Elevate Releases Epic Insights Platform

Elevate Sports Ventures has launched a performance and insights platform that will allow organizations to analyze audience data and understand fan insights in a variety of different ways.

The platform will be called Epic, standing for Elevate Performances and Insights Cloud. The AI approach will combine emotional, psychological and behavioral insights as well as property data and consumer behavior of their fans to deliver personalized experiences

The platform will have three applications focusing on consumer insights, ticketing management and property insights. The platform has been leveraged by more than 25 clients with plans to expand in the future.

“The impetus was Elevate as historically as a services company, as a consultancy, was sitting on a massive amount of data,” said Jim Caruso, the company’s chief innovation officer. “We know a lot about properties and what happens inside those properties. We wanted to expand that to have a knowledge set that said, Hey, we can tell you what’s happening in the stadium, but we also want to know what’s happening outside the stadium.”

Along with its own data and through research with the Harris Poll and surveying 6,000 fans, the data tells Elevate that there is a significant overlap in fandom with travelers following more than three leagues. But at the same time, a higher percentage of travel doesn’t necessarily correlate with a higher spending level.

It also show the highest spending per traveler was NFL fans but with a lower travel percentage. NHL fans have the highest propensity to travel but a moderate spending level while soccer fans are the second highest to travel and spend money. College sports fans are moderate in both categories.

With the understanding gathered from surveying fans, the Epic platform through AI is designed to address queries such as ticket prices and successful fan engagement campaigns for mobile users. The data can also work to correlate fan engagement data to refine marketing strategies and enhance loyalty.

Caruso said the data that Elevate has is the foundation for the program and then it built a suite of applications to make answers easier to find for clients.

“I could be a ticketing manager who needs to go in and use this information to make decisions around pricing tickets,” he said in New Orleans on Thursday. “Or I could be a marketing manager who wants to use that data to build customer personas and figure out how to market to them or figure out what brands I should sponsor. Those are very different use cases, so we wanted to make it easy and create those different applications.”

With the AI part of the program, Caruso said instead of having to sift through all the research the system will be able to generate answers for clients.

“It’s not the old school way of pulling charts and data tables,” he said. “It’s how do I let AI do this work for me, sift through all this data that as a human, I couldn’t possibly comprehend and then have an interaction with it, engage with it, ask it questions. … I could go in and say, hey, what are the top five things that people are doing when they’re thinking about traveling for sports and it would tell me what those things are. Then I could dig in and drill in and get more insight to it.”

Super Bowl week also means getting business done within the industry. Elevate for the first time had its “Elly” hospitality house inside an event space/gallery in the Warehouse District open from Wednesday through pregame on Sunday. Elevate Experiences also was putting together Super Bowl experience packages that included three hotel nights plus tickets, pregame tailgating, access to the Elevate House and other items.