Last week our Global Head of Strategy & Product at dentsu Sports Analytics, Craig Roberts, was in Singapore for the 4th STF Asia Leadership Dialogue, discussing sports, technology, and finance.

Craig led the conversation on sports and data, exploring how strategic use of data is redefining the future of sport globally with its impact on consumer and commercial growth.

Below, Craig shares his thoughts and key takeaways from both his talk and the conference.

At the STF Leaders Dialogue in Singapore this week I had the opportunity to hear from and chat with an amazing group of people from across the global sports industry. A few important trends and themes stood out:

• Sport as a high growth investment asset: Investors and fund managers are looking at sport as a growth asset. They see continued increasing demand for the live, unscripted drama of sport, the celebration of human achievement and the unique way sports can connect to emotions and communities.

• Evolving distribution models: Distribution and monetisation models will be different going forward, and knowing the fan is always important and becoming even more so. This point aligned with one of the main points in my presentation, so it was good to have that validated by others!

• The sports investment market is going gangbusters: There are so many deals and proposals washing around the market – one leading sports fund manager said they review 2-5 investments per week, and this is a fund that is making investments no smaller than $15m and up to more than half a billion.

• ROI uncertainty: Even though the market is hot right now, there’s still uncertainty about how investors will achieve the growth and returns needed to make current valuations stack up.

• Mixed motivations: Social status and political influence are still a factor for the billionaires who are buying into leagues and teams, but investors still want 12-15%+ returns. Structured deals to manage risk and return, including mixtures of equity and debt, are increasingly common.

• Capital vs Capability: However, it was interesting to observe a potential gap between capital and capability. Funds can put in millions with a view to growing commercial revenues from a sports league or team, but what are they bringing to the table other than money? How will they mitigate their risk or increase their certainty around growth and returns, unless they are also bringing experience in building great commercial sports properties? The panel on Sports Agency Models 2.0 was enlightening on this, with traditional sports agencies starting to talk about putting more skin in the game beyond the traditional commission-based model

• Piracy running rampant: The session on piracy was eye-opening. The willingness of fans to bypass official broadcast channels and jump on pirated streams not only undermines the commercial model for sports, but it introduces so many risks in terms of identity theft, organised crime, device takeovers, and DDOS attacks. Key message to any fan: do not download any pirate free sports stream app, you are putting yourself at risk!

I also had the opportunity to share some of my perspectives on sports and data. There were so many angles we could have taken – on-field and high-performance data, personal health and fitness tracker data, data for talent ID and team selection, data for gambling, data for broadcast, data at venues, AI (naturally) – all these were discussed at varying times throughout the day. I decided to focus on three themes relating to fan/customer data and sponsorship/measurement data:

Fan data is a foundational asset

For sports properties (teams, leagues, federations, etc), a fan data strategy and platform should be table stakes. As an industry, sports has fallen behind other consumer-focused sectors in this area. My contention is that we've gotten lazy, and we need to catch up. Sports' unfair advantage is also its Achilles' Heel, in that our customers actually want the product and we've been allowed to get away with not being very sophisticated about how we capture, manage, and use customer data. We've outsourced the customer relationship, and as a result we're missing a huge asset that sponsors, broadcasters, and investors in sport are looking for as a driver of long-term value. It's not too late to start.

Sponsorship measurement moves beyond exposure

Continue to shift the conversation on sponsorship measurement from eyeballs to impact. This is our fundamental philosophy at dentsu Sports Analytics: full-funnel measurement that builds a data-driven narrative on how sports sponsorship delivers beyond exposure and reach, to measurable brand and business impact.

Cultural Relevance: We can measure it

Cultural Relevance, the industry's latest trend, is measureable. And if we can measure it, we can manage for it. While share of voice is finite, share of culture is not. I shared some examples of how we are helping brands and sports properties quantify their relative Cultural Relevance beyond reach, so we can move beyond gut feel and get more scientific about cutting through, connecting to, and shaping culture – and also start to predict what’s going to cut through into mainstream culture next.

Thanks to Unmish Parthasarathi for organising the event, and for Singapore Cricket Club for hosting us at their lovely member's club building. Also, to my dentsu colleagues Rohit Potphode and Yosuke Murai from dentsu Sports & Entertainment India, Tomohiro Nakano our Global Sports & Entertainment Director at Dentsu Group in Tokyo, and Echo Li, Melody Li and Seiji Tachibana from our Singapore commercial team for their support of this event.

Interested in chatting further? Reach out directly via insights.au@mktg.com.