Slam dunk - business analytics tactics from the NBA
- Summary:
- A London conference co-sponsored by SAP and the NBA inadvertently showed that the mix of sports marketing and tech is a good object lesson in the 'whys’ and 'hows’ of exploiting analytics across many industry sectors.
Following Chris Middleton's look at sports, retail and analytics from New York last week, there was similar on show at the Leaders Meet Innovation conference in London.
Given that it was jointly sponsored by SAP and the National Basketball Association (NBA) of the USA , the event could be forgiven for demonstrating a strong bias towards the use of big data analytics-based sports marketing tricks and techniques.
By the same token, however, it also demonstrated, albeit mostly by inference rather than direct assault, the underlying shift of emphasis away from the technology per se and onto the key user issues of why use the technology and what can be done with it.
It also demonstrated where some of the new driving forces are likely to come from, especially as the relative importance of marketing, and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) continues to grow.
While technology was certainly not ignored at the conference – there was big data, analytical tools, wearable devices and IoT in abundance as subjects for discussion – the real lessons learnable from the event could be spread far and wide.
Indeed, given the level of interest that most people have in sport of one kind or another, it could even be said that an opportunity was missed in using that broad interest as the basis for learning how to apply the learnings to other subjects.
Perhaps the best example of this covered at the conference was a new information service for basketball fans recently introduced by the NBA. It is based on the vast amounts of game statistics going back years – on every team, every match and every player. It is, if one is not interested in basketball, very easy to stop listening to talk of this service, particularly as it was mentioned by SAP’s EMEA COO, Darren Roos, in his opening remarks, and by NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, in his closing presentation.
But in practice, this shows a model of how big data analytics services may well develop. Here is an organisation with both the raw data necessary, on tap, and the deep knowledge of both the subject matter and the important questions likely to be asked by anyone seeking advice. Given that the key issue with applied big data analytics is `what questions will people really want answered’, who better to package it up and deliver it than an organisation with real historical depth of knowledge of the subject and its historical data?
Apply that model to any existing market and the opportunity emerges for organisations such as trade associations and specialist consultancies to step forward and package up the knowledge they have about their industries. They will be far better placed than most to short-circuit the struggle most businesses will have in identifying the real questions needed to turn data into analytics that means something of value. And that will be a service worth paying for.
Asking the right questions
Getting the questions right was also referenced by another speaker, Dr Scott Drawer, who is Performance Director of the Rugby Football Union. He quoted French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Straus, who pointed out that scientists were not people that provided the right answers, but people who asked the right questions. These, Drawer suggested, come from a four-stage sequence, starting with close observation of the player or athlete, followed by hypothesising what might be happening, modelling such events and testing them before they are applied in practice.
And yes, technology plays an important part here in that part of the observation process now includes significant amounts of measuring and monitoring devices all linked using Internet of Things technologies. In gyms these days, everything is monitored and logged.
He also noted that human `smarts’ are also a crucial part of this process as it does not follow that, of themselves alone, data equals information, or that information equals knowledge, knowledge equals wisdom or that wisdom ends up providing performance.
Other areas covered at the event included innovations in broadcasting and music where again the impact coming from users was the key underlying trends. In broadcasting the technology is now capable of giving viewers the `best seat in the house’. Indeed, with multiple cameras and instant replay systems, including wearable devices such as on-player cameras, it can be said that viewers get a better view than actually being in the stadium.
A broadcast panel, which included David Schafer, SVP of Discovery Communications, Steve Hellmuth , EVP of Ops and Tech at the NBA, and Andy Meikle, CEO of SportLobster, agreed that the key target now was to maximise the benefits for the user, with a realisation that the need is not to pivot services round what those users want.
An important goal here is pitching ever more services at mobile devices as the primary target, so that user services end up as personal as possible.
In music, a similar stress could be seen. The panellists: Christian Harris, European MD of Deezer, Sylvain Grande, VP Product for Soundcloud, and Vanessa Bakewell, head of Entertainment at Facebook, pointed to the discovery of new music as being the most important goal. Again, this is not just an automatable process, as the key factor is that the music has to be what users want to hear.
What drives that, increasingly, is the growth of what might termed the citizen DJ – individuals with an interest and knowledge of a musical genre that leads to them building a playlist of music that others sharing that musical interest want to follow and adopt. Such people are now an important target for the online music delivery businesses to find and foster, as they do much of the company’s work for them, and do it with specialist expertise.
My take
This conference highlighted, albeit indirectly and perhaps unwittingly, real learnings on the real uses for analytics in a far wider range of businesses than the glitz and glamour of sport and its associated services. It also showed that technology per se is no longer where the true innovations will be found.
Disclosure: at time of writing, SAP is a premier partner of diginomica.