AS Roma fans celebrate a recent UEFA Champions League victory over Shakhtar Donetsk at Stadio Olimpico in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)
After Boston-born billionaire businessman James Pallotta bought Italian soccer powerhouse AS Roma several years ago, he was struck by how little the club knew about its fan base. Despite a season-ticket base of more than 30,000, he said internal records included maybe two-thousand email addresses.
“One of the things that we saw right away was that we had no data on our fans,” said Pallotta, a successful hedge fund manager who later founded private investment firm Raptor Group.
In discussions with peer owners, he found the issue to be endemic in sports. While others would tout, say, 600 million followers, Pallotta would retort, “Name them,” to which they’d reply, “What do you mean?” Pallotta would ask if they had any kind of basic contact info. When they couldn’t comply, he would boast that Roma had a billion followers, adding the caveat, “You made up a number so I made up a number.” The size of a fan base was only so helpful as the team’s ability to engage with and market to them.
Pallotta said he later became drawn to artificial intelligence and machine learning, and applying those techniques to the sports and entertainment industries’ desire to better understand their fans became the underlying vision behind Fan Manager. The company recently launched its new AI-powered platform to intake and unify several raw data sources for a better understanding of consumers and improved revenue opportunities.
James Pallotta
Fan Manager’s early clients include such iconic teams as Roma, the NBA’s Boston Celtics (of whom Pallotta is a co-owner), MLB’s Boston Red Sox and Washington Nationals, the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, MLS’ D.C. United as well as the U.S. Soccer national governing body.
The company uses its proprietary machine learning algorithms to ingest more than five million fan transactions daily through integrations with 60 partner sources — from ticketing vendors, e-commerce platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, email or lead generation software and social analytics — and says it can increase efficiency by 80 percent as well as improve annual ROI by a factor of eight.
“It’s the intersection of all of that information to get a data-driven way to say that this is the behavioral basis of the fans,” Fan Manager CEO David Melnick said.
Melnick, who previously ran an analytics technology platform for Merkle, appreciated the unique challenge of applying his expertise to a new field. Sports and entertainment fans are, he freely admits, not the same as typical consumers.
“What’s different about fans than regular consumers is that they have this sort of deep passionate connection with, whether it’s their team, their college, their theater or a performer they follow,” he said. “There’s something more there at the fan level.”
At a time when data privacy concerns are growing, Melnick emphasizes that Fan Manager itself doesn’t collect data directly but, rather, through team and venue clients of whom they require strict privacy safeguards. The newly scalable technology platform is hosted by Amazon Web Services, which has access and partition controls.
David Melnick
Pallotta said Fan Manager is beginning to seek strategic investors to raise up to $5 million in financing with an eye toward expanding the network globally. Melnick said the company seeks teams who are innovative and forward-thinking, willing to share ideas and best practices across its portfolio of clients. He added that his team is also looking to invest more in business development, helping sponsors and advertisers drive economic value for their expenditure within the $25 billion global sports sponsorship business.
AS Roma is proving to be a good case study for Fan Manager’s potential. In recent years, the club has switched ticketing partners to Best Union, taken control of its own retail stores, rapidly grown its social team and built an award-winning official website — steps, Pallotta said, that will help prep the club to better utilize Fan Manager’s features.
Furthermore, the clubs is breaking ground on a new stadium later this year, providing a blank canvas for crafting a sports and entertainment campus to their needs. While AS Roma might have 25 home matches in the course of a year, Pallotta wants the venue to host hundreds of events across its 250,000 square feet of land, as well as invite visitors to tour the stadium and the team Hall of Fame. He has dispatched chief technology officer Asim Pasha and director of global business development Kaitlyn Colligan to meet with all kinds of potential vendors and partners.
“We’ve spent, literally, the last two and a half years interviewing a couple hundred companies on what we’re going to do for technology and services in the stadium,” Pallotta said, adding: “Fan Manager can tie in all of the different venues and people coming through that campus.”
