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How the NFL teamed up with Amazon to gain new insights into its fan base

“The NFL has always had a large audience to mine for data and insights—the problem has been stitching that data together from disparate sources to form actionable marketing insights,” Ad Age’s Asa Hiken writes in a post titled “How the NFL is using Amazon’s data platform to power personalized marketing.” Hiken spoke with Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer, who shed light on how the Amazon partnership has dramatically increased the league’s ability to parse actionable data through its fan data platform.

The details: “The NFL’s need for data support stems from the difficulty in aggregating information from numerous sources across 32 teams,” Hiken notes. “Previously the league could not unify roughly 90 billion daily fan attributes, but with advances in AI and machine learning, it can now sift through that ocean of information and categorize it accordingly, Ballew said. Over the past 18 months, the result has been a fourfold increase in the number of people the NFL can see comprehensively through its fan data platform, reaching more than 70 million individuals.”

Essential context: “Last month, the NFL popped the hood on its fan data initiative built through AWS, revealing more details about how it organizes vast troves of consumer information,” Hiken reports. “The NFL and Amazon have become close partners in recent years, as the league streams more games on Amazon’s Prime Video. Meanwhile, AWS has become more tightly woven into Amazon’s marketing and advertising services, as well.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Weekly jobless claims fall to 233,000, less than expected, in a positive sign for labor market,” CNBC reports

• “Fed’s Schmid Says ‘We Are Not Quite There’ in Cooling Inflation,” Bloomberg News reports

• “Taylor Swift concerts and the Olympics could lead to a fresh surge in global inflation, UBS says,” from Business Insider

• “Mortgage Rates Drop to 15-Month Low,” The Wall Street Journal reports

Also see: Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news

Omega, Visa, Google top Tubular’s ranking of brands leveraging the Olympics on YouTube

Social video analytics platform Tubular is out with new data that shows how global brands have been garnering big audiences for their Olympics content on YouTube. Across the past 90 days, the following five global brands—including Google, owned by YouTube parent Alphabet—have racked up a combined 229 million views for a mix of Olympics-themed campaigns and Olympics-related content marketing. (To watch a representative YouTube video from each brand, click on the brand name link.)

1. Omega: 81.5 million views
2. Visa: 60.0 million views
3. Google: 35.5 million views
4. Samsung: 32.2 million views
5. Nike: 22.5 million views

See also: 4 Paris Olympics lessons for marketers

Small agencies think big about data

ICYMI: Ad Age recently revealed the winners of the 2024 Small Agency of the Year Awards—see the full package here—and, as always, data was a key part of the narrative for various honorees. Among them:

• “How DCX Growth Accelerator deployed data to increase brand relevance”

• “Avalon Consulting uses data to send a direct mail lifeline to nonprofits”

• “Exverus Media's investment in tech innovation pays off”

Just briefly

• “How Apple’s new pop-up blocker is a warning to advertisers,” from Ad Age

• “Gen Z’s digital detox trend—from social-first to social-free,” also from Ad Age

• “X agrees to not use some EU user data to train AI chatbot,” Reuters reports

• “AI models trained on AI-generated data could spiral into unintelligible nonsense, scientists warn,” from Live Science

• “Here’s How To Stop Your Car From Sharing Your Data,” from The Autopian

• “Nearly 3 Billion People Hacked in National Public Data Breach. What You Need to Know,” from Kiplinger

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.