Sports is a big money business, and a multi-faceted one at that. In an age of digital consumption and streaming, data has become one of the most important commodities for sports stakeholders.
This is a commodity that software platform Luscid believes could be better leveraged by the industry. Data has huge potential for the sports, covering a range of business areas such as partnership formation and marketing, explains Luscid Co-Founder, Harry Coe.
Insider Sport: Firstly Harry, can you tell us more about Luscid and how the company came to fruition?
Harry Coe: Luscid is a software platform that helps brands deploy sponsorship and marketing budgets based on data-driven insights. Luscid was created to solve a problem – the difficulty brands and the agencies that represent them have when evaluating the best sponsorship and partnerships opportunities. There are many factors that brands must consider when making this decision which, combined with the scale of the global sponsorship market, makes the process complex and time consuming.
The platform allows brands to plug in global target audiences, budgets, brand values and a selection of key touch points which are then evaluated against the global sponsorship ecosystem. We guide the user to areas of best fit – whether that be tennis, 90’s music, strategy or esports games, fashion or many others. All of these are then scored according to the brand’s inputs across 83 other areas of consumer interest (genres).
Brands can then dive into any of these genres and discover which events, venues, leagues, and teams across the globe meet those all-important brand requirements. Our 87 genres contain 6000+ sponsorable properties all underpinned by current and previous activity of 60,000+ brands.
Users can feel confident knowing that they have evaluated all the options and applied tangible metrics to every stage of the search process.
IS: What role does data play in building a successful sponsorship strategy?
HC: Data already plays an irreplaceable role in bringing brand partnerships to life and monitoring the success of sponsorships. The area we feel has been underserved, is the search and comparison process that brands and their agencies go through to find the right partnership.
Combining multiple global data sources that allow users to understand the passion points of audiences in 50 countries, the platform evaluates 500,000 historic and live financial sponsorship deals to help users understand what they can achieve with their budgets. With all the relevant data at their disposal, users can recognise where sector competitors are active and apply media listening and analysis to gauge which opportunities have pinpoint alignment with their carefully maintained brand values.
IS: Do you think data is being fully tapped into and maximised by sporting organisations?
HC: From our perspective it is difficult to evaluate how right owners are fully tapping into their data. Luscid sits on the other side of the market, servicing the brands and the agencies that represent them. In our experience, there is always something more that can be done to utilise data in a resourceful way. On the platform, we see that rights owners with clearly defined and consistent messaging, who use their data to project the values that are important to them and the brands they want to partner with, shine through when brands are using the platform to evaluate.
IS: How impactful can AI be when it comes to the decision-making process for sponsorship and what needs to happen for sporting organisations to fully tap into AI?
HC: Across every industry, AI will improve and streamline processes, ultimately improving productivity. As it pertains to the sponsorship decision making process, we are always looking for ways to leverage our wealth of proprietary data, and train it to provide even more accurate reporting at speed to our users. Sporting organisations leverage AI in much the same way, in order to target the right brands to partner with and present their product to be as attractive as possible.
IS: How can Luscid evolve sponsorship around landmark global events, such as the Rugby World Cup or the Olympics?
HC: A unique feature of the Luscid platform is our LIVE metric reporting. All data sources on our platform are updated in real time which is crucial when judging the relevance and suitability of a cyclical event from a brand’s perspective. It allows users to track an event’s relevance to their requirements over time periods rather than at a snapshot moment, enabling them to pick out vital trends and providing insights to how they fluctuate.
