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| Andy Steen |
ANDY STEEN is head of strategic marketing at Avaya where she manages the technology company's sport and entertainment relationships across the globe. Steen worked at various PR and marketing agencies before joining Avaya, whose technology is present in 64 stadiums worldwide, including Avaya Stadium in San Jose, Calif., and Swalec Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. Steen talked to SBD Global about the company's global ambitions, its Sochi 2014 partnership and "fanalytics."
On fanalytics ...
Andy Steen: Every team wants to understand the fan journey. We’ve coined it here at Avaya, calling it fanalytics. Fanalytics means, “What could you learn about making your stadium or arena even more compelling to fans?” There are so many stadiums being built or retrofitted right now, and everyone’s competing for the attention of the same consumers. So how do they get people back into the stadium that have been maybe sitting on the couch? What we’re seeing that stadium operators want is they want to understand the fan journey. They want to understand when they walk in, they’re going to want to get notifications on where they park, and we are making that a really easy interface through the mobile app. They’re going to want their tickets on their phone. And they’re going to want those to be transferred to anybody digitally. Then they want security. They want to know there’s video surveillance and that the stadium they’re entering is operating with all the best practices. And the moment they enter, they want Wi-Fi. They need Wi-Fi in order to connect with all their social channels. They also want that game day experience to be really delivered to them, exclusive to them in the stadium. If they’re going to make it all the way to the stadium and spend the money on the tickets, they’re going to want to get something out of that experience they weren’t getting at home. ... When they leave, they may want a traffic report. All of that needs to be tracked through analytics.
On Avaya’s presence at Sochi 2014 ...
Steen: Sochi was one of the first Olympics that was mobile-enabled. Everybody brought a device and it was the first Olympics that everybody expected the Olympics in their hand. So, we were able to provide that. It was a huge success for Avaya. When you power something like the Olympics, that’s like putting on 18 “Big Games” a day for 18 days. If you can do that, you pretty much can do anything at that point because you’re doing it for the world. So, the infrastructure that we built there for that to happen was pretty remarkable. For Sochi it was a huge success and certainly it was something that we’re very proud of. Of course, it happened a couple years ago now, and we’ve made a lot of advances since then. ... There was a lot of great learnings coming out of Sochi about how people wanted to interact with technology and that was sort of a launch pad for how we moved forward with Avaya Stadium and our presence in the Pepsi Center in Denver and we’re also in [the NHL] Montreal Canadiens' Bell Centre. It started in Sochi where you saw they wanted a mobile device interface, but now what we see is they want a wake-to-sleep interface. It’s become 24/7, 365. I think that’s changed with the way we interact with our devices, the apps that have come out in the last few years that make us always on. It used to be just a couple simple apps where we were on Facebook and Twitter, but now we’re on Whatsapp and Snapchat.
On global expansion ...
Steen: I think we definitely want to continue our footprint throughout the globe, but, of course, because some are not referenceable sites for us, even though our technology is there, we don’t have the rights to talk about that story, even though it’s a great story. But I think, as you look at that infographic [see below], there are 64 stadiums in Europe and the APAC regions that have Avaya technology. And as we move forward and we continue to tell our story, what I think is so compelling about what we do is, we are not a niche player. We don’t just do one thing, and [then] we walk away and you have to figure out how to integrate that with 10 other vendors. We provide so much of the infrastructure and from how they communicate that we could do it all end to end, or we can integrate really well with niche players in between all of those things. I think that is what’s driving the excitement around what Avaya does within stadiums.
On global trends ...
Steen: With the Premier League and other soccer leagues over in Europe, they want the same experience. Sometimes they want even more exclusive experiences, because you are spending a lot of money on tickets. I think technology doesn’t have any bounds. Globally, fans may demand something different that’s specific to their region, or the type of sport that they like, but overall, I think technology is the driving force of how sports teams are going to interface with their fans and in a way that the fans want them to do it. The fans want it to be simple. They want to get it when they want it and they don’t want to wait for someone on the phone. They don’t want to go to a website and search for information. They want it delivered to them because we’re predicting it. That’s what fanalytics does. It helps predict that behavior.
On connecting with fans ...
Steen: We have the mobile app and then we have the fan engagement wall. That is something that we have at Avaya Stadium, which is a really cutting edge technology that is pulling out all the social feeds from the cloud and pushing them back real time in front of the fans. Using the hashtag AvayaStadium or Quake74, they show up on the board. That’s just a very engaging feature. We have many teams that come to us and say, “We want that.” It’s not just one screen, you could put that on any screen. They could put that on their website, they could put it in their mobile app. They can integrate it across any signage that they have, any size signage, even if they have existing hardware. I think a team can really look at that as a great way of pulling the fans together and making them feel like they’re a part of it inside the stadium.
On the future of Avaya technology in stadiums ...
Steen: I want to get the fan engagement wall and the mobile app more front and center. I think that they’re cutting edge technologies that are really changing the fan experience and changing the way fans interact at a game. What I love about Avaya’s infrastructure technology is it's so consistent. The fan application stuff is going to change and morph. The apps you have on your phone right now are not going to be the apps you have in five years. We’re all going to evolve and change, and I want to make sure that the mobile app that we built and the fan engagement applications evolve with those changing times.
Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.
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| Source: AVAYA |
