginning of what we hope becomes a brand that people like not just because it gives them the info they want, but also because we do fun, interesting and out-of-the-box things,” said Rabie.
Still, the core of this app and revelation it prescribes to is big data. Automated Insights is a current example in the sports field actively maximizing this movement. By and large, most entities have simply collected this inordinate number of information and haven’t applied strategies at scale. There’s a lot of variables involved to thoroughly process big data in a prudent fashion. More informed decisions to develop and enhance sports products should be a part of the outgrowth.
“The majority of apps are focused live scores, live stats, fantasy sports and tracking teams, and there is nothing out there in terms of data, as surprising as that might sound, Rabie told Forbes.
According to Wired, massive computing resources and talent are the largest impediments within the app marketplace’s ability to apply big data. Thus, collecting, managing and processing available data makes it a tall order to overcome. These realities, in part, have forced the sports mobile sector to bypass its usage as a form of content. Fans have been left to look elsewhere for it. This opportunity is what Draftpedia is looking capitalize on.
When asked why well-known mock draft websites, like NBADraft.net and DraftExpress, with significant user base and content have yet to tap into mobile, Rabie mentioned that it’s a good question and that everyone in the sports media sector ultimately will do so. As indicative by ESPN’s five of the top 20 free sports apps, “mobile is the present and future; and that most concepts can definitely translate into mobile.”
With regards to big data specifically, though, Rabie touched on the same issues raised by Wired and Draftpedia’s place to penetrate this open market.
“I think the success of the sports-reference sites proves that there’s a market for in-depth analytics. But i think they’re focused on a level of depth we are not trying to reach. Our goal is to be relevant to the majority of sports fans who are curious about simple, popular topics. Another part of the challenge is separating and customizing all this data that sports fans are presented with. There’s just so much information out there (old and new) about leagues, teams, players, etc.; and I think where Bleacher Report has succeeded is in giving consumers exactly what they want. We are trying to do the same, except with data rather than content.”
Bearing that in mind, Draftpedia hopes to become “The IMDB for Sports”. Prior to the NBA Draft on June 17, the app had 12,000 users. They registered 17,000 total users by June 30th with a campaign budget of $650. Three key drivers towards this spike can be attributed to Apple electing to feature them on the front of their sports page, tweeting a shoutout via their App Store handle, and organic search traffic within the iOS ecosystem. On draft night though, 7,000 “sessions” took place with a median five to six minutes length of time using the app. After initial seed financing round, look for expansion to other sports and Android to become available by late September.
While one can invariably anticipate the 2014 NBA Draft–particularly in light of the NBA launching their Summer League app–Rabie doubts next year’s hyped class can match the historic ones of 1984, 1996, or 2003. If not convinced, one can always go back and compare them–a year from now and until perpetuity–through the handy Draftpedia app.