I know for years you have been in the thick of the age of digital disruption and l transformation, and 4FRONT is truly in the middle of it.
What do you foresee as the future of managing digital disruption in sports marketing, sponsorship, and ticketing?
I think it's a wonderful question.
Len Komoroski, who's the CEO of the Cleveland Cavaliers who we've worked with, he had a wonderful quote for us that, we were in a meeting with him, and he said,
I''m to the point where I don't consider it a digital strategy anymore. It's just a strategy," and I think we live in such a digital world that I think the combination of our digital and traditional services combined together, really fit in nicely with that aspiration because the fan is still the fan."
Digital is just another way of engaging with them as a weapon. I think it's really important that those are aligned, and mainly because that's what leads to disruption and alignment to be able to do that. I think that core lesson that I learned early on of seeing five years out and being ahead of the curve, whatever you dream up, I think the digital capabilities allow you to do it in a way that wasn't imaginable before, and that's key.
I would say when you've got a business problem, a business opportunity, or maybe even something you're not even thinking about, those are those collaborative discussions that I think at least our team, both on the art and science side, really love diving into.
I would say, like in the case of the Cavaliers, we had a wonderful challenge from them where it was to come up with a new seven-figure revenue stream that we could create, that didn't exist before. What our team did was we used data insights and found that they had a large number of web traffic coming from Australia, and the reason for that was two of the 12 players at the time on the Cavaliers were born in Australia. So, what do you do with that piece of data?
Sometimes the data or analytics team might just sit there, analyze that and it kind of sits in a vacuum.
Our team, the innovation team, takes that data and tries to make it actionable. What we learned was, on top of that, there's the ability to create a promotion around that data point. What we decided on was the Australian Independence Day, their 4th of July, is January 26th, which is right in the middle of the NBA season, it's their summer, it's exactly the same that you would expect a 4th of July celebration: barbecues, day offs, national pride. We then created an idea to create an NBA Australia Day in Cleveland where the Cavs would play a game on the night of January 25th, that 18 hours ahead in Sydney would be nine o'clock in the morning.
They took that data point, they married it with creative innovation for the promotion idea, and then because the morning, it's 9 a.m. in Australia, the partnerships team prospects a breakfast cereal company in Australia, sells the title sponsorship to basically the Wheaties of Australia called Up & Go, and then our digital media team serves media in Australia to a targeted audience that day and it led to the number one trending topic on social media in all of Australia on their national holiday.
To me that's a perfect representation of how we put the Cleveland Cavaliers really at the forefront using those four capabilities, and created a new revenue stream for them. It didn't really exist on a Monday in January where they otherwise might not have done something extraordinary.
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