There are a lot of talks about databases and data collection among Sport Organisations too.

I spoke to a few of them in the last two months about the importance of a carefully and strategically planned step to approach the online world, more focused on new opportunities and leveraging the latest technology rather than on prehistory (the read-only internet where websites were online brochures, mass targeting without distinction whoever landed on a certain page).

The key point here is not about just collecting data, but how we use the data also.

I’ll make an example using Behavioural Targeting, a product I worked on for years at Yahoo!.

One of the biggest issue we had was to persuade companies and advertising agencies that “Behavioural Targeting” is an empty word, with dozens of different providers and platforms making a different use of the collected data, hence the need, before making a choice on what provider to use, to have a high level understanding on how each platform is working (leveraging the data).

Leveraging the data is the key

I know it sounds geeky, but many Targeting companies are taking advantage of clients not being up to speed with technology, selling them a product that of Behavioural Targeting has got only the name.

Approach Product A: Sometime (a week? a month? six months ago?), somewhere on some page, Barry clicked on an ad about Cars, hence we assume Barry is interested in Cars so we will serve him Cars related ads.

Approach Product B: Two days ago Bill clicked on two Cars ads and searched for Cars related keywords, while today he visited a Cars related page. We do NOT ONLY know that Bill is interested in Cars, we know that Bill is HIGHLY interested in Cars NOW, so we can leverage this data by serving him Cars related ads.

Question: which of the two products will give me more Conversions? The one that generically targets users that have generically shown interest in a product at some generic point in time or the one that scientifically and methodically picks users with a high interest in a product in this very moment?

Same applies to Sport Organisations.
Strategic planning and goal setting allow to:

1. Designing tools, platforms, initiatives and practices that will collect the specific data we need.
2. Leveraging the data at the right time for hitting our goals, being it monetisation, audience building, or any other objective.

Alessandro De Zanche