Sponsored by Amperity | GOAL! How Amperity Helped Seattle Sounders & Baltimore Ravens Fan Engagement

Summary

Amperity's unified customer data platform helps sports teams like the Seattle Sounders and Baltimore Ravens build a fan 360 by resolving fragmented data from ticketing, merchandise, apps, and concession systems into a single actionable profile.
The Seattle Sounders achieved an 80% year-over-year increase in season ticket deposits after implementing Amperity's identity resolution and fan engagement capabilities.
The Baltimore Ravens unlocked two years of stalled marketing goals within the first week of deployment, building a unified fan data foundation in 45 minutes using Amperity's transparent, auditable identity resolution integrated with Unity Catalog via Amperity Bridge.

Chapters

FAQs

What is a fan 360 and why do sports teams need it?

A fan 360 is a unified profile that combines all the data a sports franchise holds about a single fan — including ticket purchases, merchandise transactions, app activity, and in-stadium spending — into one actionable record. Without it, teams cannot see that the person who bought a ticket, a jersey, and a hot dog is the same fan, because each interaction is recorded under a different identifier across siloed systems.

How did Amperity help the Baltimore Ravens with their fan data?

The Baltimore Ravens had fan data locked in legacy systems with untrusted identity matching, which had blocked key marketing goals for two years. Amperity delivered value within the first week by building a unified fan data foundation in 45 minutes using transparent, auditable identity resolution rather than a black-box matching approach.

What results did the Seattle Sounders achieve after using Amperity?

After implementing Amperity, the Seattle Sounders increased year-over-year season ticket deposits by 80%. The team was also able to create a fan experience outside the stadium designed to be as meaningful as watching a match inside the stadium.

How does Amperity connect to the Databricks Data and AI platform?

Amperity Bridge integrates fan identity and behavioral profiles with the Databricks Data and AI platform through Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing, enabling teams to access unified fan data directly within their lakehouse environment. This allows data teams to run analytics and power personalization without maintaining separate copies of fan data outside the lakehouse.

Full transcript

[00:08] Hi everyone, my name is Megan Lundy, solutions consultant at Empire and I'm excited to welcome you to our session goal. How the how impurity helped the Seattle Sounders and Baltimore Ravens fan engagement in football e football.
[00:20] Now, I am based in our uh New York office. So, we have a little bit of basketball fever right now. Uh we're very proud of our Knicks, but we're going to talk about uh these these two sports today. U but excited to talk
[00:32] about how this can apply to any sports franchise. A little bit of an agenda of how we'll spend the next 20 minutes. Um we're going to kick off with a little
[00:44] discussion of what makes building a fan 360 and understanding fan engagement as a sports franchise so challenging. Then we'll do a little bit of a case study. We're going to dig into the Baltimore Ravens and how they were able to build a
[00:57] unified data foundation of their fans in just 45 minutes and then talk a little about why it matters. Uh look at both the Ravens and the Sounders and what they've been able to unlock with parody. So kicking off, what is a fan 360?
[01:11] What's why is it so important? I want everyone to think back to the last time you attended a sporting events live. First thing you did was probably go online, buy your tickets to the game. Then you're getting excited. Maybe
[01:24] there's a new player that's just been traded to that team. You buy a new jersey online, maybe from the uh team sports shop. You go to the uh the park on game day. Scan your ticket. Beep. Get let in. You're curious who's on the
[01:38] injured list, who's going to be playing today, who's in the who's on the starting lineup. So, you check the roster on the team's app. You then get hungry or thirsty. Maybe you get a popcorn and some hot dogs. Maybe you get a beer. uh and you swipe with your
[01:51] credit card at that transaction in the park. Uh and you have such a great day. The team, home team wins, you're super excited and you're already looking at the schedule as to when you can go to your next game. To you, you've just had an awesome day out at the ballpark. But
[02:05] to the team, it could be really hard to see that you've had such a great day. That's because when you bought your tickets, they was on Ticketm and you used your name, Alex Pollson, in your Gmail email. uh you went to go buy your
[02:18] jersey from the Fanatics team store and maybe used your work email because that's what you signed up your with your account. Uh when you scan your tickets, it's just a ticket ID number. There's that that's what's beeped at the ballpark. Things like your concession
[02:30] purchases are going to be based on your swiped credit card token. And so all of that disperate data is uh is is ultimately disconnected and it makes it really hard for that team to be able to reconstruct that great day that you just
[02:43] had at the park. We believe that trying to operate without a unified view of your fans or being able to connect. This is like a quarterback trying to play blindfolded or your goalie playing with their hands
[02:56] tied behind their back. The way to unlock top performance is to have your data operating at the highest level just like professional athletes are are per performing at the highest level.
[03:08] So, let's talk a little bit about the Baltimore Ravens and how they were able to overcome these challenges and build that unified fan view. So, uh, a little bit of a context here. Um, the Ravens had, uh, no shortage of fan data that
[03:22] they had collected. They had, just like we saw in that example, ticketing data, merchandise data, mobile app information that was coming from the league and the NFL, um, as well as, you know, engagement on their SMS and email
[03:34] platforms. they had uh been trying to connect that data using some legacy software but um it was slow, very expensive and ultimately untrusted throughout the
[03:46] organization. So even as they were able to um you know start to connect this uh when they brought it to other parts of the organization uh they didn't really trust the data. So it was really limiting their uh the the the ability to
[03:58] adopt that view of the fan. Part of the reason why that was so untrusted is that that the the the uh techniques used to actually match those different data points in that legacy system uh was a total black box. They
[04:11] had no insight into what was happening and but they knew it could only you know do some simple things like match if the email was was the same across two records which as we saw email is even collected on on on much of this data.
[04:24] Ultimately, we had to throw a flag. They had a for a delay of game. Marketing had really limited access to fan data. Every single campaign they executed required analytics invi involvement resulting in delays, time investment, and analysts
[04:38] doing uh activities that were quite basic. Why was this so important for them to solve? Really key element here is that the best fans have the messiest data. Again,
[04:50] think back to that example we walked through at the beginning. the fan who is engaging with the mobile app and buying uh uh merchandise online are your best fans uh and they have the data that's
[05:02] most disparate across all of those different systems because they've been a fan for a long time and they're engaging across all of these different platforms. It was really challenging to do even some basic uh marketing that they wanted
[05:15] to launch to be able to do things like have a welcome message when someone attended their first game to say welcome to the flock or welcome to the uh Ravens fan base. Um internal dashboards and
[05:27] metrics were untrusted. So again had had trouble gaining any adoption. Um and ultimately they were forever playing defense. So really hard to innovate when you spend all your time just trying to get the basics going and and start get
[05:40] getting uh trust uh embedded in the data across the organization. So what the Ravens ended up doing was turning to Empire uh to seamlessly uh connect their data bricks lakehouse
[05:52] where they had already colllocated all of that uh merchandise and ticketing and engagement data um and use parody to resolve that fan data build unified fan profiles or a fan 360 and put those
[06:05] profiles to use across marketing analytics game day experience and more. What this looks like is a single fan data ecosystem accessible to every single department of the franchise. They
[06:18] were able to use intelligent identity resolution to improve fan profile accuracy and completeness. Uh and ultimately that improved data confidence by adding attributes like lifetime value of that fan, identifying the top decile
[06:32] of fans. Um being able to flag who was a season ticket holder for this year or many other years
[06:45] that instead of spending time uh uh filing tickets, they were able to um improve that overall data consistency and align and normalize that data across the franchise, making it available to
[06:57] other teams across uh other uh uh organizations across uh uh the the franchise. Finally, they were able to self-s serve things like a birectional fan profile between data bricks and amparity, making that fan profile and
[07:10] the fan 360 available in their Unity catalog alongside all of the other details that they had they had collected. So, let's walk through this a little bit and see exactly how uh the Ravens were able to bring this to life. So I
[07:23] mentioned that they uh read every fan data source uh using unity catalog and uh delta sharing or what's now open sharing uh using amperity bridge. So this included things like their ticket master fanatics digital and attentive
[07:38] ESP data mobile app data and information that the league shares like demographics. This was able to be done uh very quickly because Imperity does not require a preset schema. Uh no rigid mapping or
[07:51] upfront transformation required to get started. So the Ravens were able to connect amparity to their Unity catalog in under 10 minutes. And that's not just one table. That actually represented dozens of tables and hundreds of
[08:04] hundreds of millions of records. Next, the Ravens took advantage of Amperity's patented ML identity resolution uh to be able to appro to approach that uh fan unification uh
[08:17] using deterministic, probabilistic as well as transitive matching techniques to resolve those fragmented records from all of those different systems and determine which record belongs to each fan. They were able to do this and connect
[08:30] that data even if that source collects different data and uh can be able to use all of these techniques to overcome common data issues like fans using nicknames, changing their surnames as
[08:42] they get married, having multiple emails or moving across town. As part of this process, they generated an amperity ID or a fan ID based on that first party data which adapts to change over time as
[08:54] new data is is collected on that fan. uh and is stable enough to use for longitudinal measurement over time. Raven saw that their average fan had data in three different sources and some
[09:07] of their best fans actually had data across every single one of those sources they collected. So tens of thousands of fans had data in all 11 sources that they were able to connect. I'll take a moment here to um just call
[09:21] out that all of this happens in a very transparent configurable way. Uh the team at the Ravens actually implemented them this themselves and used our quick start wizard uh to and had their first identity graph built in just 45 minutes.
[09:34] That was just the starting point and there are lots of tools to be able to use to extend beyond that initial graph. There's incredible transparency built into the platform to be able to inspect
[09:46] every single connection and understand why it was uh why that connection was made and why those two records were connected. There's built-in things like benchmarking to zero in on any opportunities to further improve data
[09:58] quality or find edge cases uh and course correct uh accordingly. Finally, Imperity provides sandboxes so they were able to safely manage changes as they added new data to this foundation or made those configuration
[10:11] changes. So they were able to connect all of that data, assign an ID to every single record. Then the real fun part begins.
[10:23] They were able to connect all of the records that belong to an individual uh into a and publish a fan profile that aggregates all of that behavioral and interaction data into easy to use context on every single fan. So we get
[10:37] to meet someone like Judy who's a super fan. She's a Marylander for life, uh lives in Annapolis, uh and has been a season ticket holder for many years. She's a super engaged fan. She even
[10:49] traveled across the pond a couple of years ago to attend the UK game that they had back in 2023. So, she's purchasing things online. The last thing she it last item she bought was a child's sweatshirt, uh maybe for a a
[11:01] child or a niece or a nephew. This is the level of visibility that the Ravens now have into every single fan, both uh in uh their Unity catalog, but also in those fan engagement tools like their
[11:13] ESP um and and mobile app. So let's talk a little bit more about that. Every single asset that was generated using Amperity is available in
[11:25] Unity catalog as soon as the that asset is uh is has been created or updated. Um Amperity takes advantage of zero copy data sharing patterns to make that data available without unnecessary
[11:38] dduplication and leveraging some of data brick standards like delta sharing. This means that the Ravensi continue to retain control and governance and governance over that data uh no matter
[11:51] where it is connected. Data is refreshed regularly as new information comes in and new data is collected on their fans. They have the option to vary this cadence. So during the season when there's a lot going on, they refresh
[12:03] that much more frequently than in the offseason when uh there's a little bit less engagement. Finally, I mentioned that they've set up direct connectors to places like their ESP to be able to deliver profiles and audiences effectively.
[12:16] So, let's talk a little bit about what the Ravens were able to achieve here. I mentioned that they built their first fan identity graph in just 45 minutes. This was done self-s served by some folks at the Ravens uh using our quick start wizard. We offer a data diagnostic
[12:30] if you want to try this yourself on your data, no matter your industry. It's a low lifted one-day project to be able to understand data quality and what uh amperity could potentially power for your own customer data.
[12:42] I mentioned all data was available automatically back in their Unity catalog. They used this to build fan acquisition dashboards using data bricks AIBI tools and were able to unlock some opportunities that they had been chasing
[12:54] for years like uh that welcome to the flock uh type engagement to bring new uh new fans on board quickly. All in all, we're really proud uh to have partnered Whoopsies, we went back a
[13:07] little there. We're really proud to have partnered with the Ravens and Data Bricks to help them deliver uh uh Exactly. I'm pressing a key here. I'm very sorry. I'm going to stop touching that.
[13:34] So anyway, we're very proud to have been partnering with the Ravens and Data Bricks to help the uh help the Ravens deliver this excellent fan experience for uh the Ravens as well as many other football teams. Next, we are going to flip to the
[13:46] football part of our uh presentation here. And I'm sure many of you in the in the audience here in the stands have uh World Cup fever. Um little story time here. And Parody is actually headquartered in Seattle, which
[13:58] incidentally is where Team USA is playing their next game this Friday at Lumen Field. And speaking of Lumenfield, we're now going to turn our attention to the Sounders, uh, which is their home, uh, because, uh, Lumenfield is their
[14:11] home base. If you don't know about the Sounders, they are a Seattle institution. They have been an Imperity customer for eight years. Uh, and we are really excited to share some of the highlights of our partnership with them.
[14:23] They initially got started back in 2018 because they had made some really deep investments across their different departments uh but were lacking interconnectivity between those different teams to be able to again
[14:35] understand the complete fan experience and action on it. They have grown over the years uh not just organically as their fan base has grown but they also acquired a sister team uh uh the Seattle
[14:47] Rain um uh in 2024. And what hasn't changed over these eight years is their continued desire to move beyond batch and blast and generic communications to enable next-gen fan
[14:59] engagement. So
[15:11] now have over a hundred tables all connected with the imperity ID describing different elements of fan behavior and fan engagement. They have a continuous approach to trying something new, testing, iterating, and then automating it. The
[15:24] automation is a really core value driver for them. And so at this point, they have uh 50 evergreen campaigns that are set up and are activating across own channels like email, but also Meta and Tik Tok ads. So these are campaigns that
[15:37] are going to people who maybe buy multiple uh tickets in a season, but aren't season ticket holders yet. You can imagine the opportunity to continue to engage those type of uh of of fans. And if you're local to Seattle, you
[15:50] really need to check out their first game on us promotion, which is a really cool promotion to help get people interested um and excited about se about soccer. Um it lets them it lets new fans
[16:02] uh go to their first game for free. And if you think about this, this is something where you really need to know who is an existing fan and who is not because you want to be able to validate that that fan is indeed new and block
[16:15] bad actors who might be uh trying to just get a ticket uh you know once a week for a free game. So they use Amperody to help power this in real time profiles to be able to validate that when those uh when folks sign up for
[16:27] this type of program to be able to uh again understand that they are a truly a new fan and offer them this program. got really need to have that robust data foundation to be able to enable innovation like this.
[16:41] All right, we'll talk a little bit about the results that the sounders have seen again over the last eight years. Um they have uh seen incredible rorowaz when activating some of those key segments on uh on Facebook. So for example, those
[16:53] multi-game attendees who haven't purchased a season ticket yet, getting that additional uh game uh out of them or helping them engage a little bit further. One thing we haven't talked too much about in the last 20 minutes is the
[17:05] corporate group and season ticket sales which are typically a little bit more hightouch than something like a a single game ticket. Um making fan data available to those types of sales people and engagement uh drives real results.
[17:19] So the sounders were able to uh grow their season ticket sales by 80% after using a parody to help power that cycle for those salespeople. They've seen higher engagement in email, too. And you can just imagine a
[17:31] personalized message highlighting uh kid-friendly activities uh is being sent to members of the kid club rather than to the entire fan base is going to perform much stronger than blasting that to everyone.
[17:43] Automation again is a real core value driver for the Sounders. They spend less time wrangling their data and more time on uh taking advantage of new innovation and opportunities.
[17:55] We're gonna pause the game for some out of town scores, aka uh some success that we've seen in other verticals. Um I'll call out Virgin Atlantic who built their uh initial Traveler 360 in just 4 days
[18:07] using Imperity and Data Bricks. I think their lounge is right across the way there. Uh so make sure you swing by and and uh hear more about that. Another British retailer, New Look, uh saw tremendous incremental return on ad
[18:20] spend when launching the exact same campaigns powered by that stronger uh data foundation. So they use the same uh creative, the same targeting, but built those on a stronger data foundation and saw amazing uh increases in in return on
[18:33] ad spend. And clients like Veil Resorts were able to message more customers and do it more quickly. We are imperity is positioned to help you win the big game without changing
[18:45] the play group uh with the without changing the playbook. Empire is built for lakehouse architecture and everything I just showed you talking about the Ravens uh was done with amparity bridge which lets you share data uh from your unity catalog and to
[18:59] and from your unity catalog using that open uh delta sharing. Again, that means you can uh retain control of your customer data and the governance and continue to make Unity catalog the center of the universe. Also, in the
[19:12] realm of data uh security and governance, we now support bring your own storage. So, all data assets generated within parody are written directly to your own storage. Again, helping you uh improve security and privacy. And where we're going next here
[19:25] is the ability to uh uh bring your own compute where impurity workloads uh are actually executed on your data bricks compute. Um and so uh in that case imperity becomes a thin control plane
[19:38] and uh all of those those data operations are designed to uh all the heavy lifting data operations happen in your own compute and this feature is currently in private preview. Finally uh time for a TV timeout. Uh
[19:50] we're coming to our end here. Um, I would like to welcome all of you to come uh check out Imperody in booth 501. We're here all week. Would be happy to share more about how we're helping um the Ravens, the Sounders, and any other
[20:03] team or any other vertical uh solve their customer and fan data challenges. Uh we are also got have some World Cup theme swag and are giving away the ultimate tailgate accessory, a great Arctic cooler. Plus, you can learn how
[20:15] to benchmark your own customer data maturity. I am seeing blinking red here, so I think we're at the buzzer. So, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

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