If we’ve learned anything about sports, music, or any type of performance over the past few years, it is that there is nothing in the world that can match experiencing an event in person. The sights, the sounds, and the crowd energy generated through the shared experience of thousands of like-minded individuals can be palpable.

We can feel it, we know it’s special, and the truth is that harnessing it involves thinking about your fans as individuals who experience and share your brand in different ways.

From 1,000 to 100,000 and beyond, your attendees have one thing in common, they support the club. But are they all the exact same person?

The answer is decidedly not. They have different devices, beliefs, conceptions, languages, routes to the match, friends, social media bubbles, and so on. Your fan base loves your team, but they are not one single person. They are not a monolith.

As consumers, we have grown accustomed to receiving personalized content experiences. From the Netflix algorithm to targeted advertising and web experiences to Amazon’s product recommendations, personalization rules our everyday existence.

Day after day, meeting after meeting, every team, and every venue is telling us that they are striving for a “best in class fan experience.” Whether through a new board initiative, or club mandate, fan experience has become the golden chalice, the must-do, the singular focus of large public venues and their clubs.

When personalization reaches the live event experience, you will engage more meaningfully with your fans and create powerful opportunities for your brand partners in-venue.

We have been hearing about the “Stadium of the Future” for many years now, and the era of personalized stadium experiences is finally upon us. Custom merchandise, tailored mobile web experiences, food requirement ordering, and parking lot-to-seat bespoke experiences are must-haves in 2022 and beyond. As venues have strived to make their experience fan-friendly, they have needed more custom content to be delivered to their fan bases.

It is paramount that you think about content delivery in the same way and here’s why:

• The 2018 Deloitte Stadium Experience survey revealed that both rabid and casual fan types put high importance and relative dissatisfaction on experiential elements such as unique experiences related to their interest. The report concluded that “teams must look to communicate these options in a cohesive and coherent way that speaks to each fan as an individual, emphasizing the true personalization of the experience and offer that is being presented to them as part of their time in the stadium.” (-Deloitte Fan Engagement Survey 2018, 1^st Edition)
  
  
• Subsequently, an Allied Market Research report from this year predicts that advertising spending on out-of-home media is expected to grow from $18.8 Billion USD to $58.6 billion USD by 2031, registering a CAGR of 11.6% between 2022 and 2031. According to the report by End-User, the entertainment segment would manifest the fastest CAGR of 14.9% from 2022 to 2031. Rising demand for digital advertisement solution across the sports & entertainment industry is driving the market growth. (Allied Market Research, 2022)

The second point deserves some emphasis. Marketers continue to be flummoxed by their dwindling ability to reach consumers effectively. That fact, coupled with steadily rising digital marketing CPMs and the ever-changing rules from channels like Google and Meta, have advertisers turning to OOH and captive audience segments. 

Where sports and entertainment sponsorship, and out-of-home was once an occasionally worrisome part of a CMO’s strategy, it is now a necessary piece to ensure meaningful engagement with consumers. Your venue can now offer carefully distributed content curated for your fans in a captive environment.

Are you maximizing this opportunity yet? You need to start by enabling your venue with the right technology to ensure all your content can be processed per screen. When you are distributing by end-point – the edge – you can do more. More engagement, more targeting, more processing speed and power. The days of broadcasting venue-wide messages or simply cloning your TV feed well behind us.

Not only are we excited for the present and future of in-venue personalized content – it is the vision we started with more than 14 years ago when StadiumVision was conceived.

Now, we move forward as Wipro VisionEDGE through an expansion of the 26-year partnership between two leading technology companies, Cisco and Wipro. Wipro VisionEDGE combines the simple, flexible, and secure network products of Cisco with the innovation-led strategy, technology, and business services of Wipro.

The personalized fan experience is happening, and this is only the beginning. We encourage you to stay tuned to this space as we search for insights and build the most powerful out-of-home solution in the industry.

Cheers!