NEW YORK — Sebastián Lancestremère and his team at Microsoft are helping sports organizations, like Spain’s top football league La Liga, rethink how they connect with today’s fan in the modern digital age.
The General Manager of Sports Business at Microsoft recently spoke at Microsoft Digital Difference in Manhattan, highlighting and expanding upon the software and technology corporation’s new global relationship with LaLiga. Lancestremère illustrated that through the partnership — where the football league will utilize Microsoft’s Azure cloud-based computing platform, its Cortana Intelligence Suite and additional software — he and his team will be focusing on two specific areas, among others.
First, the ability for LaLiga to hyper-target and create clusters around fans’ interests and behaviors is a central point of the relationship.
“For example, there are different behaviors that you can get out of (Microsoft Azure). You might have the purest fans, and they know everything about the game. The content that you want to provide them is different than maybe the content you’d provide to more of an international fan,” he explained.
Along with segmenting fans, he said that predictive analytics and artificial intelligence will be woven into how LaLiga better understands its fans and their interactions with the league and the 42 teams.
“If you don’t have a single identity for how that fan behaves or purchases at the online store, what types of statistics he consumes, what videos he’s watching online, etcetera, it’s very hard. It’s disruptive what we’re doing with the digital platform,” Lancestremère said.
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Added Marc Reguera, Power BI Customer Engagement Team Lead at Microsoft: “Our platform enables to connect that data from different sources and transform it, mash it up in order to generate actionable information. At the end of the day, you don’t just want data. You want information.”
Raúl González, LaLiga’s Country Manager for the United States, recently appeared on the financial news network The Cheddar. The legendary Real Madrid striker discussed that with LaLiga incorporating Microsoft’s all-encompassing tools, the league itself and teams can determine the global reach of their fanbases. Consequently, as an example, teams can then use that information to target Facebook users in a certain country at a particular time if they know 50 percent of their audience hails from there.
Still, as Lancestremère explained, of the teams within LaLiga and even globally among the top professional leagues, there are still many organizations who can’t answer his three questions when he begins talking with a property or team: Do you have a digital strategy? Do you have a digital lead? How much revenue is derived by digital/what are your KPIs?
He said that it’s difficult at first to integrate new technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence into a team or league when there aren’t clear answers to those questions. A team wouldn’t have a data scientist to crunch complex numbers, develop algorithms and understand the intricacies of artificial intelligence if it didn’t already have a head of digital, as he suggested.
As Microsoft develops its relationship with LaLiga, Reguera and Lancestremère both said how predictive analytics via Microsoft’s suite of services will influence not only business decisions but also match-making choices, too.
For example, if LaLiga could see that over the past 20 years, it rained heavily on a certain day, maybe the league wouldn’t schedule a match on that day. Or, if it could see that attendance figures were higher over the past five years when matches were scheduled after a particular time, it’d adjust accordingly.
“With artificial intelligence, sometimes as humans you can’t predict or imagine certain scenarios whereas with the machine learning and AI, you can see trends that wouldn’t even imagine,” Reguera said. “Those are real insights out of data.”