What you need to know:

• TEG and Cricket Australia have created a merged fan data set that covers ticketing, membership, merchandise and participation to figure out how to boost engagement in the sport.
• The partnership is the first time comprehensive data sets have been merged for a sport anywhere in the world, according to TEG.
• TEG’s analytics business, Ovation, built a safe haven-style platform for the new, merged customer data platform. It says the next step will be brands and sponsors comparing their first party data with the mega set, as well as integration into broadcaster buying platforms like Seven West Media’s 7RediQ.
• Other sports are also in TEG’s sights, as it looks to be a massive data house for Australians spending in the sport and entertainment sectors.  

Clean catch

Cricket Australia has thrown down the gauntlet to Australia’s other major sporting bodies, announcing a world-first data sharing partnership with Ticketek-owner TEG that will inform the sport’s fanbase marketing, merchandise, growth, and monetisation.

The two organisations have pooled their resources and created combined data science, marketing, and product teams that they hope will map and analyse their touchpoints, from a fan’s involvement with community sport and which Big Bash League team they follow, to any merchandise or other sport purchases they make.

More than 90 per cent of Cricket Australia’s de-identified data set matched with TEG’s 16 million authenticated users.

The arrangement will function like a safe haven, built by TEG’s analytics business Ovation, that merges ticketing, membership, merchandise and participation data. By merging the two, both parties can build bigger profiles of cricket fans and participants to

“This is the first time we’ve brought that together, for an anonymised view of the cricket fan,” Ovation General Manager Andrew Reid said.

“It’s all deterministic, a one-to-one match, a very comprehensive view. All logged in, verified data. It’s as critical as revenue, you need to grow involvement at a grassroots level. There could be triggers, indicators of people dropping out at a certain point. When are those times?”

The partnership has big plans. TEG has previously discussed building an identifier that corners the sports and entertainment market, and this could be a major step towards that end. It also says broadcasters, like Seven West Media with its 7RediQ platform, are “potential data partners”. Other brands and sponsors could introduce their first-party data into this mega data set to measure coverage across Cricket Australia’s ecosystem.

“The five-year goal is to start introducing optimising of marketing and personalisation. We want to be able to include broadcast partners into that mix,” Reid said.

“This is really phase one of a much bigger plan to integrate other communication channels. Ultimately, what we have right now is a 270-degree view. To get a 360-degree view, you need to have that media component, CTV and logged in data at a broadcast level, as well.”

TEG eyeing other codes

TEG wants to roll out this type of partnership with other sporting codes, which are each vying to reach a holy grail of data-fuelled engagement and growth.

"This is an enormously exciting collaboration, furthering our mission to make cricket a sport for all Australians,” Nick Hockley, CEO of Cricket Australia, said in a statement.

“By connecting the digital interactions of our fans and participants as they engage with our sport, we can understand and meet their needs, improve their experience and provide a seamless user journey.”

Reid says the model TEG is pioneering in this arrangement with Cricket Australia is one they’d like to replicate across other sports.

“Without a doubt. From an Ovation perspective, we’ve broken the back of the model here. We’ve got a combined data science team, combined marketing team, combined product team,” he said. “Over the five years, there’s going to be a lot of skill transfer between the two parties, we see this working with other sports, particularly sports rich in first-party data. Ultimately, means a more effective way of selling the sport.”

First party data play

Other sporting codes are spending big on first-party data as a means of growing their fan base. Australian Professional Leagues (APL) has re-branded the football competition cover women, men and youth under The A-Leagues – rather than just being for men. Chief Commercial Officer Ant Hearne says the code will spend around $10 million building a customer data platform of football fans.

“The job we've got to do is we've got a huge amount of disparate data sources that we need to bring together into that data lake, clean it all up, put it on a single [user] ID, and then we've got to go about collecting more of it,” Hearne told Mi3 in September.

“So every time someone comes to the football hub or any interaction where we can get a signal back, we'll be trying to do that. We'll use that to try and understand where new pockets of fans are and how we connect with them and deliver what they want.”