We’re back with another SportsBiz Spotlight, a feature that shines a light on fantastic organisations operating within the sport industry.
Our latest guest is Tradable Bits, the all-in-one SaaS platform that allows sports organisations to manage their fan-marketing, working with the likes of the Toronto Raptors, Tennessee Titans, Dallas Mavericks and Live Nation. We’re sitting down with the team to learn more about their business!
Tell us about the business?
Tradable Bits is a SaaS platform that acts as an all-in-one ecosystem to manage every aspect of fan-marketing efforts for the music, sports, and entertainment industry in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
What does Tradable Bits do?
The Tradable Bits platform allows partners to securely collect first-party fan data with easy-to-use digital activation campaigns which enable partners to get a better understanding of their fans. Essentially, imagine having one place to centralize your data and, from this, the ability to create a single fan view to personalize the fans’ experience in the venue, at home and online at scale.
The platform enables partners to increase their addressable audience and service both their local and international fan bases using one source of intelligence. This has proven to reduce ad spend by reaching the relevant audiences to sell tickets and merchandise. But more importantly, partners now have a much better understanding of their fans and as a result, can create more personalized digital experiences for their fans.
When was it founded?
Founded in 2010 by Darshan Kaler and Dmitry Khrisanov, Tradable Bits currently works with industry leaders such as Toronto Raptors, Dallas Mavericks, FC Cincinnati, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, Australian Football League, and Viacom CBS, to name a few.
What’s the main purpose of the organization?
Tradable Bits’ mission as an organization is to build better fan experiences by helping our partners get to know their fans better. When you super-serve fans, everyone prospers.
Sports and entertainment organizations have always had limited budgets and resources to understand their fans. Hence, the challenge of doing more with less. This is where our platform comes in and fits the need by providing scalable solutions to help them sell more tickets and authentically engage their fans without increasing advertising spend. We have seen most organizations are challenged by the following:
- Data systems are siloed which reduces the accessibility and ineffective utilization of fan data in real-time.
- Personalization of digital assets, marketing communications, and live activations are hard to achieve at scale.
- Due to limited access to first-party data from social platforms, creating comprehensive fan profiles is time and cost-prohibitive. Furthermore, most legacy data collection systems are not updated to reflect today’s dynamic nature of fan engagement.
To address these challenges, we built a comprehensive cloud-based platform that helps partners understand their fans based on their interactions across various social channels and in turn create better fan experiences digitally. To do this, we assist partners by:
- Integrating data from multiple sources to create a clear “single fan view” which amalgamates behaviour across different mediums.
- Segmenting fans into addressable audiences using machine learning dynamic data filtration systems.
- Activating and engaging the fan base through meaningful digital engagements and thus, monetizing the fan base better with limited advertising spend thereby increasing return on investment.
If failure wasn’t a possibility, what would be your biggest ambition?
We want to reshape and re-imagine what fan experience can become. We aim to be a driving force behind building better fan experiences, regardless of the medium preferred by the fans.
We are continuously pushing the physical and digital world to improve the fan experience. For example, we have started building AR activations to engage fans as they come back to the stadium and venue.
This is a journey we are taking along with our partners and their fans. In the last year, the pandemic has impacted everyone globally. While everyone was forced to be at home we extended our platform to create a second screen experience to help fans connect with their favourite artists and teams with an interactive broadcast solution called FanXP™. This allows our partners to collect first-party fan data, interactions, interests while monetizing an enhanced second-screen experience. The tool enables the creation of a digital arena for fans to feel like they are in the venue with the ability to engage in interactive trivia and switch camera angles while they watch the live events. Today, FanXP™ is leveraged by some of the biggest teams in the NBA and NHL, such as The Toronto Raptors, Portland Trail Blazers and Toronto Maple Leafs, as a way to engage their fans at home.
What’s your USP?
We’re a technology solutions company. Many of the tools we’ve built over the years were driven by our partners reaching out to us to help them with resolving their challenges and pain points. The Tradable Bits platform is a building block to quickly build smart effective solutions specifically within the sports, music and entertainment industries. We love building new things in collaboration with our partners. We can’t thank our partners enough for the support they’ve extended us and for innovating with us every single day!
How many people work at Tradable Bits and in what capacity? I.e. job roles etc.
We’re a family of 30 people that work across 5 countries. Half our company focuses on product development and the other half focuses on customer success, business development and marketing. We pride ourselves on being lean and resourceful. The passion that our people bring every day has been a driving force behind our sustained growth over the last few years.
Who are your usual clients?
Our partners are typically sports teams, music promoters and music festivals. We work with several teams in the NBA, NHL, NFL and the AFL. We’re now expanding into Europe and can’t wait to start working with more teams here. We’re all huge fans of football and can’t wait to help partners in Europe solve some of their challenges.
Who would be your dream client?
As mentioned previously, a lot of our product development has been thanks to our partners. So, to us, a dream partner is one who is willing to innovate and consistently push the boundaries of fan engagement. Working as the technology partner to these organizations helps us reimagine fan experiences and, at the end of the day, the fans benefit from this which is what it is all about.
How can people connect with Tradable Bits? What’s your website and socials?
You can find us at http://tradablebits.com/ and on LinkedIn here.
Thank you to the team for talking to us about Tradable Bits – it was fantastic to learn more about the business!
Finally, thanks to you, the reader, for reading our latest SportsBiz Spotlight! If you would like to feature your sports based business or know of an organisation you would like to see feature, get in touch!
