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Learfield IMG College unveils new analytics platform Fanbase

Learfield IMG College has launched a new analytics platform called Fanbase to drive new revenue for intercollegiate athletics.

Fanbase will combine behavioural data sets from official athletics sites with other sources of fan data, including ticketing, digital media, social media and third-party appends.

Learfield IMG College will now be able to help universities better understand their fans’ behaviours including how they use social media, where they shop and how they consume content. The firm said in a statement that these insights will help to boost growth across ticket sales, merchandise sales, donations and sponsorship revenue.

“Given our connection to so many school partners, we have a responsibility to apply advanced data practices across the collegiate ecosystem to increase fan engagement, grow athletics revenue and extend sponsor brand association,” said Learfield IMG College president and chief executive, Cole Gahagan.

“Beyond helping our universities deepen their connection to fans, we’re delivering a game changer in college sports marketing, and especially at this moment in time. Brand partners can now leverage Fanbase to digitally target the very fans who attend games and listen to broadcasts, reaching those fans 365 days a year.”

The platform will help brand sponsors extend fan engagement beyond university campuses and radio broadcasts through digital advertising and media, with targeted messages and content.

The company has already has begun initial Fanbase integrations at dozens of schools, including the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, the University of Oklahoma, Texas Christian University and Virginia Tech.

Each school’s athletics department has existing partnerships in place with Learfield IMG College across multimedia rights, Paciolan for ticketing services and SIDEARM Sports for website design and hosting.

Learfield IMG College chief content, development and strategy officer Rob Schneider, said: “The breadth of our enterprise puts us in a unique position to lead this initiative for our school partners. The cost and complexity of delivering this independently is prohibitive for most schools, but we see helping our university partners understand their fans holistically as a core component of our offering moving forward.

“Our long-term goal is to use fan data to drive value for all of our school partners, but partners that have multi-faceted relationships with us across our platform will see the most immediate and material benefits simply because we have more fan data to work with. The early response from schools has been overwhelmingly positive.”

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