SBJ Tech: NFL teams keep eyes on what’s next

AMB Sports & Entertainment is often Exhibit A of fan experience by virtue of its work in its Mercedes-Benz Stadium , Falcons and Atlanta United apps. That comes not only in its connection to in-venue fans on various game days and events but also for those watching from home.

That success has come with the help of FanReach , a mobile app developer and marketing tech integrator that seeks to help its clients -- ranging throughout the NFL and other of the top men’s leagues in North America -- fortify those one-to-one relationships.

Formerly known as Adept, FanReach started working with the Falcons in 2019. AMBSE had a greater strategy in mind when it came to interacting with fans, said Greg Urbano, the Falcons’ senior director/digital strategy. Data structure was, and still is, important in developing an optimized user flow for fans -- for example, providing the connected experience to various accounts like Ticketmaster.

“We knew, even back in 2019, where we wanted to go in our four-to-five-year path,” Urbano said. “So to see a lot of that come to life now and understand that we built this data reservoir for years, internally we built systems to be able to connect all the different data pieces together.”

That learning enables AMBSE and the Falcons to offer a more catered experience while also providing useful insight to sponsors -- like, as Urbano shared, pointing out to Michelob which fans are winging through the Michelob Ultra Grill so it can plan more sponsorship deployments and revenue opportunities.

“The more users that we get to log into our app and take advantage of those experiences, the more we’re going to be able to know about them so that the second, third and fourth time they come back, we can start to bubble up different things," Urbano said.

FanReach has approximately 60 clients, spanning the NFL, NHL and MLS. Founded in 2010, the company offers products for teams, leagues and venues. Recent wins include the Gillette Stadium and New England Revolution apps. FanReach also hired longtime Patriots employee Jana Gauthier as its VP/product.

When Keith Dobkowski, FanReach’s chief strategy officer, spoke to SBJ earlier in the summer, he highlighted the large segment of displaced NFL fans as a need to focus on the app as a vessel for personalization to meet each fan where they are.

“If you think about the limitations in social advertising or in email advertising -- once you get into the app, you can really get into persona building and then lookalike audience, because you have enough data,” Dobkowski said.

SAP and the 49ers are testing how well the Apple Vision Pro VR headset works with Executive Huddle, the game-day analytics suite that the software company developed following the germ of an idea from San Francisco’s NFL team.

Executive Huddle deals in aspects of venue management such as parking, tickets and concessions, delivering data via dashboards on screens to those manning a control inside an SAP Tower suite at Levi’s Stadium. The Niners business strategy and analytics team -- Noele Crooks, Jonny Dalsey and Max Kahn -- monitor these screens, receiving SMS notifications on smartphones when alerts pop up.

The goal, Crooks explained, is that by using an Apple Vision Pro headset to view the dashboards, they can receive the alerts while still being able to watch the game via passthrough -- without having to switch their attention from the information on screen, or if on a smartphone, close the browser the dashboards are in to open a text message.

Here’s an example of how this team sees using the Apple Vision Pro to resolve an issue: Executive Huddle sends an alert that entry is getting bogged down at Gate A, but Gate D has excess staff because fewer fans are using it to enter Levi’s. With the headset, Crooks and co. can have an eye on the dashboards, see the alert and react without having to switch screens -- it all displays in the Vision Pro. This enables them to react faster and send workers from Gate D with handheld scanners to Gate A to help co-workers there speed up entry.

The 49ers are the only organization anywhere testing the integration, the latest example of SAP’s 11-year relationship with the team. But the hope is that the Vision Pro can help shave seconds off response time -- and help Executive Huddle customers like the 49ers keep their fans happier.

Two years ago, ESPN added a feature to its fantasy football platform called “auto control.” It is similar to the well-known auto-draft function but extrapolates the entire season, automatically making waiver claims and lineup decisions for a team assigned by the league commissioner.

The intention behind the feature, ESPN Director/Product Management Dan Bohm told SBJ, is to compensate for apathetic or absentee players and help leagues with an odd number of competitors form an even number of teams.

“It’s basically full management of your team, minus making trades,” Bohm said, adding that trade capabilities could be integrated in the future. “It’s looking at rest-of-season projections and essentially trying to optimize your performance for the rest of the year based on what’s projected for the players on your roster versus the players who are available in the free agency pool.”

As the SBJ Tech team scrambled to reassemble our annual league early last week, we found ourselves with nine willing players. We figured it would be a fun opportunity to tap the computer as a 10th and see how it fared against our combined fantasy football sensibilities -- which we sarcastically promise are sharp as a tack.

Although the ESPN autopilot is not as sophisticated in its decision-making as a large language model, we did tap ChatGPT for a few crucial elements: the team’s name and logo. Prompted to write a “funny fantasy football team name for a league I am in with my co-workers on Sports Business Journal’s Technology editorial team,” the model spat back Tech Titans of the Gridiron. ChatGPT’s preferred logo for said team was a “cybernetic football player,” which DALL-E took to mean this:

Tech Titans of the Gridiron started off 0-1 after Week One and was eighth out of 10 teams in points scored. Worse, it saw its starting quarterback -- the Packers' Jordan Love -- go down with an MCL sprain last Friday in Brazil.

In turn, TTotG used its first free-agent window to submit waiver claims for Rams QB Matthew Stafford and Falcons QB Kirk Cousins. Ultimately, it secured its top choice in Stafford, dropping Titans WR DeAndre Hopkins, who had one catch for eight yards in his first game of the season.

The logic behind its waiver decisions appeared to have some nuance. Stafford was projected for the second-most points in Week 2 (17.6) among available quarterbacks, trailing only Steelers QB Justin Fields (18.8), whose rest-of-season projection is only for 89.7 points (compared to Stafford’s 240.5) as he is temporarily filling in for injured starter Russell Wilson. Cousins is projected for 16.8 points this week and 250.9 for the rest of the season, one of five QBs that ranked ahead of Stafford in projected rest-of-season points -- but trailed in their projection for Week 2, specifically. Given that Love is expected back some time in the next few weeks, perhaps autopilot is indexing for the short-term.

Stay tuned. We’ll check in on the computer’s progress throughout the season.

• For this week's cover story, SBJ's Chris Smith profiles Jeb Terry, the Cosm CEO whose company is seeking to establish "shared reality" experiences inside its 87-foot-by-55-foot diameter dome with hyper-realistic and up-close viewing experiences for sports and more.

• The NFL and Amazon Web Services extended the length and expanded the scope of their partnership, introducing generative AI functionality among their collaborative projects, reports SBJ's Joe Lemire.

• In this week's "Closing Shot," SBJ's Adam Stern examines Formula E's first decade, from starting as an experiment 10 years ago to finding traction as motorsports and consumers are embracing electric vehicles.

• Nominations are open for this year’s nine SBA: Tech awards. Among them are expanded categories in both venue and immersive tech, as well as a brand-new award -- Next in Sports Tech: Rising Female Leader, presented by Next League. The nomination window closes Oct. 21. Then save the date -- winners will be announced in N.Y. on March 4 to kick off SBJ Tech Week.