Fan favorites: Crafting unexpected fan experiences

WHAT IT MEANS to be a “fan”—of a team, a band, a movie, even weather coverage—has changed drastically in the past few decades. Fans used to have to be in the same stadium, theater, or living room to find like-minded community. But now, their world has expanded into digital spaces. A fandom exists wherever fans gather, online or off.

Today’s fans want to be part of something bigger than themselves; to feel as if their wants and needs are being anticipated—sometimes before they’ve even realized them themselves. That process has never been easy, but it’s certainly become more complicated as technology—and therefore a fan’s expectation—has advanced dramatically.

That reality highlights the question on almost every marketing executive’s mind: what will the future of fandom look like?Two major sports entities—the WNBA and the Tennis Channel—asked this question recently, aiming to connect more deeply with both physical and digital fans in a fast-changing tech landscape. In collaboration with Deloitte, both created cutting-edge experiences that set the pace for new opportunities to connect with fans—in ways that even the fans themselves never would have expected.

Setting a new standard

But WNBA fans have traditionally faced the kind of barriers commiserate with a young league that lacks the financial prowess of more mainstream entities like the NBA or NFL, compounded by the deep-seated effects of inequity in women’s sports. For decades, there’s been no consistent, centralized digital place for fans to connect with their favorite teams, players, or one another—even just to find scores or game times. The league didn’t even have the fully dedicated digital resources or staffers needed to build tools fans might use until early 2022.

But the last 18 months have signified real change, starting with the league raising $75 million—the most ever for a women’s professional sports association—for evolutionary efforts including brand elevation and marketing, globalization initiatives, and growth of consumer touchpoints. As part of this, the WNBA and Deloitte Digital quickly identified the need to build a new digital experience for the fan base.

“We really needed to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate what was working, and rebuild from scratch what wasn’t,” says Dev Ward, who serves as the league’s Director of Digital Products.

Beginning in early 2022, the WNBA and Deloitte Digital leveraged a series of fan-facing workshops to find out what fans wanted most. The answers were near unanimous, even from the actual WNBA players who were surveyed as well: “know me” expectations, like personalized digital content, and quick, consolidated access to league information like scores and schedules. The more Ward and her growing digital team stepped back and assessed the reality of the league’s current digital experience, the more they realized how accurate the feedback was. That would be a guiding light for change.

"(The process) was full of empathy ... and that's what motivated us,” Ward says. “We wanted people to be able to see this experience and say, 'Wow—they did that, and this is exactly what I would expect of a professional sports league.'"

Over the course of the next 18 months, the WNBA worked with Deloitte Digital to create a new website and mobile app, united through a cohesive underlying digital strategy. The base of the new properties not only allows the league to link fan experiences to better product consumption paths, but also creates opportunities to tell the players’ stories around inclusion, equality, and social justice.

The effort’s success has been evident: app downloads are up nearly 400%, and the WNBA’s digital presence has more than doubled its monthly active users. Most importantly, the league’s relationship with its supporting fandom has never been stronger.

Surprise and delight

Sinclair, one of the largest TV station operators in the US, has nearly 200 stations in more than 100 markets; it ultimately covers about 40% of American households. Like most station operators, the company’s history is rooted in people gathering around a TV to watch and discuss what matters to them.

Yet Sinclair faces a challenge common to traditional broadcasters: unlike streaming platforms, which inherently collect and personify consumer data, broadcasters still lack a direct digital connection with their audience, and that makes it more challenging to truly build informed consumer relationships.

“As we seek to engage and interact with growing audiences, we’re committed to exploring and experimenting where we believe fans will gather.” says Sinclair’s Chief Business Officer J.R. McCabe.

So the company began that experimentation with a specific audience and property: tennis fans, through Sinclair’s lauded Tennis Channel offering. As a testing ground, the Tennis Channel makes sense: Tennis is a global sport with a proud fan base that voraciously plays and consumes the sport. It offered a built-in fandom—so how could Sinclair build a stronger connection with its fans while also harnessing existing resources, like decades of archival video?

The answer was in building a cutting-edge metaverse experience that could exceed fans’ wildest expectations.

In collaboration with Deloitte Digital and the Unlimited Reality team—which is focused on helping clients create and connect virtual worlds—Sinclair built a virtual community experience in which fans could connect with the sport, the Tennis Channel’s programming, and each other. And in 2023, at the prestigious BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, the Tennis Channel test-drove an exclusive, invitation-only fan experience based in a digital and photorealistic space recreation.

Invitees participated both on-site at Indian Wells and around the world on their laptops in a series of browser-based experiences, such as exploring a clubhouse environment (complete with scavenger hunt and mini-games) and touring a near-replica of the legendary Indian Wells Tennis Garden Stadium 1. A social viewing experience harnessed spatial audio to let fans experience programming on the Jumbotron, hit balls around a digital court, tour points of interest in 360-degree digital environments, and interact with each other. Historical video was available as a kind of hall of fame walkthrough, creating a story around the history of the sport. Building such an immersive experience was technically difficult; Deloitte Digital had to bring together unexpected tech providers like Epic Games (and the Unreal Engine 5 that Fortnite operates on) and Amazon Web Services for the space’s creation and computing platform.

And the fans responded: nearly 70% of those who participated said they loved the experience and wanted more. Many provided feedback that Sinclair plans to use in future iterations of the product, which might include rewarding fans for continued participation, expanded social capabilities, advertising partners, and novel retail experiences. Like the digital racket you’re hitting the ball with inside the experience? Perfect—you can buy it from Wilson with the click of a button.

For Sinclair, this is just the start of engaging more directly with their customers around a specific passion like a sport or entertainment property. The long-term goal? Moving toward a more holistic loyalty consumption model, where viewer engagement—across the full spectrum of Sinclair’s properties—is rewarded with unique opportunities and limited-access experiences.

“Not everyone can go to Indian Wells for the physical experience,” says Jordan Wiggins, Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “But I can have a fun experience just sitting in my home. The notion of democratizing sports entertainment to a broader audience is something that we take pretty seriously.”
 

What a fan wants

Both tennis fans and WNBA fans share a hunger for consistent connection to each sport and its athletes, fueled by a desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Just as importantly, they share a desire for the unexpected—a translation of the unpredictability of sports’ base nature into the daily experience of supporting it.

Together with Deloitte, both Sinclair and the WNBA have done precisely that: combine baseline fan expectations with the raw ingredients of their respective sports’ advantages to create wholly unexpected digital experiences that cement lasting relationships with fans. From hitting a digital forehand winner in Stadium 1 to a centralized app that holds the near-entirety of the daily WNBA programming, these are more than just the experiences that fans wanted—they are experiences that fans never dared to fully dream for.

And now, through unexpected combinations of providers, strategies, and technologies, they’ve been fully brought to life—and that’s the very definition of fan service.