Data analytics and AI on and off the court in Orlando

Even though they bowed out of this season in the first round of the playoffs, the Orlando Magic has reached the NBA Finals twice since the team was founded in 1989. Despite hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy eluding the team so far, however, the franchise is at the forefront of digital innovation to revolutionize the fan experience.

Sellout games have historically served as motivation for the team to exceed expectations for home crowds. Knowing this, the Magic has signed a strategic agreement with multinational analytics and AI software developer SAS with the aim to maximize impact during games at the Kia Center in downtown Orlando.

Specifically, the team will leverage the operational benefits of SAS Viya, the provider’s platform, to enhance gameday experiences and personalize digital interactions with fans. “We continue to find ways to improve the fan experience,” says Jay Riola, chief strategy and innovation officer of the Orlando Magic. “SAS Viya will allow us to go deeper and create an even more personalized experience for the teams’ followers.”

With this step forward, The Magic’s mission is to create legendary experiences. “The observability of data and the insights derived will allow us to continually evolve and grow while keeping our fans at the top of our game,” he adds.

The primary goal of the enhanced partnership is to understand what actions and engagements keep people coming back. So by using the SAS Viya data and AI platform to analyze fan engagement on the app, each bit of data can translate into more personalized interactivity, exclusive content, and offers tailored uniquely to individual preferences.

With enhanced data visualization, modeling, and estimation capabilities, the Magic can optimize ticket sales forecasting and leverage their success with dynamic pricing while ensuring ticket availability.

At the center of the strategy

After two decades with the Magic, Riola recalls the team’s core values ​​like a mantra: teamwork, community, delivering legendary service, and in particular focus now, innovation. “We seek to create a frictionless fan experience through technology, making it as simple and smart as possible,” he says. “For the past 15 years, we’ve analyzed data and explored areas like AI to grow our fan base beyond the city of Orlando, and improve our overall business operations.” There have also been initiatives to foster real-time engagement so fans can appear in the arena and feel like they’re competing in a contest or influencing the live experience.

New technologies are constantly emerging, and Riola is vigilant about exploring opportunities as part of the NBA ecosystem. The core of the Magic’s offering in particular is based on supporting live events, where fans have to come to the arena. However, there are many other ways in which tech can interact and engage with fans. “We’ve looked at different leadership perspectives,” he says. So whether it’s through virtual reality or augmented reality, there’s a concentration on resources, efforts, and investment in various digital, AI, and biometric techniques to modernize or adapt the fan experience. 

Simply put, hyper-personalization is approached from a dual perspective. They’re first committed to providing tools to create flexible offerings fans are looking for. “It’s about designing your membership experience to your liking, personalizing, and creating what you look for each game day,” he says. Then there’s the commitment to offering content Orlando Magic fans demand in a way that’s meaningful.

The value of teamwork

Achieving the team’s goals in terms of technological innovation and digitalization is no easy task, and without the support of partners like SAS, such a mission would be impossible. “In the sports business, it’s inevitable to rely on a variety of different technologies to create the entire operation,” says Riola. “That’s why we do that on a large number of technology providers and partners to carry out our initiatives.”

In terms of analytics and data management, he adds, it was in 2010 when the Magic first began to see their potential, and Riola was there from day one of the initial partnership with SAS. From that moment on, the alliance shaped the future of the team’s operations.

“Big data became a growing field at the time, and the ticketing industry was being disrupted by online resale markets,” he says. “We realized our data had enormous value as a business, as did the data we had on the teams. Back then, we were one of the first to build a company, a webcast, and realize we had these different systems containing information about our business and our fans. We needed to integrate them into a single environment and then use analytics tools to make predictions, generate business intelligence, and automate processes.”

So what was needed then, and now, was a partner that would allow the company to effectively manage that data. “We’ve used SAS for a long time to ingest data, design our warehouse, and work with third parties, like Snowflake, which is our cloud database,” Riola says. “We’re now on an AWS, so we need a partner that can work with other technology partners we have, from databases and storage to other business intelligence tools that SAS can interact with,” he says. “That’s important to us because in the sports business, we use many different technologies also used by the gatekeepers of the company that contain value and information.”

When talking specifically about the data and information value the team handles, privacy and compliance policies are naturally enforced. “We’re very careful about privacy and consent, and comply with all privacy laws and restrictions,” he says. “Yet our goal is to collect as much data as we can about the fans so our relationship with them is as personalized and meaningful as possible.”