Phizzle
Automating the Fan Engagement Process

Today, how sports organizations engage with their fans is transforming the world of sports. Sports organizations are rapidly adopting a much more interactive approach to design campaigns and keep fans engaged. In the process, organizations need various third party applications to support email, social, and mobile marketing campaigns. “However, extracting data from different applications becomes a tedious task and is a significant challenge for organizations,” remarks Ben Davis, CEO, Phizzle. Based in San Francisco, Phizzle offers a single sign-on solution with all the core campaign management functionalities and API including email, loyalty, social, gamification, and many more. “We automate the master data management process across various fan touch points resulting in the delivery of relevant messaging and content within the right marketing channel and context.”

The company’s phz.io solution enhances fan connectivity via APIs through various channels like social, email, ticketing and mobile apps. Users can easily manage the fan behavior that is stored, merged, and organized through phz.io APIs and SAP HANA in the cloud, on premise or via a hybrid. Further, phz. io’s FanTracker™ consolidates all the data into a 360-degree profile or “the golden record,” as Davis calls it.

Since the record consists of data from multiple channels, it gives a clear view of the fans’ interests and passions. Inside an individual’s record, clients can see a fan or consumer’s purchase history, ticket sales, participation in contests, loyalty subscriptions, and more. Using this information, organizations can create personalized marketing campaigns, omni-channel communications and gamification to keep fans engaged. Gamification can be used to reach new consumers as well as drive interest and loyalty from existing fans toward the brand. With increased participation, a data feedback loop is created through which more information can be captured and is accessible through the phz.io engagement automation platform. The platform also continuously mines data on each fan, building the profile even when the sports organization is not directly engaging the fan. Real-time fan engagement can be created through the solution’s vote and trivia logic directly on mobile devices. Visual representations can also be made based on current social trends.

We automate the master data management process across various fan touch points resulting in the delivery of relevant messaging and content within the right marketing channel and context

As more fans engage, organizations get powerful insights on them allowing them to monetize and personalize the engagements.

“Bringing in disjointed data or multiple fan profiles from multiple applications into a data warehouse does not solve the problem. Fan Tracker and our integration with SAP HANA creates a single profile with behavior across multiple applications and the ability to consume large volumes of data and make it available in near real-time for analytics and re-targeting,” explains Davis. In one instance, the Charlotte Hornets, an NBA franchise, used phz.io and identified that more than 50 percent of their 19 million fans were duplicates, having aggregated more than 25 million fan and consumer interactions. This alone saved them more than $1M in consulting services because phz.io offers pre-built integrations. “The Charlotte Hornets made a significant investment and received an immediate ROI that will continue to grow as we integrate more sources of data. As an additional benefit, the team also generated 100 percent ROI on the Phizzle license through additional ticket sales in one season,” points out Davis.

In the near future, “We will be bringing super-computing to consumer engagement and releasing a rules engine where we can provide a framework for organizations to automate the way they want to deal with their fans based on rules that they create,” elucidates Davis. “We are also working on a new content management system as well as segmentation services and in the next year, we plan on adding machine learning into our portfolio.” Adjacently, Phizzle is also expanding its footprint in other industries including retail, consumer product goods, oil and gas, and telecom.