Over their more than 20 years of team ownership, Robert and Jonathan Kraft have been flooded with information aimed at getting a better understanding of consumers. That wave has led to major investments in technology and personnel that they believe have dramatically enhanced their company’s bottom line and made their organization a gold standard in sports.
Now, the Krafts are looking to market those systems and expertise across the sports and entertainment world — doing so through Kraft Analytics Group, or KAGR, a new division of the Kraft Sports Group led by 14-year team executive Jessica Gelman.
The new entity already has a partnership with Learfield with designs on securing college clients, in particular.
Gelman, vice president of customer marketing and strategy for Kraft Sports Group who will be CEO of KAGR, also launched the successful MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2007 around data and analytics (see related story). With the new operation, she will oversee a staff of 18 that will assist organizations in learning more about their customers.
“We’ve invested internally over the years, and people have approached us from other leagues, teams and entertainment organizations to help them,” said Robert Kraft, chairman and CEO of The Kraft Group holding company. “And people were looking to hire her, so we saw the need to finally start a new company and see it as a way to differentiate ourselves.”
 |
Jonathan (left) and Robert Kraft have invested internally in information technology with the Patriots.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
|
Kraft’s son, Jonathan Kraft, president of The Kraft Group, also noted the journey of this effort. The Kraft family purchased the New England Patriots in 1994.
“When we first started in this business, we were touching a lot of people but not memorializing those interactions in a useful manner,” he said. “But as technology changed, we started to conceptualize one unified data warehouse that would be dynamic and allow you to look at your universe of interactions, learn from them and tailor your business to what the consumer was doing.”
KAGR will operate as a cloud-based, technology-enabled services company focused on data management, advanced analytics and strategic marketing.
The venture’s name is a play on the financial term CAGR, compound annual growth rate.
“Organizations are trying to understand the customer and improve their experience,” Gelman said. “We’ve built the infrastructure over the years and been out front in using the information to understand the customer and their experience.”
KAGR’s behavior-based software system, an internally developed program, will aggregate data within an organization, capturing information from ticketing, retail/e-commerce, web, newsletters and other consumer touch points. A secondary component will offer predictive modeling on renewal tendencies and other behavioral actions.
“Traditionally, these elements are in a disparate location,” Gelman said. “We bring it all together to provide one view of the customer to find out touch points, commerce and behavior history. You can use that to prioritize what customers to reach out to.”
To use KAGR’s services, clients would license the group’s software and log in to a KAGR portal where they would have access to dashboards providing various data that they would be able to segment and process for data visualization.
KAGR’s offerings could be integrated within an organization’s active system, and implementations generally take two to four months.
Information on pricing was not available.
“There is so much noise in data, but the technology we have created is able to de-clutter it to find the nuggets of truth,” Gelman said. “We can find out what’s really important to fans: Is it where they sit or what they pay? At retail, we can understand their behavior after they make a purchase. … This allows us to understand our customer and anticipate their needs before they even know it. Our uniqueness is the data management and data visualization, but when you add on the analytics and the direct marketing, that’s where you identify the real value.”
KAGR’s partnership with Learfield aligns it with a collegiate sports marketing agency that has multimedia rights relationships with more than 110 schools. Joe Ferreira, Learfield’s chief content officer, is spearheading the partnership from his company’s side.
Learfield has been interested in taking a data analytics product to its college clients for more than a year and spoke to at least two other technology companies about forming a strategic relationship, but it wasn’t until Learfield’s leadership met with Gelman that they found the right fit, Ferreira said.
The venture will eventually have its own brand name.
Moving into the pro space will provide a challenge of its own. While other franchises similarly have developed business entities that aim to work across sports — such as Sporting KC’s Sporting Innovations, now known as FanThreeSixty — whether teams will be open to exposing their internal data to a system developed by another team (particularly if that team is in their same sport) remains to be seen.
Jonathan Kraft said he thinks others will look to capitalize on what KAGR can offer.
“We don’t view other teams from a business perspective as our competition. That’s only on the field where we are competing,” he said. “We have spent millions of dollars building the platform and building a team of people. We see the sports and entertainment world starting to embrace these ideas, but they are not really sure where to get started. This can help them.”
KAGR isn’t entering an empty marketplace, either. SSB and Circle Media, among others, already operate in the college space offering the type of analysis KAGR is now pitching as well.
But the Krafts remain bullish on KAGR.
“We believe what we’ve built is better than what some third party could build that didn’t have hands-on experience in the industry,” Jonathan Kraft said. “We’ve seen the business results.”
Gelman agreed.
“We’ve done it and know how to do it,” she said.
Kraft Sports Group will be a client of KAGR. Gelman and her group will continue to work out of Patriot Place and do what they do for the Patriots and MLS New England Revolution (also owned by Kraft) only now as an outside entity.
