Chris Carli: Using Technology to Improve Fan Engagement (Full Transcript)
Ronen Ainbinder
I'm delighted to introduce a brilliant sports technology expert in today's Halftime Snack.
Originally from the US, he is a man who envisions the future of sports, including:
- No lines at security gates, concessions, or restrooms
- Improved fan experience through authenticated data
- Real-time engagement between teams and fans
- And so much more!
He is the CEO and founder of Sports Tickets. This company combines several technologies into a single application in fan engagement that identifies every fan in every stadium in sports worldwide.
It is an honor to host such a visionary of the industry in the Halftime Snacks.
So without further a due, Ladies and gentlemen: Chris Carli
Chris Carli
Thanks, Ronen. Thank you very much for having me. It's a great honor to discuss what we've been working on for the last two and a half years and in the sports technology field.
Ronen Ainbinder
You're more than welcome, Chris; I'm delighted to have the chance to host you in this show. And I want to start with a question that's the classic entrepreneurship question that you get in school. But suppose I'm Bill Gates right now. And we just met in an elevator for the next 60 seconds. How would you sell me the idea to invest in your company?
Chris Carli
There are multiple issues facing sports today, from fan engagement, fan safety, and security fan data, then your security. And they're kind of all been accented by COVID. COVID has brought along almost four or five years of technology and six months. So we handle the entire process of everything that's facing teams, leagues, venues, and federations worldwide in a single app. And we do that starting with identity-based ticketing.
Ronen Ainbinder
Wow, that's a great pitch. I'm sure Bill Gates would stay for another 60 seconds to hear more because I would, but that's why we're here. So I want to ask you more specifically about how you came up with the idea, how you realize that you needed to build this company? What was the pain point you identified in the market and the gap you wanted to solve and feel? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Chris Carli
Gap is a great word. So what we discovered was a massive gap and fan data. So let me go back a couple of years ago, the landscape, the sports playing field, in the United States changed forever. And around May of 2018, when sports betting became legalized for the first time in the US, there was a tremendous amount of opportunities within the industry itself. And we wanted to kind of take a look and see where we fit. I built the largest portfolio of privately held domains related to the industry. And as we moved along, we realized that there's no data in sports betting because it just didn't exist before, was centralized in Las Vegas, had some dealings with offshore casinos, etc. But it wasn't an industry. As we got into how we could identify these people and where the data was, we began to pivot a little bit. And we found out that sports teams, professional sports teams, particularly in the United States, were going to indirectly benefit from sports betting. And other words, they were going to have increased viewership, increase sponsorship, increased attendance. We're going to be bringing a new type of fan into their arena. But then we realized that the teams had an engagement issue. They were fighting a whole bunch of things, particularly in a new generation of fans. There are different outlets and ways to watch a game, from Ott to streaming to your digital device, etc., all the way down to inexpensive televisions for your home. The question became, how are we going to get these new fans into our buildings? How are we going to keep them there? And how are we going to engage them in a unique experience? So that's the path we took. We went down that path, realize that there was no real good data. And some of the things that teams were trying were making a bigger scoreboard, or giving away a free hot talk, or trying to do promotions that didn't have any individual connection, any individual identity. We decided to develop the next generation of what the live fan experience would look like after the pandemic. We had been working on cashless, touchless, and frictionless technology long before the real common denominator. And what led us to where we are today is that sports ticketing in the sports ticketing market is broken. It's unnecessary today in 2020. But what was more important is that the ticket is the only common denominator that every fan in the building has. We said to ourselves that we could link a good ticket and then process to an individual fan, and then connect them to their digital device and almost like a three-point play. Now we can solve the individual identity. And we can provide an individual fan experience. If you don't know who the individual fan is, how can you provide an individual fan experience. So that's the route we took. It brought us up through March of this year. And along comes COVID. And COVID played right into our hands were built on a series of different technologies, we call them game-changing technologies, there are eight levels, and we had a security layer. One of the pain points in attending a live sporting event is long lines, security legacy technologies with old fashioned metal detectors, then taking your keys out and throwing your water away, and all of those things. So we wanted to continue to move the fans quicker. So all we did was we pulled back a little bit, and we developed, we developed our security layer. So now we can move 600 persons per hour per gate. But we can also check the temperature and incendiary devices without a fan having to stop. And we can do that because we have the individual, we know who the fan is, and we know where their devices are. And we only put a good ticket in there. If that connection remains solid, we do this all in real-time. So it emphasizes the fan experience. It's all about the fan experience. Because we can identify the individual fan, we can cater to create data driven profile driven age based content directly. So there's a lot of technology in there, a lot of technologies involved. But we just kind of put them together. And as mentioned, we pulled back during COVID. But it played perfectly. Everybody's going to want to come back to an arena, but they're going to want to come back safely. Teams and venues are going to have to provide a safe environment from not only safety concerns, traditional safety concerns, but people with COVID and COVID testing. So we have a nice, simple, easy solution. Nobody has to do anything outside of just having everything loaded into their favorite team's app. And we can control the fan experience from search to see.
Ronen Ainbinder
That's fascinating. Chris, thank you for sharing your vision of the future of sports. It sounds really exciting. And I can't wait to see how it ends up being. And I want to focus on the eight layers you mentioned that your company is stacking up in terms of technology. I want to know what type of technologies are you using? Is blockchain is AI? Is it VR? Are you using some other stuff? Can you mention just a few of them? If there are any specific problems that you can link to each one of the technologies? And how would it work? I think that would give us a really good understanding of how it would look like in practice.
Chris Carli
So if you look at the stack from top to bottom, and as mentioned, there are eight layers. So if you look at the top layer, it's a cloud-based technology. And we run our product is a software as a service. So if you look at it and think about the ticketing tab on any team's website worldwide, you just click on the ticketing tab, and that begins. So we're a cloud-based solution. Even when we started developing this product, Things have changed in the cloud, and you find things like hybrid clouds now, which are multifunctional clouds that combine different layers, all within the cloud technologies. So if you look at the top where we're hybrid cloud-driven, the second part of our piece is onboarding. Each layer, each one of the eight layers, has multiple layers underneath it. So there's a top layer, and it's named. So security. So our security layer includes data security, individual security, venue, security, etc. And we look at that, and we have the most comprehensive onboarding process. Suppose you think about what you do in financial services, banking, insurance, and what you would do to go through to get a credit card or a loan to verify who you are. In that case, we go through that process. Built into that process is advanced technologies, like AI and machine learning, and biometrics. So as opposed to coming out and saying that we're AI-driven, we're biometric driven, which sometimes can be scary for people on the other end, we use those technologies embedded in each one of our layers. So from onboarding and part of the onboarding process is the digital connection to the individual. Once we know that the individual is correct, then we go through a digital DNA process where we confirm that that that digital device does belong to you. We can stop fraud right at the very beginning because we can trace emails. We can trace IP addresses from wherever they are supposed to be. And our system and our onboarding platform work the same way, regardless of your location around the world. So whether you're in South Africa or South Australia, wherever you are in the world, we move to whatever documentation you would need to provide in that particular country. We handle legacy devices, and we handle older devices, handle other providers we handle, in the US from Apple and iOS to Android systems, etc. It's one unified process. And then we move down the stack a little bit more. We've covered safety and security and identity; we have built what's called a box office. And what that is, is a series of relational databases with a blockchain element in it, a smart contract element in it. And then we go down to really what our most proprietary technology is. And that's the way we move data. We move data literally at the speed of sound. And we have technology that allows us to function in a very loud environment. We can reach every fan and every seat with a unified message. But we can do that not only in the live environment at the stadium. But we can also send the same message Ott, and we can send it streaming. We can also send it through terrestrial media, like television and radio; we can embed it into a replay. So the way we move data and move a message is one of the cores of our technology. That's a real single. That's a real single strong point for us. We're the only application of it and sports in the world. And it does help us with our onboarding processes worldwide. But we don't need Wi-Fi connections, and we don't need RFID, we don't need to pair devices, it can function off the grid if the best way to think about it is probably airplane mode, where you shut your phone off for air airplane, and you still have some connectivity. But Bluetooth is only as good as the distance between the connection. And our system works with that environment. Our box office has everything in a streamlined set. As mentioned, it's a real set of relational databases with a blockchain element. And then your all payments system, our payment systems work in current any currency worldwide. In all of these transactions happened within fractions of a second, our entire process works. We can transfer transact six or 700,000 transactions per second, all in a combined very high-level piece of deep technology. So it's all stacked together. That's connected through a series of SDKs and APIs, and once again, the layers have multiple layers underneath.
We're not reinventing the world by writing a million code lines with just vetted the best technologies in the world. And we have providers, and we have a mapping layer. We can map you through the event through a venue. So we have the best providers in the world, IBM, Oracle, Google, and Google mapping. We have the strongest onboarding process identity processor in the world. We have the largest payment provider in the world. And again, it's designed to be built into a single application, all touchless cashless, and frictionless.
Ronen Ainbinder
Wow, it's very impressive, Chris. And I think you are a sports technology in Wikipedia because you just gave us a big lesson. And I appreciate it. I remember that there was somewhere I learned that data is the currency of the future. I'm sure you agree with that. But I want to ask you if the data is the main line of your business, where you need to focus on that market or any other business line that you should focus on to be successful?
Chris Carli
In the end, what we truly are is a data company. And all of the processes that we mentioned are driven towards the ability to get data. Most of the data that exists right now are untraditional, and it's built through a series of guesstimates or estimates. For example, the largest technology companies and consulting companies globally try to gauge a market with a sample size of 400 800 1200. And then try to paint that over, of course of hundreds of 1000s. Even with millions of people with very small sample size, our system is individual; there are no guesstimates. It's actual real-time data, and you're saying that data is the new currency. And in the end, we are a data company. And we built the platform toward the ability to build a profile, authenticated, verifiable individual fan data. And data is is data. Our platform will produce millions of data points. But what's most important is the aggregation of the data and the analytics of the data. And those are KPI's key components to what makes the most sense toward it. So you may have a baseball league or a football league. And the metrics on one side of the league might be different than the ones on the other. So the aggregation of the data is the most important thing that we have. And as mentioned, we have millions and millions and millions of points from things you like, things you participate in, things you want to opt into, etc. And this is all done in real-time. The more data that we provide to teams, league venues is a win-win across the board. For example, we can provide our partner data to the ounce metrics to a beverage company. We can tell them their age ranges, what type of products they're buying, where they're buying them pregame before and game. We can tell them exactly to the ounce what that particular fan did. We can accumulate that we can maneuver it, combine it with other teams, bind it through countries through leagues through similar demographics, and those combinations are endless. And those are invaluable to a team because those are their partners. And those partners spend millions of dollars advertising. But right now, they have no way of really understanding what influence they have. But our other technology that I mentioned our data movement is we can push that data backward. In other words, based on the profile based on your age, based on your likes, we can draw you to a concession. Or we can insert order you or pre-order your favorite items based on your profile based on your wants, based on where you're going to be in the stadium. How are you going to move into the state, etc.? We control the entire process, but it's all data-driven. So data is the new currency.
Ronen Ainbinder
I love that. And I also wonder if by managing massive amounts of data, do you encounter any issues with privacy and how the data is supposed to be owned by the one that, like the people, encounters a lot of issues? And if so, in terms of privacy, and if so, how do you deal with them? Or how do you manage that?
Chris Carli
We manage it on multi-layers because data and data privacy are very big things right now. But data and data management are different across the world. So we have to work with the existing systems. Whatever is there now is probably going to change very quickly. We handle that by a series of servers that are not located anywhere else within our platform. You also have the right to opt into as much of the services as you would like. But the data remains with you. So we may have the idea that you're a female 38 to 42, that you attend four games a year. But we're not going to say that that's Mary Jones, and she lives at 1234 a street, we will know we will aggregate that data into a very anonymous platform if you will. The opt-in feature is something that the more data you provide to the team into the system, the more benefit you will be able to return; you'll have a higher loyalty reward program, you'll be first to be able to get tickets. You'll be the first to get merchandise. You'll be the first to be able to engage with players. We have found that most people provide a tremendous amount of data with education without actually realizing it. Suppose you are interested in a particular website or a particular product. In that case, you provide that data through your credit card through your public profile through your social media profiles, logging in through LinkedIn, and Apple and Google right now is an instant gateway to your data. But the best way to think about it for us is we modeled our process after the airline ticket industry. People give up their data to provide a safe trip. They provide a passport. They provide a credit card. They provide ID. They go through additional security layers, and they have one boarding pass per person, they have one seat assigned per person. We did the same model. And we treat your data and your privacy the same way the airlines would. People do that for a 300 person flight. But they don't do it for a 60,000 seat stadium. And in the new normal, they're going to have to; they're just going to have to, they're going to want the safety and security around them. So we play off that we take advantage of the fact that they're going to have to provide this data to move ahead, or they're just not going to be able to do it.
COVID is going to go away. But our processes are going to stay the same. Have we ramped up to handle COVID issues? Absolutely. We also can be able to integrate COVID documentation into our platform as well. And we can tell whether that's fraudulent if it matches the person on the other side, based on a series of how we onboard. So we've handled that issue as well. We're probably going to not see a return to total normalcy until 2021. So as we go through 2020 will gradually get back to normal, but things will have to be in place. Before we even consider going to the next level.
Ronen Ainbinder
I agree with you, Chris. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see and analyze the people's reactions while going through the new processes. What I mean is that I'm not imagining that the stadium entry will be the same or even similar to going to getting on an airplane because the whole process of getting in an airplane is like a hassle and everyone hates it. So I hope that the state this stadium experience would be seamless, will be easy will carry all the benefits you've mentioned. But without giving away the negative things that may happen by doing those things. But I think it's going to be exciting to see it. And since we're running out of time, I want to ask you a more intriguing question. What would you do? Let's say you would have no company, and you're just an investor. You invest in technology, and specifically in sports technology. Let's say I would give you $10 million. If I would be Bill Gates $10 million to invest right now in sports technology, how would you use it, and why would you use it that way?
Chris Carli
So besides investing in my own company, we are solving multiple pain issues because I think that we are. I would work on the second seat experience in combining not what a fan is seeing live, but elsewhere on their second screen. Whether it be their digital watch, their digital device, iPad, laptop, large screen TV, whatever it happens to be. Because there's going to be so much focus outside of what's happening in the arena, and fortunately, or unfortunately, people aren't always going to be able to go to the arena, it's a very expensive event for, let's say, a family of four. And there are fans now because of branding all over the world. You might have your favorite football player down in South America, but you might be from Canada, and you probably may not have a chance to go to visit that fan directly. But you would certainly like to be a part of their experience, being able to connect to that fan one on one. And those are the things that we can, but that's the road that I would continue to explore because on one, fan engagement, in the second screen, is what it's called.
Ronen Ainbinder
most of the fans of every team are never even going to be in a live event. Now, with the Internet's access and how teams may have fans from all over the world. I'm sure that I'd say that at least 80% of the fans that follow and engage with the team daily were will never even going to be in the stadium. So I agree with you that I think that the fan experience that is not sitting in the same view is a key element of the future of sports technology. And I think that's a great place to wrap today's conversation. Chris, I want to thank you so much for your insights. It's been a whole lesson on sports technology, technology in general, and the things we will see in the future. You're a complete visionary. And I appreciate your time, and I can't wait to see what sports tickets are going to do once we'll be able to be in stadiums and live sports again. So thank you so much, Chris.