How the NFL Uses AI to Personalize Fan Experiences | Adobe for Business
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Experience Maker of the Year,
congratulations!
How does it feel?
Thank you, it's like, feel like honored.
Thanks to Adobe.
Really, it's a great team effort.
We did in the last four years, we did a
lot of failures, a lot of success.
But leadership, all the time
was there to support us.
You lead martech at the NFL
What does that entail?
Working with all 32
clubs plus league level,
each and every club have
their own martech stack.
32 clubs, some of the most
passionate fans of any sport,
of any league.
Four years back, like we can
say all 32 clubs plus league
were decentralized ecosystem, right?
They are operating as a local, they are
building their own space.
So what we are losing there, like,
one club did good,
is not going and
learning to the other club.
And what league is doing is not getting
passed to the club as well.
And which is ending up like over
communication with the fans.
You ended up maybe five clubs
and you are receiving five communications
from each and every club every day.
We selected Adobe as an optimizer
and an orchestration layer
and orchestrate that at the
league level with all 32 clubs.
We integrated with their
ecosystem, bring it into the league.
We want the fans to get the right
experience at the right
time, with the right context.
We put the fan in the center and not
doing that as an
audience batch and blast.
We are targeting
individual fans with the right message.
We reduced the 30% of over communication
to the fans by going with this approach.
We need a lot of
personalization, a lot of content as well.
A lot of local content in
the different languages.
So we start building a GenAI system
privately within our NFL world,
working with Adobe on the,
Firefly and other products.
And we start developing our own models,
own agents, along with Adobe
to give that domestic and
the localized content to them.
We need a million of
variations of the content
Each and every social media have their
own type of content, what they needed.
With the agentic AI, what we are doing,
we are generating the
content at scale.
One click, it will generate a million of
variations of that image
It will go to the AJO for the activation.
It will go to the social media for the
activation directly.
I mean, that's scale right there.
It sounds like to me it's using agentic
to meet that personalized content,
per fan.
We have all Adobe products.
We have the AEP,
Adobe Journey Manager,
Adobe Journey Optimizer, AJO.
We are using the CJA
Customer Journey Analytics.
We are using the Adobe
Analytics for the tracking.
We are using the Mix Modeler for the
attribution at the end
because we want to do the right
attribution to each and every channel.
Then Creative Cloud side.
We are using the Firefly,
Frame.io and Adobe Express.
Like the Workfront for
managing this entire process.
when we are working with so many
products, so many platforms,
we need a very good processing time.
We are having Workfront also run this
entire process together.
We are seeing the success from the club
adoption as more of clubs are coming
and they want to adopt these platforms.
Say like what we feel when we do something
great during the events,
like either in the fan experience, during
the Super Bowl or in the draft,
we are activating some
use case for the fans.
That's where we start feeling, OK, now we
are doing something great.
We make it a very
smooth process for the fans.
Like just go and create a
NFL ID and you are registered, right?
125% hike in the draft
registration at the time, yeah.
And you're collecting a ton of data, too.
Yes.
With that - those interactions.
I think we're talking about
almost 340 million profiles
at audience in AEP to target.
That's the audience we are managing.
There's a lot of unknown fans.
There's a lot of known fans as well.
But we are targeting them
across each and every channel.
We activate all the channels in the
platform for the
340 million audience.
So fans, yeah.
That audience is only
getting bigger as you expand.
I know the NFL is based in the US, but
it's a global audience
of fans, I don't think a
lot of people realize that.
We are expanding to international,
Recently, we launched
several hub for marketing platform
for the international market.
Dutch have their own martech instance.
Australia have their own martech instance.
and Brazil, their own,
Spain, they have their own instance.
So with the help of this technology, we
are creating multiple instances
in each and every region.
So the fans can get a
localized experience versus
oh, we are getting
targeted from US market.
So yeah.
This is the dream.
This is the vision, right?
Treating every audience, every person
like an audience of one,
no matter where they are, across whatever
club they cheer for.
You can say like, expand, AI driven,
agentic AI in each and every places.
So we have AEP, AJO and everywhere.
Like agentic AIs are available.
We want to activate that and more.
Thank you so much for sitting down
with me and congratulations again
on your win here
So exciting
and so well deserved.
Ask follow-up questions or revisit key timestamps.
The NFL's MarTech lead discusses transforming their marketing strategy from a decentralized ecosystem across 32 clubs to a unified, fan-centric approach using Adobe's products. They leveraged Adobe as an orchestration layer to reduce fan over-communication by 30% and ensure personalized experiences. A private GenAI system, developed with Adobe Firefly, generates millions of localized content variations at scale. The NFL utilizes a comprehensive suite of Adobe products, including AEP, AJO, CJA, Analytics, Mix Modeler, Creative Cloud, and Workfront, to manage 340 million fan profiles. This strategy has led to significant success, including a 125% increase in draft registrations and expansion into international markets with localized content.
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