From Broadcast to Behavior: Activating First-Party Fan Data in the Direct-to-Consumer Era

Identity, Consent, and the Complexity Underneath

Q: What is the biggest gap between the data organizations are collecting and what they are actually doing with it?

The first thing I always ask is: what have you asked the fan to actually consent to? Because even at the very beginning, before you talk about personalization or building any kind of meaningful profile, you have to think about whether you can legally use and share that data between a team and its league.

Historically, those agreements were not written with first-party data in mind. The use cases we all want to know were never considered at the time most fan engagements were started. A simple example is the team/league consent where it's typically one or the other, but now we need both. Clients of ours are doing increasingly better on that, but there is still a large portion of existing fan records where the consent framework is a legacy problem.

Then you add the identity stitching challenge. Fans enter through multiple front doors, the team app, a fantasy platform, a league streaming product. A single fan can easily generate records across seven or ten different touchpoints.

Additionally, if you are part of a multi-sport ownership group, you also have to decide what it means that someone is a fan of your basketball team, but not necessarily a fan of your hockey team, even though the same group owns both. Data sharing across those properties is not a given, legally or technically.

Q: Where does third-party ticketing fit in, and why is it such a persistent issue?

Ticketing is a massive data gap that gets quite a bit of attention, because it's typically in a bad state. Most teams and leagues do not own their ticketing, it goes through one of the major ticketing platform providers. Those providers are not incentivized to share that data back. They are building their own profiles, their own business. The tension is structural, and it means that a huge proportion of in-person engagement, arguably the most valuable kind, gets lost in the fray, leaving teams wondering who is actually in those seats. Pressure from leagues and teams has made this better slowly over time, but it still sticks out as a real sore point to get the data you want in real time, when you can actually action upon it

For most leagues and teams, the reality of their data estate is far messier than their roadmaps might suggest. Scott notes that even the most basic question, what data have you actually consented to collect and share is still unresolved for many long-standing organizations.

Solving these foundational layers is the prerequisite for everything that follows. Once the data estate is cleaner, organizations can begin building what most are working toward: a unified fan profile, the single record that makes meaningful personalization possible. This has many names, the golden record, the complete profile, but it all means the same thing.

The question of how deep that personalization should go, and whether the investment always justifies the return, is where Scott Michaels’ perspective cuts against conventional wisdom.

The Golden Profile and the Limits of Personalization

Q: What does a “golden profile” actually look like, and should every organization be aiming toward it?

Every organization we talk to is working toward some version of a golden profile. master record that starts with the basics: name, age , email, hopefully a phone number. Then you extend it with sports-specific data, such as team affinity, attendance habits, jersey size, what kind of fan they are. The goal is a complete enough profile to run meaningful personalization campaigns.

But here is something I do not think gets said enough: personalization is subject to real diminishing returns at the individual team level. An aggregator, meaning a league streaming product, a multi-sport platform, has a genuine personalization mandate because the content catalogue is enormous and retention depends on surfacing the right thing at the right time.

At a single team level, the signal is already so narrow that the ROI of going deeper often does not hold. You are already talking to people who are fans of this specific team. The personalization job is mostly about driving them further down the funnel, from casual fan to single-game buyer, and then from single-game to season ticket holder.

Q: Where does AI come in? What has actually changed about how it is being used?

Machine learning has been powering personalization in this space for over a decade — that is not new. What is shifting is the scale of what is possible on the outbound side.

The real evolution is moving from marketing to segments toward 1-to-1 marketing where an AI agent is managing thousands of variants in a message. It’s deciding not just whether to send it or not, but what images, what copy, what offer it contains. That level of granularity has always been the goal, but it has never been executable by humans. Now it is.

This is why ACx (Agentic Customer Experience) is the new standard for most international enterprises. But the infrastructure rests entirely on whether the previous foundational work has been done right. Consent gathered correctly. Profiles built progressively. Trust established through a clear value exchange. Sports and entertainment organizations need to be able to answer the question: what is the real value we are providing for our fans in exchange for their data?

The Value Exchange Is the Strategy

The organizations best positioned to activate first-party fan data are not necessarily the ones with the largest data teams or the most sophisticated tech stacks. They are the ones that provide true value for their fans. Personalized news updates are no longer enough. Fans are being asked to share progressively more through every contest entry, login wall, and preference center, and they are paying attention to whether what comes back is worth it.

The structural work, consent, identity stitching, ticketing data gaps, all of this is a genuinely complex, but not an unknown, challenge. And strategic clarity is the main pathway toward solving that puzzle. That conversation should start now, even before the architecture is perfect. The teams and leagues that get this right will have a fan relationship built on something more durable than habit.

If you are navigating first-party data activation in sports and entertainment,

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Co-written by Francisca García Charad