Major League Baseball Advanced Media wins SAS Enterprise Intelligence Award
PHILADELPHIA (April 11, 2005) – Major League Baseball Advanced Media has improved customer loyalty and enhanced the enjoyment of its fans cost-effectively with marketing automation and advanced customer analytics from SAS, the leader in business intelligence. In recognition of its efforts, SAS today presented MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, with the 14th annual SAS Enterprise Intelligence Award at this year’s SAS Users Group International (SUGI) meeting.
SAS presents its Enterprise Intelligence Awards annually to organizations that have demonstrated productivity gains, cost or time savings, or achievement of organization or business goals through the use of SAS® software. The award was presented to MLBAM for the company’s overwhelmingly successful use of SAS software to warehouse and analyze customer data, resulting in higher retention rates and enhanced fan experiences.
“MLBAM’s success reinforces our belief that SAS provides the most powerful business intelligence solutions on the market for improving the quality and profitability of customers, products, services and business processes,” said Jim Davis, SAS’ senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “SAS provides MLBAM with the business intelligence capabilities required to provide the best possible experience for baseball fans.”
ADVANCED REPORTING AND PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS PROVE WINNING COMBINATION
As the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball, MLBAM manages the official league site, www.MLB.com, and each of the 30 individual club sites. Part baseball encyclopedia, part ticket line, MLB.com provided 10 billion page views to over one billion visitors in 2004. To help manage that volume, MLB.com relies on SAS Marketing Automation. SAS provides sophisticated reporting capabilities and the newest generation of predictive analytics, offering MLB.com state-of-the-art data management and data discovery capabilities.
One of MLBAM’s goals is convincing more of those billion visitors to register so they can be presented targeted offers in real time to enhance their interactions with baseball, both online and offline. By having a greater number of registered visitors, MLB.com can also increase retention rates among users who subscribe to various online services, including live games on MLB.TV and MLB.com Gameday Audio.
“Someone once asked me what we know about the average baseball fan, and the answer was that we know they like baseball!” said Justin Shaffer, MLB Advanced Media’s director of operations. “But with a solution like SAS, we realized that we know much more.”
SAS helped MLB.com learn more about the fans visiting the site, thanks to the diverse range of data coming from both the clubs and MLB.com – online and offline. Customer information runs the gamut, from merchandising and ticket sales at the ballpark to everything MLB.com collects via clickstream that shows what each customer is doing on the Web site at any given time. The goal is to learn how to target fans with the right offer at the right time and place via the Web site, personalized e-mails, instant messages, and SMS alerts. It also helps with cross-selling and up-selling efforts by enabling MLB.com to suggest products based on what’s in a fan’s shopping cart at checkout, and their previous purchase history.
“We chose SAS because we wanted a solution that could bring all this data together and provide us the best interface for real-time analysis and to handle predictive modeling,” Shaffer said. “SAS helps us figure out the best way to view our fan data and customer data to improve their experience at the ballpark and online.”
UNDERSTANDING FAN BEHAVIORS IS CRUCIAL
MLB.com uses SAS to warehouse and analyze data relating to Web traffic and purchasing behavior, which serves as snapshots to make it easier to spot new visitors with similar tastes. That way, MLB.com can guide them through the site in a way that they’re likely to find rewarding.
“Fans don’t have to spend money; we want them to interact with us daily for all their baseball needs,” said Kristen Fergason, marketing director for MLB Advanced Media. “We can learn more about behaviors while still being able to share opportunities with them based on the visitors’ interests, such as a customized jersey or that their favorite players are going to visit their town on a specific day.”
On a typical day during the Major League Baseball season, the site posts hundreds of original news stories. But MLB.com also takes additional steps to encourage fans to visit the site daily. Automatically targeting specific audiences to let them know about information that might interest them is one way to keep them engaged. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to New York Yankees fans with the latest news about third-baseman Alex (A-Rod) Rodriguez, Fergason said she’d rather target anyone who’s ever read an A-Rod story or bought A-Rod merchandise. Specifically targeting those fans increases the likelihood that they’ll respond.
“One of the reasons we chose SAS was so we could access our in-house information,” Fergason said. “Before SAS, we’d ask our tech guys for this kind of information, and there would be a lag in getting an answer back. On the Internet, everything can change in the blink of an eye, so you need information instantaneously. With SAS, we have online access to real-time information.”
ABOUT SAS ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCE AWARDS
SAS presents its Enterprise Intelligence Awards annually in two categories: commercial and government applications. The 2004 commercial award was presented to MCI’s Business Analysis group and Bell Canada during the opening session of the 29th annual SAS Users Group International conference in Montreal, attended by SAS customers from around the world. The 2004 government award was presented to the U.S. Department of Commerce at the sixth Annual SAS Public Sector Executive Event in Washington.
This award was created to spotlight organizations that best exemplify the use of SAS intelligence to enable decision makers across the company to act with the highest level of confidence and knowledge to meet business goals.
"What sets apart organizations worthy of this award is their ability to apply SAS intelligence to unique business problems and achieve results that are vital to their business success,” said Deb Orton, manager of SAS’ Customer Knowledge Center. Those results come in the form of productivity gains, cost or time savings, or achievement of organization or business goals.
“The Enterprise Intelligence Award is a critical component of our overall strategy to continually highlight the success of our customers,” said Orton. “It’s a win not only for the customer who takes home this prestigious award. It’s also a win for SAS in that it builds our relationships with our own customers and makes us visible in a very positive light at the highest levels of the customer organization.”
The announcement came at the 30th annual SAS Users Group International (SUGI) conference. More than 3,000 SAS users from around the world attended this year’s SUGI in Philadelphia.
ABOUT MLB ADVANCED MEDIA LP
Established in June 2000, following a unanimous vote by the 30 Major League Baseball club owners to centralize all of baseball’s Internet operations, MLB Advanced Media LP (MLBAM) is the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball. MLBAM manages the official league site, www.MLB.com, and each of the 30 individual club sites to create the most comprehensive Major League Baseball resource on the Internet. MLB.com offers fans the most complete baseball information on the Web, including up-to-date statistics, game summaries, extensive historical information, and exclusive features about Major League Baseball events and programs. The site also includes online ticket sales, baseball merchandise, authenticated memorabilia and collectibles, fantasy games, live and archived radio broadcasts of every game, live and archived video Webcasts of entire games, pitch-by-pitch enactment of games, and hosted post-game video highlight shows.
All rights reserved. Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of the applicable MLB entities. All rights reserved.
ABOUT SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40,000 sites – including 96 of the top 100 companies on the FORTUNE Global 500® – to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know ®.
Editorial contacts:
Americas: (919) 677-8000
Other contact: Michael Barlow, (203) 259-8337
Other contact: MLB Advanced Media, Jim Gallagher, (212) 485-3182
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