>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M. I. T. Chief Data officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M. I. T. In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody You're watching The Cube, the Leader and Live Tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante, and it's my pleasure to introduce Matt Kobe, who's the vice president of business strategy Analytics of Chicago Bulls. We love talking sports. We love talking data. Matt. Thanks for coming on. >> No problem getting a date. So talk about >> your role. Is the head of analytics for the Bulls? >> Sure. So I work exclusively on the business side of the operation. So we have a separate team that those the basketball side, which is kind of your players stuff. But on the business side, um, what we're focused on is really two things. One is being essentially internal consultants for the rest of the customer facing functions. So we work a lot with ticketing, allow its sponsorship, um, marketing digital, all of those folks that engage with our customer base and then on the backside back end of it, we're building out the technical infrastructure for the organization right. So everything from data warehouse to C. R M to email marketing All of that sits with my team. And so we were a lot of hats, which is exciting. But at the end of the day, we're trying to use data to enhance the customer and fan experience. Um and that's our aim. And that's what we're driving towards >> success in sports. In a larger respect. It's come down to don't be offended by this. Who's got the best geeks? So now your side of the house is not about like you say, player performance about the business performances. But that's it. That's a big part of getting the best players. I mean, if it's successful and all the nuances of the N B, A salary cap and everything else, but I think there is one, and so that makes it even more important. But you're helping fund. You know that in various ways, but so are the other two teams that completely separate. Is there a Chinese wall between them? Are you part of the sort of same group? >> Um, we're pretty separate. So the basketball folks do their thing. The business folks do their thing from an analytic standpoint. We meet and we collaborate on tools and other methods of actually doing the analysis. But in terms of, um, the analysis itself, there is a little bit of separation there, and mainly that is from priority standpoint. Obviously, the basketball stuff is the most important stuff. And so if we're working on both sides that we'd always be doing the basketball stuff and the business stuff needs to get done, >> drag you into exactly okay. But which came first? The chicken or the egg was It was the sort of post Moneyball activity applied to the N B. A. And I want to ask you a question about that. And then somebody said, Hey, we should do this for the business side. Or was the business side of sort of always there? >> I think I think, the business side and probably the last 5 to 7 years you've really seen it grown. So if you look at the N. B. A. I've been with the Bulls for five years. If you look at the N. B. A. 78 years ago, there was a handful of Business analytics teams and those those teams had one or two people at him. Now every single team in the NBA has some sort of business analytics team, and the average staff is seven. So my staff is six full time folks pushed myself, so we'll write it right at the average. And I think what you've seen is everything has become more complex in sports. Right? If you look at ticketing, you've got all the secondary markets. You have all this data flowing in, and they need someone to make sense of all that data. If you look at sponsorship sponsorship, his transition from selling a sign that sits on the side of the court for these truly integrated partnerships, where our partners are coming to us and saying, What do we get out of? This was our return. And so you're seeing a lot more part lot more collaboration between analytics and sponsorship to go back to those partners and say, Hey, here's what we delivered And so I think you it started on the basketball side, certainly because that's that's where the, you know that is the most important piece. But it quickly followed on the business side because they saw the value that that type of thinking can bring in the business. >> So I know this is not, you know, your swim lane, but But, you know, the lore of Billy Beane and Moneyball and all that, a sort of the starting point for sports analytics. Is that Is that Is that a fair characterization? Yeah. I mean, was that Was that really the main spring? >> I think it It probably started even before that. I think if you have got to see Billy being at the M I t Sports Analytics conference and him thought he always references kind of Bill James is first, and so I think it started. Baseball was I wouldn't say the easiest place to start, But it was. It's a one versus one, right? It's pitcher versus batter. In a lot of cases, basketball is a little bit more fluid. It's a team. Sport is a little harder, but I think as technology has advanced, there's been more and more opportunities to do the analytics on the basketball side and on the business side. I think what you're seeing is this huge. What we've heard the first day and 1/2 here, this huge influx of data, not nearly to the levels of the MasterCard's and others of the world. But as more and more things moved to the mobile phone, I think you're going to see this huge influx of data on the business side, and you're going to need the same systems in the same sort of approach to tackle it. >> S O. Bill James is the ultimate sports geek, and he's responsible for all these stats that, no, none of us understand. He's why we don't pay attention to batting average anymore. Of course, I still do. So let's talk about the business side of things. If you think about the business of baseball, you know it's all about maximizing the gate. Yeah, there's there's some revenue, a lot of revenue course from TV. But it's not like football, which is dominated by the by the TV. Basketball, I think, is probably a mix right. You got 80 whatever 82 game season, so filling up the stadium is important. Obviously, N v A has done a great job of of really getting it right. Free agency is like, fascinating. Now >> it's 12 months a year >> scored way. Talk about the NBA all the time and of course, you know, people like celebrities like LeBron have certainly helped, and now a whole batch of others. But what's the money side of the n ba look like? Where's the money coming from? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you certainly have broadcast right, but in many ways, like national broadcast sort of takes care of it itself. In some ways, from the standpoint of my team, doesn't have a lot of control over national broadcast money. That's a league level thing. And so the things that we have control over the two big buckets are ticketing and sponsorship. Those those are the two big buckets of revenue that my team spends a lot of time on. Ticketing is, is one that is important from the standpoint, as you say, which is like, How do we fill the building right? We've got 41 home game, supposed three preseason games. We got 44 events a year. Our goal is to fill the building for all 44 of those events. We do a pretty good job of doing it, but that has cascading effects into other revenue streams. Right, As you think about concessions and merchandise and sponsorship, it's a lot easier to spell spot cell of sponsorship when you're building is full, then if you're building isn't full. And so our focus is on. How do we? How do we fill the building in the most efficient way possible? And as you have things like the secondary market and people have access to tickets in different ways than they did 10 to 15 years ago, I think that becomes increasingly complex. Um, but that's the fun area that's like, That's where we spend a lot of time. There's the pricing, There's inventory management. It's a lot of, you know, is you look a traditional cpg. There's there's some of those same principles being applied, which is how do you are you looking airline right there? They're selling a plane. It's an asset you have to fill. We have ah, building. That's an asset we have to fill, and how do we fill it in the most optimal way? >> So the idea of surge pricing demand supply, But so several years ago, the Red Sox went to a tiered pricing. You guys do the same If the Sox are playing Kansas City Royals tickets way cheaper than if they're playing the Yankees. You guys do a similar. So >> we do it for single game tickets. So far are season ticket holders. It's the same price for every game, but on the price for primary tickets for single games, right? So if we're playing, you know this year will be the Clippers and the Lakers. That price is going to be much more expensive, so we dynamically price on a game to game basis. But our season ticket holders pay this. >> Why don't you do it for the season ticket holders? Um, just haven't gone there yet. >> Yeah, I mean, there's some teams have, right, so there's a few different approaches you convey. Lovely price. Those tickets, I think, for for us, the there's in years past. In the last few years, in particular, there's been a couple of flagship games, and then every other game feels similar. I think this will be the first year where you have 8 to 10 teams that really have a shot at winning the title, and so I think you'll see a more balanced schedule. Um, and so we've We've talked about it a lot. We just haven't gone to that made that move yet? >> Well, a season ticket holder that shares his tickets with seven other guys with red sauce. You could buy a BMW. You share the tickets, so but But I would love it if they didn't do the tiered. Pricing is a season ticket holder, so hope you hold off a while, but I don't know. It could maximize revenues if the Red Sox that was probably not a stupid thing is they're smart people. What about the sponsorships? Is fascinating about the partners looking for our ally. How are you measuring that? You're building your forging a tighter relationship, obviously, with the sponsors in these partners. Yeah, what's that are? Why look like it's >> measured? A variety of relies, largely based on the assets that they deliver. But I think every single partner we talk to these days, I also leave the sponsorship team. So I oversee. It's It's rare in sports, but I stayed over business strategy and Alex and sponsorship team. Um, it's not my title, but in practice, that's what I do. And I think everyone we talked to wants digital right? They want we've got over 25,000,000 social media followers with the Bulls, right? We've got 19,000,000 on Facebook alone. And so sponsors see those numbers and they know that we can deliver impression. They know we can deliver engagement and they want access to those channels. And so, from a return on, I always call a return on objectives, right? Return on investment is a little bit tricky, but return on objectives is if we're trying to reel brand awareness, we're gonna go back to them and say, Here's how many people came to our arena and saw your logo and saw the feature that you had on the scoreboard. If you're on our social media channels or a website, here's the number of impressions you got. Here is the number of engagements you got. I think where we're at now is Maura's Bad Morris. Still better, right? Everyone wants the big numbers. I think where you're starting to see it move, though, is that more isn't always better. We want the right folks engaging with our brands, and that's really what we're starting to think about is if you get 10,000,000 impressions, but they're 10,000,000 impressions to the wrong group of potential customers, that's not terribly helpful. for a brand. We're trying to work with our brands to reach the right demographics that they want to reach in order to actually build that brand awareness they want to build. >> What, What? Your primary social channels. Twitter, Obviously. >> So every platform has a different purpose way. Have Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Snapchat. We're in a week. We bow in in China and you know, every platform has a different function. Twitter's obviously more real time news. Um, you know the timeline stuff, it falls off really quick. Instagram is really the artistic piece of it on, and then Facebook is a blend of both, and so that's kind of how we deploy our channels. We have a whole social team that generates content and pushes that content out. But those are the channels we use and those air incredibly valuable. Now what you're starting to see is those channels are changing very rapidly, based on their own set of algorithms, of how they deliver content of fans. And so we're having to continue to adapt to those changing environments in those social >> show impressions. In the term, impressions varies by various platforms. So so I know. I know I'm more familiar with Twitter impressions. They have the definition. It's not just somebody who might have seen it. It's somebody that they believe actually spent a few seconds looking at. They have some algorithm to figure that out. Yeah. Is that a metric that you finding your brands are are buying into, for example? >> Yeah. I mean, I think certainly there they view it's kind of the old, you know, when you bought TV ads, it's how many households. So my commercial right, it's It's a similar type of metric of how many eyeballs saw a piece of content that we put out. I think we're the metrics. More people are starting to care about his engagements, which is how many of you actually engaged with that piece of content, whether it's a like a common a share, because then that's actual. Yeah, you might have seen it for three seconds, but we know how things work. You're scrolling pretty fast, But if you actually stopped to engage it with something, that's where I think brands are starting to see value. And as we think about our content, we have ah framework that our digital team uses. But one of the pillars of that is thumb stopping. We want to create content that is some stopping that people actually engage with. And that's been a big focus of ours. Last couple years, >> I presume. Using video, huge >> video We've got a whole graphics team that does custom graphics for whether it's stats or for history, historical anniversaries. We have a hole in house production team that does higher end, and then our digital team does more kind of straight from the phone raw footage. So we're using a variety of different mediums toe reach our fans >> that What's your background? How'd you get into all of this? >> I spent seven years in consulting, so I worked for Deloitte on their strategy group out of Chicago, And I worked for CPG companies like at the intersection of Retailer and CPG. So a lot of in store promotional work helping brands think through just General Revenue management, pricing strategy, promotional strategy and, um stumbled upon greatness with the Bulls job. A friend gave me the heads up that they were looking to fill this type of role and I was able to get my resume in the mix and I was lucky enough to get get the job, and it's been when I started. We're single, single, single, so it's a team of one. Five years later, we're a team of six, and we'll probably keep growing. So it's been an exciting ride and >> your background is >> maths. That's eyes business. Undergrad. And then I got a went Indian undergrad business and then went to Kellogg. Northwestern got an MBA on strategy, so that's my background. But it's, you know, I've dabbled in sports. I worked for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid back in the day when I was at Deloitte. Um, and so it's been It's always been a dream of mine. I just never knew how I get there like I was wanted to work in sports. They just don't know the path. And I'm lucky enough to find the path a lot earlier than I thought. >> How about this conference? I know you have been the other M I T. Event. How about this one? How we found some of the key takeaways. Think you >> think it's been great because a lot of the conferences we go to our really sports focus? So you've got the M. I T Sports Analytics conference. You have seat. You have n b a type, um, programming that they put on. But it's nice to get out of sports and sort of see how other bigger industries are thinking about some of the problems specifically around data management and the influx of data and how they're thinking about it. It's always nice to kind of elevated. Just have some room to breathe and think and meet people that are not in sports and start to build those, you know, relationships and with thought leaders and things like that. So it's been great. It's my first time here. What are probably back >> good that Well, hopefully get to see a game, even though that stocks are playing that well. Thanks so much for coming in Cuba. No problems here on your own. You have me. It was great to have you. All right. Keep right, everybody. I'll be back with our next guest with Paul Gill on day Volante here in the house. You're watching the cue from M I T CEO. I cube. Right back