Today we're speaking with Paul ba Lu, the chief data and analytics officer of the NFL about the League's use of data, analytics, and AI to optimize gain performance. Ensure player, safety improve fan engagement and increase revenue streams. Our guest co-host is Q Harrison Terry, the head of growth marketing at the Mark Cuban companies at the center of the journey always is, can you?
Up organizations, do two things connect with their customers and our case, our fans better and more intimately. And then, secondly, can you improve your operations? And in our case that involves improving the game? So as I look at the journey that I've been on, it's interesting that I've gotten to this point. I have a deep love for sports
deep, love for the game. And now, we're at a point where Sports in particular is focused on using data and analytics, the science that comes from data and analytics to accomplish those two goals. So very similar to my journey and Automotive Of my journey and financial services and Retail over the last three-plus decades. Now I get to talk about football, they do something. So on top of worrying about the technical side of my job, I get
to talk about football. So you think about two wonderful things going on my passion for data and analytics, my passion for sports, put the two of them together and my days are quite interesting and to be honest, a lot of fun, one of the things that is exciting about that. But also acknowledges where you bent is In both retail Banking and now even Sports on the
football side. You still have to worry about the consumer and what ways has the consumer experience, part of your job changed in and what differs now compared to even the previous parts of your career. So if you go way back, when because as Michael knows, I've been at this a long time, we really struggle to understand who you were and therefore how to connect with you in ways that are meaningful.
I always like to say, we want to engage with you meaningfully in Text that is the right conversation with you that you want to have with us. So decades ago we just struggle because we didn't have the capabilities to do that. So we resulted in very coarse things that we did, we surveyed you, we tested things. Coarsely, we'd send a lot of things into your mailbox, not, you know, mailbox by the way,
your actual postal code mailbox. Well today our ability to see and know and engage with you is driven by the fact that we have the assets from a data standpoint from an analytic standpoint. Point in an engagement standpoint, think about marketing technology and all the changes in the last decade and what the league embraced is.
The fact that we, despite the success of the NFL, with the world changing in terms of how content is being consumed and who owns that relationship, we have to get in front of that. We have to, with the respect in the privilege of our fans, know them and engage with them in the way they want to be engaged with. So our largest initiative at the league from a data and analytic standpoint.
It is our one to one program. And so, very similar to what you see with retailers or an automotive or in financial services. We're now focused on doing the same thing in other sports leagues, are getting there as well, because if you're going to be successful, you have to connect and the way fans want to be connected.
And by the way, under the age of 40, they want to be connected even more differently than just turning on the game every Sunday. So, that's a big part of the journey we're on. And what I like about it is it really shows the power and leverages the power Or what it data and analytics organization can do, what is the role then of data and analytics in getting closer to the fans and addressing. Those customer experience goals
that you were just describing. Our role is a significant one because in partnership with marketing and partnership with our clubs or media organization, we're providing the ingredients to bake the right souffle as I would describe it. We're responsible for bringing Together of that complete view, we're actually the first sports League that has aligned with our clubs to bring all of our data to fan on fans together in a
systematic way. And that's a big step for Forks because it unlocks our ability to understand tens of millions of fans systematically and increasingly pretty close to real time. And then in working with marketing and media and other channels, we are driving those insights into the relevant conversations to those individual pans. And then of course, Measuring and constantly learning through the feedback loops, that's
extremely important. Because once again, connecting with fans in a way that makes a difference in their relationship with us is how you deepen that relationship with us. We don't take for granted that we are the biggest Sports league in the United States. And you could argue the biggest in the world. We understand that going forward. It's about deepening that relationship. That's what great companies and what great organizations do. And you can't do that.
If you don't see a no No, you can talk about how much you love your customers, but if you can't see and know and then act upon that information is problematic, so we're focused on everything. On the data side, systematically all the way from acquisition to governance usage, everything on the technology side, and then, of course, the analytics and the insights that get driven through
that ecosystem. So, we're engaging in a way that makes a difference and it's to the credit of the commissioner and the credit of our owners they've embraced this because they understand that the future has more of a direct Consumer focus and all the fragmentation and media that's out there and we have to be prepared for it. We have a really interesting question from Twitter, very important question on this topic and this is from our Salon Khan and he wants to know how do you
manage the Privacy aspects as you're addressing these? These customer experience goals Fan Experience goals. One of the pillars is our data governance organization, and we have a group Within that, that's responsible for consent, working with our legal team and the general counsel's of all the clubs. And we start off with our philosophy on consent and privacy and that is, we are
going to be transparent. We are going to give our fans controls to express their preferences if they choose to do. So and their relationship with us. And then we're going to make sure that the privilege of having that data is used in a way that provides them value that we're not just doing it till we can carpet bomb Communications to their We're focused very much on making sure that the communications are relevant. That's the journey.
We're on 20 years ago. When we started going down the path of data. Governance issues around privacy were very limited because we were in the early days of gathering transactional data assets on individuals. We're now at the point where it has to be one of the pillars of the overall strategy. And we're very proud of the fact that we made it a pillar. One of the four pillars of the strategy around 121 And every day we spend, Time on it.
And every day, we're making sure we're doing it the right way, not only in the US, but globally because it's a complex journey. And by the way, if you don't do this right there are brand issues as well as compliance issues. And, of course, the NFL spends a lot of time, focusing on the brand side of it, Paula, one of the questions I have around that is centered or in the form of excess ability.
Now, externally, I mean, you, you have your partner's in the clubs and they know how to, you know, manage the data into I'm not Listen not so much worried about it from that made but more so internally you've got a lot of Partners. You've got a lot of fans and you've got a ton of teams that you've got to manage. How do you make the data accessible internally and go about it in a way where it ensures near real-time visibility. So people have the right and sites but are doing.
So in a way where you can win with the data, our approach is not only data governance, which is all about what we're doing and standardization. And data quality and access controls and so on. But we're focused in partnership with marketing on marketing governance, how are we using the data? How are you orchestrating it? And then analytic governance, which goes through the
validation processes. So it sounds like a lot of governance doesn't have to be a government type governance program, but you have to have those elements in place and you've got to run this with that degree of discipline that you're we all believe in this. Theoretically this concept of democratization of data created. Everybody make it, everybody make sure everybody has access to it, but at the end of the day, you have to govern it appropriately.
And that's not why we built. This whole ecosystem involving our clubs, by the way in that ecosystem, because there's 33 entities at the NFL and you have to be able to orchestrate coordinate, understand what you're doing, or guess what happens. You everybody wants to communicate to everybody all the time, and that uncoordinated side of it, not only causes compliance issues, but the bigger risk and All that is that fans, start tuning, you out.
Customers start tuning you out. And that's not what this all about. This is about deepening the relationship which by the way, leads you to things such as sometimes more is not better. The last is better in terms of your communication and that's all been built into the system.
We're launching in the system we have developed in the last year or so be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the Subscribe button at the top of our website so we can send you our newsletter and notify Of upcoming live shows. So a lot of your effort then is focused on that Fan Experience. You, you mentioned there are four pillars. Can you describe what those are? We support the league on every initiative player, health, and safety.
Football operations, officiating media operations, media optimization. So we go across the entire league and while fan is a big part of what we do, all these other activities are equally as important because Our commitment is to help the league achieve its strategic objectives, which is to make the game better to maintain the Integrity of the game to make sure that our content is being consumed,
efficiently and effectively. So it is very, very important that we look at it that way when you think about our structure, in terms of the fan cited it from a journey standpoint, it starts with data and clearly all the data management aspects of that, we then have a pillar around analytics and insights It's because once you have the ingredients question is what insights are going to generate and how are you going to continuously measure and track the robustness?
Then we have the pillar around marketing technology and marketing governance and orchestration. And then the last pillar is privacy and consent and the related enabling capabilities. Because within that bucket, you also have identity resolution and related capabilities, you have to have if you're going to do this at scale, because when you think about the data, Exit. He's that. We're bringing in. It's pretty hard to govern. Systematically your relationship with an individual.
If you can't know them. And to know them, you have to see them and you have to validate that they are them. Which by the way, is poor grammar, but you get the point that you go down that path. So think of it is a full ecosystem, that thing gets wrapped around the needs of the organization and then you execute off that ecosystem through your channels and that's related to the data that you have. So, you It's about like, how the
breath of the data. But one thing I want to apartment point out in particular with the NFL's, the depth, like not only do you have pretty well. Structured information pertaining to the game's main gauge means that even the fans and the stadiums but you are in charge of one of the largest media events in the world. That is the Super Bowl. And as a marketer that is like one of the most fascinating times because everyone's tunde, right? And with that.
What data do, I mean, you have to manage the data of the Super Bowl, right? Like you're one of my rod correct? Not. Yeah. So just to be clear. It is the largest event that one. Okay, it's the largest I could resist that because you know it is it is the largest of that 200 million viewers by the way and the Super Bowl has just concluded. So just seeing it just wrap your head around that.
No other event gets anywhere. About 20 billion viewers other than our playoff games and Monday nights and Sunday nights and so on, it's a it's a wonderful question. So the breadth and the depth of the data we have is pretty amazing to tell you the truth. It's one of the situations where we're Gathering data from what bands are doing in stadiums and what they're doing with the clubs. But we also have relationships with the fans permissions, where we're getting the data from our partners.
In terms of transactional relationships that we have, Have with those Partners. We also have a data development organization, that's constantly focused on what new data assets can we acquire and how can we bring them in? So we are, we're blessed with actually, the opportunity to have lots and lots of data from a breadth and depth perspective, the real challenge we have is like most organizations been
around for a long time. That data was created for a specific use case and now we're trying to leverage it for other things to get this holistic picture. So a big part of our journey has been too. Can we bring the data together? Can we cleanse it? Can we standardize it? And we deal with the ability of properly. Associating it with an
individual. So it's pretty pretty amazing to think about where we're at. It's also pretty amazing to think about where we're heading because we're still in the early phases and with the right permissions in place in the support from fans, what we're going to be able to build in terms of our version of a Walled Garden is pretty amazing.
When you think of the tens of millions of fans that we can see and know because the passion for the sport is so high and with the right respect for Them, we can build very deep relationship, so it's great question, but and yes, the Super Bowl is the largest event. So I just said, maybe the World Cup every four years you could argue but wherever year just to be crystal, clear about that point. The Super Bowl is the one that's a qaq and I are having a good time. Me as a marketer, you know,
that's the dream, right? You've Won event, 200 million people, that 200 worldwide, you have pop culture Sports entertainment, some of the best products, and partners that also
coincide with this. And, you know, the second dissecting that data and then leveraging it to do it again the following year and then even sharing that with your partner to your team's, it's just a that's what's an incredible role where you're defining really the future of Most organizations because it's a reality now that most orgs can, if they want to obtain and build pretty large data sets, but how you maneuver said data set is like probably the most important thing and
we're learning from you. Yeah. How do you leverage it? How do you bring it to life? I like my favorite expression is, how do you bring it to life? And so I'll give you a good example of this. We've been developing an alternative way of assessing how our content. Is being consumed in a fragmented media world. Not just looking at traditional measurements of TV, or even digital or streaming, but comprehensively, how is it being consumed through social media?
How's it being consumed through PR Communications? How's it being consumed through legalized sports, betting, all of those things around it, and we had to do that, because of the fact that if you can get that data and understand the comprehensiveness of how your content is being really consumed it, Only shapes where you want to put your emphasis where you want to place your backs. What am I doing right? What else can I adjust in terms of by mixed?
And that's been a fascinating Journey for us to go down. We've now validated and we have those Diagnostics to have another data set to understand what we see, we call it NFL as a platform but it's it's really this ability to see how our content is being consumed and how much time and individuals spending with us by the way, in the month of January in the u.s. 3 billion hours and Over three billion dollars were spent consuming NFL content in the United States just in one month,
three billion hours. It's just you don't have a team that's that large that can ingest 3 billion hours worth of data. So like talk to us about your partner's, right? Like I remember just I study computer science so some of the more fascinating case studies early on with AWS actually we're with the dfl next-gen was the
platform. Yes. Okay. So that project in particular, you all were first movers in a space that you didn't have to be. Is it because you need help processing the data or what's the what's the idea there? You know that it's always this great question of the ability to buy a, do you rent it? And when you're going through and the way I describe it is that the right ecosystem. Now is Lego blocks. So years ago when you were building The whole data and analytics and insight.
Each block is a whole you get up in the morning and people think about it is as it used to be a guy have to go to one vendor. I'd have to go to one partner and you had closed systems and so on now it's an ecosystem and I approach it from a try to approach it from a Proto humility, where I get up in the morning. And I think about this in the context of I don't have all the answers. We're not going to build everything in house. So how can we at the end of the day?
Leverage, our relationships with these great partners and AWS is a really good example. Great partner, the NFL next-gen stats is a big enabler for us and football, officiating, player, health, and safety. So the partnership with AWS is just a good example of us. Saying if there's a partner that can fit into the ecosystem and help us do two things, get smarter faster or fill a technology Gap. That's how we look at it and it's really the journey we're at it. For me, going over the last few
decades. I think it's probably one of the biggest pivot Points. We don't spend enough time on is that the ability to piece together different parts of the technology stack. And that ecosystem has been transformed just in the last decade if we just pause and take that step back because again, even 2010 ish, we were still wet it to saying, my stack had to be ax and I was dealing with this set of vendors. Well, now take a look at anybody Buddies. Modern stack, it's the
environments in the cloud. The software tools are eclectic. They're all over the place. My analytic platform can basically be just about anything, which is what we do today and all the piece parts are really coming together. So pretty fascinating. It's a to me. What you just asked is one of the critically important questions we as a field have to continue to stretch our thinking on because you know the day the were being asked to do two
things generate insights. That are more precise and to take latency out of the equation, that's my version of Moore's law. By the way, if anybody plays around with that, I have rights to it. Because that was a concept. I came up with what any partner that helps us do that. We're going to be very interested. We have a very much related question from again, Our Salon Khan comes back and he wants to know how do you manage decision-making Based on data as
opposed to gut? Feel when in any industry, there's a human tendency among the people receiving that data to, you know, rely on their own experience and intuition as opposed to trusting that data. So as you're working with decision-makers inside the league and at teams, how do you, how do you manage that aspect of it? It's something you. And I've actually talked about in the past and that is you have to have an orientation that it's going to be Art and Science and establish organizations.
And that as you move towards science to just support more and more decision-making going towards, what we describe as model-driven, decisioning you have to bring them along through the Journey, you have to deal with the change management. The human dimensions of this, the transformational side of
this. It's one of the reasons why within the field, you see many of us now, having business transformation functions or we have translators, or we have engagement managers because if you don't invest the time to do that, That these organizations are established and people are established. And the way they make decisions that old adage that people don't object to change, the objective being changed, is true in this case and that's an any
established organization. So that's that to me Remains The Secret Sauce. I'm engaging with the business partners powering forward in a way where it's beneficial to them. Bringing them along to the
journey. I can remember when I joined the league initially the You're pulling me aside and saying please educate us all the time and he understood that and I understand it because all the years I've been doing this, if you look at the early Legacy companies that had very large investments in data analytics, I had one of the largest when I was at GM for a decade. We had one of the largest organizations that we would consider to be a data and
analytics organization. Now, we never got to full adoption of all the work we were doing because we underestimated the The need to change and have the change management component in the equation. There's a couple questions from Twitter and I want to I want to preface this question with the just the precursor element. Then it fills and Just Sports in general, I've changed. I mean MBA is filling this as well with the unbundling of the Gable package. Right. You know the regional Sports
networks. They're not making enough money. They so there's there's there's possible bankruptcies that can into on that front and that's going to have an impact. On all of sports but more specifically like in this world where you're experiencing disruption what are the some of the shining stars that you're seeing on the horizon. So first our strategy is to have optionality and optionality because for anybody to call the ball ten years from now it's
it's an interesting challenge. We've publicly stated multiple times that we feel very good. We have long-term agreements with our play Layers. We have long-term agreements with our distribution channels. That's great. It gives us time to make investments and prepare for the Future Part of the Investments and preparing. For the future is to have optionality and where you go and how your content is going to be distributed you to do that.
Well though, you still have to make the game better all the time. You got to connect with fans because if you own the relationship with the fans and you're making the game better, then your optionality for how you distribute is better because who knows what the future holds. Pause. So you got to get the fundamentals, right? You have to be prepared for that for us. We've been experimenting on a
number of fronts. You saw Amazon with Thursday night football, for instance, had a great first season. We proved that we could disseminate content through that channel, which is a page Channel at scale, 10 million viewers roughly every single week and we had some weeks. Well, above that, that's where we're at.
And we're continuing to experiment and trying to figure out where this is going at the same time, what we're making I'm sure is that we can control as much of our fate is possible in the way you do. That is make the game great, which it already is, but make it Greater make it better. And then make sure you can connect with your fans. Thus the investment and data and analytics is a critical enabler to us having that control of our future do as much as we can.
So with that Chris Peterson from Twitter, is asking the following question as far as disruptions on the horizon for the NFL in terms of either It's or control of all the data. How has the explosive growth of sports, betting change things for you all? It's a factor. Obviously, it's something that when you look at sports, we had to get comfortable with because you have to get comfortable with it because you don't want it to have negative repercussions on
the game. What we've done is we've continued to focus on striking the right balance, making sure that it's the Integrity of the game is still there and making sure that we're complying with how its role Going out. Obviously it has business impacts because gambling organizations. They always be organizations are big advertisers and they're promoting and they're doing all those things that are there from a data.
Analytic standpoint. We get lots of homework assignments, around making sure that we're tracking and understanding that there are no negative implications to me. I look at it is part of the overall puzzle of how we maintain the Integrity of the game. How we helped Tan because it's broader than us maintain the Integrity of the game or the future, but not a surprise that the world's there and not surprised that it continues to grow. And, and it's important to fans.
When we look at the amount of activity, going around legalized sports betting in football. It's very, very high. We take a very large share of that in the season, disproportionate share of the LSB activities between September and January about three-quarters of it. And sports are going to football Paul. We have not spoken at all about the use of data and analytics to help improve team performance to optimize the team. The football tell us about that. That seems pretty pretty
foundational. Yeah, it is and again as I said, when you think about data and analytics in a modern science, always think about a how am I connecting with my customer? My fans and then how am I improving my operation? So in automotive it was about quality and efficiency. And productivity and throughput in football. It's about improving the game and proving officiating,
improving performance. So the way I always think of it is in my side of it, my team is focused around supporting officiating and officiating analytics, and Rule changes and we provide a lot of support to player health and safety because of the work streams, we have there, the club level, they all now, every Club, all 32 clubs has analytics within their football part of their organization.
So you think about clubs they have a revenue Ooh, part of their organization, which they have data and analytics teams, which work, very closely with us. And then they have football teams or team members supporting the football side of their equation. And you see it, you see it in terms of football strategy, you see it, in terms of probabilities being used, think about the, everybody's now amazed at how often teams, go for it on fourth down. Well, that's driven by
probability analysis. It makes more sense to go for it on fourth down than it does to punt. And so when we look back on it years ago, Can always remember a game between the paths and I think paying was still in Indianapolis at the time where I'll check win for it on somewhere around is 35 yard line in the fourth quarter and it was fourth and not one, it was more like fourth and six or seven and everybody was just appalled. Why did he go for it?
And of course the reason he went for his, he knew if he gave the ball back to paintin, the probability of Peyton walking down the field and scoring was very, very high. So you can See that in the early days now it's systemically embedded in all teams and we'll see, more and more analytics and Technology being leveraged to continue, to improve the quality of the game, the Integrity of the game, the effectiveness of officiating, my team doing that for the league.
On a day-to-day basis is we've got lots of things to do every single day. We're asked to do a lot on that front and it's actually one of the high points of my week is just all the things we're working on. On that front because it's really exciting to see how technology and data and analytics will continue to drive this great game and the excitement of the game. Because to the earlier question, that's how you prepare for an uncertain future. You excellent.
On the things you can control and you create optionality in your strategy. And that's what it's all about. I do want to get into a few things. The first thing is generative AI, you've got a ton of data that you're collecting at scale. We're now here where consumers can participate in the experience of generative. AI, how is the NFL thinking about it? Especially in regards to the data that you have it's early
days for us? But whether it's generative AI or what we're doing with ML type applications, part of it always comes down to what you see generative, AI being used for in that is either natural, language processing, type Solutions, insert call centers or fan engagement or interactions or, or so on. Or some derivative there. And I would say a large part of our Focus large part of my team sits there because that's the Journey of driving hyper and accurate responsiveness to a consumer.
Having said that, when you think about all the things we're doing, and let's call it the advanced analytics field, not just generative AI, but you start looking at things like computer visioning and related technologies that work, we've been doing goes all the way from player health and safety support which we provide support to them and our external Partners on that front to sponsorship Effectiveness.
We've been doing sort of all sorts of fascinating things to determine the value of Impressions and exposures and other things that go along with it and we're all that takes us is an interesting question because again, it always anchors back into the things you're trying to resolve. Can I engage with you more meaningfully, and can I provide support to our partner and or ourselves?
So what they're doing? Operationally is having the right outcome so high on our list like everybody else the opportunities for more advanced analytics the opportunities for applying the science now at scale and cost effectively is in front of us going to be an interesting couple of years. We've got a whole Rd skunkworks team in my shop that's kicking around applications right now. Elizabeth Shaw from Twitter is wondering, you know, what are the few ways that you organize
that data? And Think about it at scale, when we get up in the morning are organizing. Construct comes down to think of it as Three Rivers. So there's data around the individual insert fans, but could be businesses as well. So we're treating businesses is an individual entity. There's data that specifically tied to player health and safety, which is a very
important area. Very sensitive area, by the way, because you've got a governor, you know, not only HIPAA, but we have the relationship with the PA that we Very closely on and then you have all the football data which includes things like
NGS. So our governing construct is we think of it as those three big rivers and then we've got support for the rest of the organization, whether it's HR or Finance or so on. But those are the three big rivers and we take a similar approach with all three of them in terms of we think of data management as an end and process it goes from, what's your Source? What's your ability to ingest? And curate it scale?
What your ability to integrate make it available, Leverage It and then what's the continuous process of enhancements and then all the enabling things underneath it. What is data quality processes or data standardization or in the case of damn data individual data identity resolution and
consent. That's why we think of it and I encourage anybody when you think about data and data management, always anchor back to the business, use cases and needs and The Logical construct that goes along with it because usually what you're faced with is you're trying to bring data. Transactional applications where the data was not designed to support your broader integrate, use cases. It was designed for a specific transaction.
So if you think about a CRM application that data is specifically there to generate an outbound communication. And now we're saying we're going to use all that data to integrate into get to this complete view of an individual. That's the right way to do it when you were talking earlier about your ecosystem, it seemed that That was also very much implied. That everything you think about you, do? You plan is about that scale, ultimately, for a data and analytics organization.
You ask yourself three questions in my mind, is it repeatable is it scalable and as a government and then you get into, obviously, the related things of? Does it add value to the organization and those sorts of things? But if you're going to do this, with Maximum Impact repeatability, Adders and then going right along with repeat abilities. Can I scale it? And then the third piece to this is because of the scale of the impact. We're now having you have to properly, govern it.
Oh, by the way, you go back three-plus decades ago when I started, we didn't have any of those concerns because our data sources were all your day nor established and very structured situations. They were government statistics or they do US Census or they were marketing research, surveys. So the Questions around scalability or governance were not really questions for us because we didn't have those issues. We were dealing with things that were so structured to begin
with. The US Census been around since 1790 and there's actually data from the US Census from 1790 most economic statistics on the US, are out there from 1949 on and the construct of the data has been preordained for all of us and oh by the way, the governance of it Is what are you
worried about? The data from You're a labor and statistics has no restrictions in terms of usage, now you can misinterpret it, which is a separate issue, but then we get into the 90s and then suddenly the world changes on its head because For the First time, we're able to capture transactional data at scale or observational data at scale, and then the whole world opens up to us around, can we manage that data? Can we govern it?
And not surprisingly, it was only in that period of time that governance really started to take off. Off both in terms of standardization quality as well as access controls. So that's a little bit of a history lesson for everybody, but when you think about it, go down that path and then you go out the next five to ten years.
And you say what's next? Well, what's next is the next generation of that is, is an even faster, leap, or bound, because the ability to make sense of it with limited latency is the next big Horizon for all of us. We have a couple of questions from Twitter and I'm going to Ask you to answer these quite quickly because we're simply going to run out of time. So the first one again from our Salon con is it's an interesting one. Do all teams have the same resources to collect manage and
share their data. No. So we are see variability by all 32, but all 32 are making substantial investments in this area and then related to that. What is your actual Ation ship with the team. So you work for I was going to say Central HQ, but that's not right. The team is might have an issue with that. Rises it a Trade Organization. So that's probably the right way, but we were closer
relationship with all 32 clubs. There are in essence, our board of directors, and from a data and analytic standpoint. It's an incredibly close working relationship. They leverage us for a set of capabilities and services. They leverage us to help Drive And then within the fan environment, we are the organization.
That's brought all the data and analytic capabilities together that all of them, consume and then another one from Twitter from Chris Peterson who says how do the multi-use stadiums and their Data Systems including Wi-Fi and cellular access points, steer data to the NFL during game. So I think what he's asking is as the The data is Flowing around the stadium. How do you guys get it?
Yeah. Actually it's the club's responsibility at that point in time and then there are specific data elements that the club share with us all visible and transparent to the fan and and all properly governed. So that again that governance is a is a crucial aspect governance governance governance. If anybody's trying to set up a data and organization from scratch, I encourage you to start with data governance. Love it Paul.
Have to do this. You probably are going to expect it. Your you probably thought you were in the green and you you're going to get away on Skate. I'm going to ask you to tell a data story and that data story is going to be about one big moment that happened this year. And that was the fact that you had Rihanna as the halftime performer in the Super Bowl. Did the floor is yours? I just looking for data story on that.
Well, it's interesting because halftime shows historically have given us pop in terms of viewership. We track that very closely, and we track. Wow, it's giving us pop. So, I've got all the data and yeah, but she did a great job and we got substantial lift, you saw the 200 million viewers and, and the tracking that we've released recently well soon. See, all of that. As we saw last year, we had about twenty six million
additional viewers. We estimate that came in for the halftime show on top of 208 million viewers overall. So we look at all of them. We share it with the companies that are working with. Some talk about it and see what insights we have. We spent a lot of time. Looking at what else we can do to drive more viewership and
more energy and more positivity. So it will all it's all getting examine reviewed top to bottom, but this year's Super Bowl was an A+. And the data is confirming that it was an A+ than just like last year with an A+, wait, an exciting game and tastic. See, you had weakened the fault of the following, you heard the previous year, and then you had
Rihanna the following year. The question I have there is like there was also covid the covid elevate, your data collection abilities, because it seems like post covid. You've just nailed it. I would say, post covid and everything going on with the league, prompted us to make some additional Investments and data analytics is one of them.
So, if you look at the last couple of years, coming out of covid, we did a lot of data collection and covid, because we had 22. Maintain Health, as well as keep the game going. And that was important for us. But covid, as well as other things are probably a forcing factor for us to put more emphasis and the area that I'm fortunate enough to be responsible for, but there's other things going on as well. The fragmentation of media and
how content is being consumed. Those are really, really big forcing functions for us as well because to the credit of the commissioner and and the senior officers of the league, they are being forwarded. Word leaning. And there's a heightened state of let's be prepared for the future and not just rest in our current success. So as we finish up, can you talk to us a little bit about where
this future is going? And I'm particularly interested in this to use an old term multimedia environment that we live in. So, maybe talk to us about any aspects of that, it's exciting as you and I have talked about For my day-to-day job is incredibly eclectic everyday is interesting because there's something new and exciting and player health or is a lot going on officiating. And course, all the fan work, but an area that really piques.
Our interest is the current and future state of how content is being consumed and why that's important for us is, we want to understand this better. We want to understand this better, so we can share with our partners and help them activate their relationship with us better.
All the partners and sponsors. We want to share it to Make sure that the things were investing in and putting emphasis on or driving, so, think about fantasy football, for instance, or all the things we're doing on social media and then it also gives us the opportunity to be out in front of where things may pivot and try to get as much of an early warning on that as possible. So early days, but very exciting for us. We feel very fortunate that we've been able to crack that code a bit.
And and cracking that code, we're spending a lot of time with ourselves in the Figuring out what we can do with it. Because, again, big question is, can you bring it to life? It's great to have the science, the science. When you're in a business setting has to add value. Well, one thing before we go, I want to thank you for leveraging. All of the best technology from across the world really and bringing that to create a
cohesive experience. I mean, one example that I've seen just in my few years as a fan is The NFL is one of the few places where you can get the best out of Amazon. Google Apple in many more to way too many for me to name and that's not true. Anywhere else in maybe I do like that about that info as a techie, it is quite a blessing, our partners like working with us.
And as we like to say, we like working with them and it's been an enjoyable, part of my role coming in because of the technology side of my job and I external technology, Those are great to work with quick. Question under the wire before we go from Twitter. Do some people consider governance as just another form of red tape? One of the favorite stories I like to say about governance is my first leader and data governance, which is almost 30 years ago, when I put her in the role.
She spent. She's tell me these stories. You'll probably spend 100% of my time explaining to people that I'm not the police. We're really what she was about was to make We had standards and consistency, and we're using data appropriately, which actually opens doors for people to leverage data, the exact opposite. So, somewhere down the road, maybe we'll change the language from governance because it does sound like, it's some type of a police action versus. It's an enablement action.
And if you do it right, it's all about enablement. And on that note, unfortunately, we're out of time. I want to say a huge. Thank you to Paul ba Lu from the National Football League. Thanks, thank you so much, Paul, for taking your time to be with us today. You're welcome. Michael is great to see you. And I also want to say a huge thank you to Q Harrison Terry for being the co-hosted. A queue is a really interesting discussion, it was and I'm always excited to be here.
Thank you for having me and Paul has been a pleasure and everybody. Thank you for watching. Especially those folks who asks such excellent questions you guys are such great. Audience. You guys are very smart intelligent sophisticated. So always ask those questions. Now before you go, this is important. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the Subscribe button at the top of our website so we can send you our newsletter and notify you of
upcoming live shows. Thank you so much everybody. I hope you have a great day and we'll see you soon.