Captivating and retaining customer in today’s fiercely competitive landscape is an ongoing challenge for businesses, and brands are constantly seeking innovative ways to hold the attention of their users. One particularly popular method that has emerged to tackle this issue is the use of quests. Quests, also known as challenges, adventures, journeys, and more, involve a series of tasks that users must complete to achieve a specific goal to then unlock certain rewards.
Quests are a powerful tool for engaging users and can be implemented across entire ecosystems with various platforms, whether it’s a digital environment like a mobile application or website, or even a physical location such as a stadium or store. They provide a unique opportunity to drive user engagement while simultaneously accomplishing your business objectives.
Here at LiveLike, we’ve developed a cutting-edge quest feature that allows you to effortlessly create and publish quests for your users on any platform. In this article, we’ll delve into the exciting possibilities of using quests in a business environment and explore concrete applications in the sports and entertainment industry and beyond.
Why Quests Are Crucial For Fan Engagement
First, let’s explore why quests matter. They are an incredibly powerful tool because they empower your business to:
Create Personalized and Memorable Experiences
Quests allow you to create customized experiences that cater to the unique preferences and goals of each user. By tailoring quests to align with their interests and needs, you can forge meaningful interactions that deeply resonate with your audience. This personal touch not only enhances user satisfaction but also cultivates a sense of loyalty towards your brand.
Improve User Retention
Quests are a game-changer when it comes to retaining users on your platform. By introducing an extra layer of motivation and excitement, quests make users more inclined to stay engaged with the experience and continue using your platform over time. The ongoing tracking of progress offers a tangible sense of accomplishment, creating a strong desire to return and actively participate on a regular basis. As a result, quests can significantly boost your retention rate and keep users coming back for more.
Collect Valuable User Data & Insights
Quests serve as a valuable source of data and insights into user behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. By analyzing quest completion rates and user interactions, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience. This wealth of information allows you to make informed, data-driven decisions to enhance your products, services, and marketing strategies. By leveraging the insights gained from quests, you can continuously improve and refine your offerings to better meet the needs and expectations of your users.
4 Ways Quests Can Drive Your Business Goals
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of quests, let’s take it a step further and explore how quests can specifically help you achieve your business objectives. Here are some scenarios where quests can be instrumental in driving your success:
Smooth User Onboarding & Seamless Product Adoption
When introducing a new digital platform, ensuring user comfort and rapid adoption is crucial. Our quest feature can play a pivotal role by providing interactive checklists or guided tours, assisting users in acquainting themselves with key features and functionalities. Through quests, new users embark on a journey of discovery, gaining familiarity with platform navigation, mastering essential tasks, and comprehending the value your platform brings. By completing quests, users swiftly adapt to your product, minimizing barriers and maximizing their overall experience.
Elevate Promotional & Marketing Campaigns
When launching a new product or feature, quests can be a catalyst for driving desired user behavior. By integrating tasks that directly relate to the product or feature, you can generate excitement and amplify customer engagement. Structuring quests around specific offerings empowers businesses to incentivize users to interact with promotional content, visit physical stores, make purchases, or participate in activities that align with your promotional and business objectives. Quests serve as a dynamic tool to captivate users and steer them towards desired actions, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of your promotional and marketing campaigns.
Amplify Sales, Cross-Sales, and Upselling Opportunities
By implementing quests, you can encourage your users to explore other related products or features within your platform. In other words, with the freedom to design quests according to your preferences, you can strategically drive traffic and prompt specific actions in targeted areas of your platform. This opens up a multitude of opportunities for upselling and cross-selling.
For instance, quests can encourage users to upgrade their existing subscriptions, make additional merchandise purchases, or explore premium offerings. Through quests, you can dynamically showcase the value of related products and foster a sense of discovery, ultimately boosting your selling, cross-selling, and upselling endeavors.
Harness Customer Feedback and Conduct Market Research
Finally, quests offer a unique opportunity to collect customer feedback and conduct market research. By incorporating survey-based quests or tasks that motivate users to share their insights and opinions, you can gather valuable user data to drive product development, shape effective marketing strategies, and enhance overall customer satisfaction. In this way, quests become a dynamic tool for engaging users and soliciting their perspectives, providing you with valuable information that can guide your business decisions and ensure your offerings align with customer preferences and needs.
Real-World Examples of Quests in Sports, Media, Entertainment and Beyond:
Now that we’ve explored the significant benefits of quests, let’s dive into some exciting real-world examples of how brands can use quests. These examples will give you a glimpse into the types of quests you can leverage to drive fan engagement, foster brand loyalty, collect crucial user data and more on your platform.
In conclusion, quests have become an indispensable tool for driving fan engagement and elevating user experiences on any kind of digital platform. They offer personalized interactions, improve user retention, provide valuable data, and help achieve business objectives.
With LiveLike’s innovative quest feature, you can revolutionize your platform strategy and captivate your fans in unprecedented ways. Take inspiration from real-world examples in sports, media, and entertainment to create immersive quests that foster loyalty and drive desired actions.
Get in touch to learn more about the power of quests or to find out how LiveLike can enhance your platform experience.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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