FAN ENGAGEMENT

Big Power
- Christopher
- David
- Mehul
- Suseen
- Gloria
- Kevin
INCREASING THE ENGAGEMENT OF FANS WITH THE CLUBS AND THE SPORT

Agenda
Data Insights and Opportunities

Our strategies aim to:

1. Increase fan retention Recommended Strategy 1:
2. Convert casual fans into super fans Fan Engagement with the sport
3. Build closer connection between
fans and clubs
4. Enable sporting organisations to
become data rich and data Recommended Strategy 2:
independent Fan Engagement with the clubs
DATA INSIGHTS AND OPPORTURNITIES

Younger Generations are not as Women’s sports are watched much

involved with the AFL less compared to Men’s sports
50% Male Female
<28% of Gen Z 14,000
40%
watched AFL on TV 12,000
30% 10,000

‘000 # people
8,000
20%
6,000
Watched AFL on TV
4,000
10%
2,000
0% 0
Pre-Boomers Boomers Gen X Gen Y Gen Z AFL Men AFL Women BBL WBBL

Source: Roy Morgan Source: Roy Morgan

• Involvement with AFL is declining across
generation groups
• Younger generations have shorter attention span
• Digital solutions can increase millennial
engagement
• Even women watch more male sports then
female sports
• Better fan engagement can address the issues
with people’s perceptions of female sports
DATA INSIGHTS AND OPPORTURNITIES

Fan engagement is not associated with socio- The AFL has a market potential of 1
economic status or geographic location. billion dollars.
There is little variation in sports engagement level across
different socio-economic groups.

35% 35% 38% 35% 34% 41%

• Only 3.2% of Australia watch the
Fair Go Doing Fine Hearth & Home Aspirationals Metrotechs Leading Lifestyles average AFL game, whereas 20% of
Australians participate in competitive
sport.
The ratios are very similar (phrase this better pls)
National 65% 35% • The average AFL package is $250 – we
Population
estimate a market size of
approximately $1 billion dollars.
AFL TV 70% 30%
Viewership

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Metro Regional
RECOMMENDATION 1: EARLY NOTIFICATION OF LIVE EXCITING EVENTS

Challenge: Cricket is a slow game with a steep Solution: predict and notify exciting events in a game
learning curve, resulting in limited appeal to increase engagement and improve interest in the
sport
We trained a recurring neural network to predict
the probability of a wicket in the next ball.*
200+ features were used such as number of dot
balls, current run rate and type of bowler using the
past 6 balls
Deep Neural Net Model Specification:
1. 2 Hidden Layers with a ‘relu’ activation function
2. Training data of 74,000 labelled points were
used
3. Data was divided into batch sizes of 200 and
epoch of 5 was used to train the model
4. Output node was activated using the sigmoid
function which predicted the probability of
wicket on every ball
*Using Cricket Australia’s BBL data
RECOMMENDATION 1: INCREASING FAN ENGAGEMENT

Deliver notifications
to fans before an exciting
moment occurs.

Adjust frequency of
notification to a user’s
level of interest in the
game.

Organically convert casual fans to a super fans by delivering ‘unmissable’ moments

CUSTOMIZED NOTIFICATIONS TO FANS USING MACHINE LEARNING (ML) MODEL

Using Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) to customize Using Network analysis to identify friend
notifications for live moments based on fans’ interest groups and send similar notifications

LIVE MOMENTS
Watching similar
TARGETED FAN
RECOMMENDATION content increases
game discussions
and external
The MAB explores a When a fan clicks engagement.
fan’s preferences on a notification,
and uses feedback positive feedback
to make better is sent back to the
recommendations. algorithm.

A similar model can be developed

……

for AFL with match data.

RECOMMENDED 2: MACHINE LEARNING POWERED FAN PLATFORM

Sentiment Meter of Fans

NLP fan
engagement
platform
positive

57% 40% 3%
NLP Fan Engagement NLP Consolidated
positive neutral negative

Hot Topics Coaches, players and club

Comments
Platform Need more
authorities can reply directly
01. Game Strategy 01.
aggression to fans with NLP platform
A single platform for all the fans to
Why was our best
communicate. Natural language processing 02. Squad Selection 02.
player subbed off?
method will perform topic classification and What was the Umpire
03. Horror Decision 03.
sentiment analysis. The ML model will develop thinking?!

commonly asked or discussed content from fan 04. One man standing 04.
Unbelievable effort
from player
discussions that can be answered by coaches, Unlucky Hard loss but hopeful
05. 05.
players and club personnel. Matchup for the season
 BENEFITS OF HAVING A PERSONALIZED CONNECTION PLATFORM BETWEEN FANS
AND THE CLUB

Data Independence and Richness

Promote Meaningful Initiatives
Currently sports clubs depend on external
Girls Youth teams should be promoted
the same way as boy’s youth team. Only social media platform for fan engagement
and Data collection. This platform will be a
at the Under 12’s we don’t discriminate
between sports by gender. rich data resource .

Increased retention Successful Partnerships

This personalized bi-directional platform Rich data resources enable newer revenue
increases a regular fan’s interaction with streams and better partnerships
club which in turn will increase retention.