A sports fan’s connection to their home team runs deep. And in the world of professional baseball — where there are 30 different home teams and games happening daily — delivering the right message to connect with the right fan is crucial.
That’s why Major League Baseball turned to Google Marketing Platform. The MLB marketing team collaborated on one platform to cut down on reporting time and speed up campaign optimization. Watch the video to see how Major League Baseball engaged fans by delivering relevant messages at the right moments.
MLB footage courtesy of MLB.com.
Video Transcription
Barbara McHugh, SVP, Marketing:
Everyone remembers their first experience at a live game. We’re really fortunate we have a game with great history that has spanned from generation to generation. What’s really great about being an employee of Major League Baseball is that we’re able to combine a business mindset but also our fandom. We’re responsible for all things marketing for Major League Baseball. As part of those efforts, we service all 30 teams and their local campaigns.
Alex Rotolo, Group Manager, Marketing Analytics:
So the scope of the campaigns we’re running span over 2,500 baseball games. It’s really a challenge to keep up with how each of those campaigns are performing.
Nathan Stringari, Sr. Director, Digital Media Technology & Operations:
Because we have 2,500 games a season, so, you know, we need something that’s fast, something that’s scalable. We need something that’s flexible in order to keep up with everything that’s happening in baseball.
Rotolo:
Before Google Marketing Platform, we were basically just spending all of our time in Excel sheets and databases and spending less time actually paying attention to the marketing campaigns themselves. So we’ve cut back reporting time about two to three weeks per month and now the insights we’re looking at are fresh day to day so we can spend more time actually with the campaign optimizations. We do a lot of either creative testing or message testing within Google Marketing Platform, and in real time we can see which messages actually resonate with the local fanbases.
Stringari:
If a team’s going on a winning streak, we want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of that winning streak, we’re putting out that message and showing fans a great time.
McHugh:
I think we’ve only scratched the surface with what we’ve been able to leverage thus far. Having one technology platform that will allow us to save time is probably the best resource that we have.
