In the heart of Silicon Valley, the Pac-12 Conference has set out to find the most innovative ways to connect with fans.
The Pac-12 and Stanford University have been working since the start of football season with AT&T and Sporting Innovations to keep fans connected from their pregame tailgate until their postgame exit.
It’s difficult enough for fans to find a quality Wi-Fi signal in a college football stadium — only a handful of schools have Wi-Fi inside the stadium bowl. But Stanford, which has had free public Wi-Fi in Stanford Stadium for four seasons, intends to take its signal beyond the bowl and into the parking lots where fans party before the game.
AT&T is working with the school on an enhanced distributed antenna system and more complete Wi-Fi coverage on campus and in parking lots so that fans can stay connected.
“The connectivity is strong, but it’s not quite complete,” Lydia Murphy-Stephans, president of Pac-12 Networks, said of Stanford’s parking and tailgate areas. “But it does give us an opportunity to see just how far we can go to customize content and data.”
As part of that customization, Sporting Innovations, the consulting arm of MLS’s Sporting Kansas City, created a GoStanford app that serves as a data collection source. The app launched quietly on Aug. 30 and it’s still not widely marketed — they want another few weeks to work out the kinks before advertising it broadly.
“We’re trying to rethink the fan experience as a whole and understand what fans want,” said Murphy-Stephans, whose media division is taking the lead on the conference’s fan experience initiatives. “Fan engagement is such
{podcast}
SBJ Podcast:
College writer Michael Smith and Assistant Managing Editor Tom Stinson discuss how the SEC and Pac-12 are attacking the fan experience from different sides, as well as Val Ackerman and the new Big East's first year.
an industry buzzword, as well as a challenge, but what we want to do is use technology to keep the fan connected.”
Stanford is one of three major fan initiatives this football season from Pac-12 Networks.
The league’s media arm also has created a method for students on all 12 campuses to access the Pac-12 Networks. Students who live in campus housing will automatically be authenticated on their mobile devices, enabling them to see the Pac-12 Networks on phones or tablets. The first four schools — Arizona State, Southern Cal, UCLA and Washington — have the service available to their on-campus students, and others are being activated. Once complete, more than 80,000 students across all 12 schools will have mobile access, the conference estimates.
In addition, the networks are working with AT&T U-verse on an enhanced TV app. Whenever U-verse subscribers tune in to the Pac-12 Networks, an app will automatically appear on the screen, offering the viewer several options for scores, stats or other detailed information about the game being televised.
“Customers are given the choice to opt in or opt out if they want the additional features,” Murphy-Stephans said. “It’s just one more way we can customize content for the viewers.”
She said the enhanced viewing options will likely be available for other distributors in the future.
But the Stanford project has the potential to deliver the most fan information back to the school and its Pac-12 brethren.
Conference chief marketer Danette Leighton and its networks digital chief, David Aufhauser, also are heavily involved in the initiative. At the school level, Athletic Director Bernard Muir and his senior associate AD, Kevin Blue, are spearheading fan engagement.
“The long-term aspiration is to have information from the app easily organized with our information from tickets and donations into usable data,” Blue said. “And if we can enable the fan to stay connected from the time they arrive for the game, that would be a long-term aspiration. When you think about our constituent base, that’s their expectation.”
The GoStanford app, which is good on Android and iOS systems, opens by giving users the chance to link a credit card to the account, or to authorize charges on the wireless bill. At registration, users can sign in with a social media account, like Facebook or Twitter, or their email address.
So right away, the app is collecting data.
The content on the app is heavily video-oriented with content from the networks and the school, such as player features, press conferences and photo galleries. On game day, the app plays live team and individual stats, play-by-play, and it eventually will play highlights from the game on a near-live basis.
And, of course, there’s a button for users to buy tickets.
“The goal at Stanford is to demonstrate a higher level of fan engagement, using mobile,” said Asim Pasha, managing partner at Sporting Innovations.
By taking the information from the app and channeling it to the customer relationship management system, the school can identify fans who might be ticket-buying prospects or potential donors.
“The thing about all colleges is that they have a lot of data,” Pasha said. “It comes from their CRM, their ticketing, all of their different points of sale. And it’s all so fragmented. If we can link it all together, then we actually have meaningful information.”
Sporting Innovations has 37 college and three conference clients, so this type of customer engagement is right in its wheelhouse, Pasha said.
