Pacers Sports & Entertainment (PS&E), in coordination with Deloitte (brings the valuable data set) and Yieldmo (it’s their proprietary platform), introduced sport’s first retail media network equivalent at JohnWallStreet’s AI Playbook event on March 11. 

Fieldhouse Media Network (FMN) will provide Pacers and Fever partners with the ability to reach more of their local fanbase and drive those individuals down funnel.

It will also enable PS&E to market to fans of the clubs outside the Indianapolis DMA. Remember, geographic targeting rules do not exist on the open web.

“Brand partnerships have long been anchored by in-venue and broadcast activations, from signage to jersey patches to on-court experiences, that drive awareness and fan connection,” Jack DelloStritto (VP, Sports and Emerging Products, Yieldmo) said. “Digital media represents the next evolution, allowing teams to extend moments to their full addressable fanbase with precision, measurement, and transparency, and ultimately strengthening partner ROI.”

If successful, FMN will help to eliminate market distinctions on the sponsorship and advertising side of PS&E’s business and enable clubs in other ‘secondary’ cities to begin pursuing national and global brand partnerships. 

“In [today’s] world, there are no large or small markets. There is just good and bad content,” Joey Graziano (Chief Commercial Officer, Pacers Sports & Entertainment) said. “And moving forward, CMOs want convertible ROI and to connect with actual fans. They are not getting that with a national brand awareness play.”

A retail media network (or RMN) is an advertising platform operated by a merchant that allows brand partners to reach its shoppers (think: Ticketmaster and Kroger). It leverages first-party purchase and behavioral data to deliver highly targeted, measurable ads. 

Unlike traditional programmatic advertising, RMNs enables retailers to package, control, and resell media related to owned IP across premium publishers and channels (i.e. open web, connected television, in app). This shifts the value proposition from awareness to consideration, and activation serves as a prospecting mechanism for direct marketing channels, like email and SMS.

“Take Amazon as an example. If you search for a Weber grill, you're going to see a bunch of sponsored placements within that feed. Advertisers pay for those placements,” DelloStritto said. The challenge is, “over time, there's so much demand for those placements that Amazon doesn’t have enough inventory on the pages to service it. So, they turn off site and essentially help paying sponsors to place ads on grill content.”

RMNs are commonplace in retail and e-commerce but have never existed in sport at scale. That is despite big four teams facing an even more acute problem; they have even less control over digital inventory.

So, when sports rights owners sell sponsorships and are obligated to activate the partnership, their spend tends to be against physical assets. And that’s problematic for brands trying to trace or attribute conversions to advertising spend.

“We’re trying to shift the narrative and enable teams to go and sell digital media as part of their partnership activation budgets,” DelloStritto said. Doing so will “help them reach [more local] fans across their entire journey and to monetize assets that other folks are monetizing on their behalf today.”

It is common for competitors of a team’s partners to buy out ad inventory on non-affiliated media sites. 

Of course, the beauty of off-platform digital inventory is that it extends far beyond the stadium. The opportunity to reach fans outside the local market is what first captured PSE’s attention.

“Having been a league employee for six years and now a team employee, and recognizing what I was able to sell at the league level and then being on the team side and seeing the intensity of local fandom but also the geographic constraints, [it was exciting to be presented with] the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds,” Graziano said.

Yieldmo’s white label solution enables PS&E to purchase all their associated digital inventory across the open web and subsequently activate ad spots with custom creative at a page level for the teams’ partners. 

Initially, PS&E intends to use the platform to activate sponsorships and deliver convertible ROI to existing partners. Longer term, it should be able to renew those same companies at sizable increases and initiate new lucrative relationships with global partners. 

“We want to do national deals,” Graziano said. That would be “a massive shift in sponsorship [revenue] and a step change from how things currently operate.”

The other “part of this conversation is around marketing to the unknown fan that will never interact with the team directly,” DelloStritto added. 

This is particularly valuable to a club, like the Fever, that has a transcendent star.  53% of WNBA fans claim to be Caitlin Clark supporters. 

“Their fan base is much larger than the millions of customers the team has data on,” DelloStritto said. Converge by Deloitte now “gives them access to the rest.”

The Yieldmo platform targets segments or audiences built on Deloitte’s extensive data supply further extending the target customer base.

"We bring together hundreds of datasets and proprietary models to show PS&E where fan interest is actually building, how those people are engaging across digital media, and how to reach them in a way that's precise and privacy-safe. That's the audience FMN is built to activate,” Li-Shen Lee (principal, Deloitte Digital) said.

Ultimately, increasing the size of the teams’ audience drives sponsorship values up.

It’s fair to wonder why RMNs have never been used successfully across sport. Cost appears to be the answer. The three Fieldhouse Media Network partners each spent ‘millions’ to build the platform.

But there are no hard costs, beyond acquiring the media, for other rights owners that want to build a RMN equivalent using the existing tech. Yieldmo is offering up access to its platform for free. The company makes money when a club uses its pipes.

“It’s a win-win equation and all our incentives are aligned from day one,” DelloStritto said.

So, how much money can teams earn? 

The belief is nine-figures over five years is possible for an organization the size of PS&E.

“We're handing sports teams a new revenue stream in a box,” DelloStratto said. “All they have to do is sell it.”

On the latest episode of JohnWallStreet Presents: Big Business on Campus, a college sports podcast powered by Playfly Sports and sponsored by Short’s Sports Travel Logistics, JohnWallStreet Founder Corey Leff and Playfly Sports Chairman Michael Schreiber sit down with Weatherford Capital Founding Partner Drew Weatherford, IMG Academy CEO Brent Richard, and USA Fencing CEO Phil Andrews to discuss the so-called “enrollment cliff” —a projected decline in college-age students that has started to materialize— and a solution to help navigate it.

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