LiveLike shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026

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.

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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."

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Listen to the full episode

Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:

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Key Takeaways

• 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

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‍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.

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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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A billion-dollar media rights property does not stay that way by standing still. NASCAR, one of the top five or six media rights properties in the United States, has spent the last several years rethinking how it distributes content, produces original programing, grows its audience, and pays its drivers to become cultural ambassadors. The results so far are striking: a 16% increase in the 18-to-34 demographic in the first year of its new media deal, and a 26% increase in that same demo through early 2026.

For platform operators, digital product teams, and anyone working in sports media, NASCAR's approach offers a detailed case study in how a legacy property can modernize without alienating its core. The NASCAR media rights strategy is not just about who carries the races. It touches production, first-party data, sponsorship packaging, content creation, schedule innovation, and driver brand-building, all coordinated by a private, family-owned organization that can move faster than most leagues.

This post breaks down the key elements of NASCAR's playbook, drawn from a conversation between LiveLike CEO & Co-Founder Miheer Walavalkar and Brian Herbst, NASCAR's EVP and Chief Media and Revenue Officer, on the Future of Fandom podcast.

A media rights deal shaped by consumption patterns, not tradition

When NASCAR went to market with its media rights in 2023, the distribution landscape looked nothing like it did during the previous cycle in 2013. Digital streaming consumption had risen to roughly 35-36% of total viewing, and it continues to climb past 42%. NASCAR's response was to split its rights across Fox, Amazon Prime, TNT (via Warner Bros. Discovery), and NBC/USA, while also bringing in the CW for its Saturday series.

Brian Herbst framed the logic clearly: "Our media rights and our distribution strategies will essentially follow where content consumption patterns are going." The NASCAR Amazon Prime partnership, which launched with the Coca-Cola 600 in 2024, drew 2.7 million viewers and skewed six to seven years younger than a traditional linear broadcast. More importantly, that younger cohort did not disappear when the schedule moved to other networks. It stayed for the full season.

This is the critical nuance in any live sports streaming strategy. Fragmentation is not just a distribution challenge; it is also an audience development tool. By placing races on streaming platforms, NASCAR reached fans it would not have found on cable alone.

Managing sports media rights fragmentation without losing fans

The obvious risk of splitting rights across four or more partners is confusion. If you are an NBA fan right now, you have to check daily which network carries that night's game. NASCAR has a structural advantage here: it is a weekend-based sport. Each week, fans need to know one thing, which channel has Sunday's race.

NASCAR builds cross-promotional obligations directly into its media deals and carves out institutional advertising inventory to promote the next broadcast partner. Brian described the approach: "We have to promote like crazy from Fox to Amazon. We have to promote like crazy from Amazon to TNT. We have to promote like crazy from TNT to NBC." That inventory can also flex outside NASCAR broadcasts entirely, reaching new audiences during events like the World Baseball Classic on Fox.

For any sports property managing fragmentation, the lesson is operational discipline. Education is not something you layer on after the deal is signed. It needs to be contractually embedded.

The $60 million production studio that made the deal possible

One of the most forward-looking moves in NASCAR's strategy was the decision to build a $60 million production facility in Concord, North Carolina, before the media rights deal was even negotiated. The logic was anticipatory: legacy partners like Fox and NBC have decades of live event production experience, but newcomers like Amazon, Apple, and the CW do not.

When the CW agreed to carry the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, the network asked NASCAR to handle production. Because the Concord studio was already under construction, NASCAR could say yes. The production agreement and the media rights agreement were signed simultaneously.

This in-house sports production capability gives NASCAR control over how its story is told, from camera placement (120 cameras per race, plus in-car cameras in every vehicle) to the voices on the broadcast. Brian put it simply: "We care the most. We've been around for 78 years. We expect to be around for another 78 years."

The facility also supports NASCAR's original content strategy, powering social videos, YouTube programing, fast channel content, and archive-driven documentaries. When NASCAR provided 800 hours of tagged footage for Amazon's Dale Earnhardt Sr. documentary, that content library became the backbone of what turned into the highest-performing sports documentary Amazon has ever released.

The Driver Ambassador Program: paying athletes to build the brand

Perhaps the most innovative element of NASCAR's current approach is the NASCAR Driver Ambassador Program. NASCAR allocated $15-20 million from the top of its media rights revenue and redirected it into incentive payments for drivers across the Cup Series, the O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, and the Truck Series.

The program works on a points system. Drivers earn points for growing their social following, appearing on shows like Good Morning America or the Pat McAfee Show, participating in Netflix or Amazon productions, and increasing their Fox broadcast appearances. The driver with the most points at year's end receives the largest payout. Joey Logano topped the leaderboard in the program's first year with a $1 million check.

NASCAR, its agency partner CAA, and the drivers' own teams all source opportunities. Nine times out of ten, Brian said, NASCAR approves driver-initiated ideas because "that'll grow the sport." With only 36 Cup Series drivers, the per-person incentive is significant enough to change behavior.

This is a model that any sports property could adapt. Rather than relying solely on a corporate marketing machine, NASCAR is turning its athletes into a distributed content and relevance network, then measuring the output and compensating accordingly.

First-party data and the vertical sales model

NASCAR's ownership structure gives it an unusual degree of vertical integration. It controls 20 of its own tracks, the media rights, the archive footage, the production facility, and a fan database containing tens of millions of records. Anyone who has bought a ticket or played a fantasy game on NASCAR.com has generated sports first-party data fan profiles that NASCAR can activate.

On the sponsorship side, this integration has enabled a vertical sales approach. A single sponsor package now includes NASCAR track spend, NASCAR IP spend, a driver and team component, and a media network component. The client buys one package and dials up or down specific assets as needed. The internal allocation debates happen behind the scenes, not in front of the client.

This sports sponsorship vertical sales model drove a record new business year for NASCAR in 2026. For platform operators thinking about monetization, the principle is clear: the more touchpoints you control, the more value you can bundle for commercial partners.

Schedule innovation and younger audience growth

NASCAR's transformation extends beyond media and content to the competition calendar itself. For 16 of Brian’s 21 years at the company, the schedule never changed. Since the merger of NASCAR and ISC (its track-holding company) and the move to private ownership, the organization has used that operational freedom to experiment aggressively.

Recent NASCAR schedule changes include street races in Chicago, a race inside the LA Coliseum, an event at the El Camino Real, the first international race since 1958 at Mexico City, and the upcoming 2025 race on the actual naval base in Coronado, San Diego. A social video promoting the Coronado race made it the hottest-selling ticket on the NASCAR circuit within 48 hours.

These moves address a geographic accessibility problem. NASCAR tracks are enormous, often located far from metro centers. Street races and stadium events bring the product to urban audiences who might never drive to Talladega. The NASCAR younger audience growth numbers validate the approach: 26% growth in the 18-to-34 demo in 2026, building on 16% growth the year before.

Correcting NASCAR technology misconceptions

One theme Brian returned to throughout the conversation was the gap between perception and reality regarding NASCAR's technological sophistication. International audiences, in particular, often assume Formula 1 is far ahead on the technology front.

The reality: NASCAR operates 120 cameras per race, in-car cameras in every vehicle, automated pit road tracking, 200 competition data points firing off cars traveling 190 miles per hour, a remote race control center in Concord, and a full in-house digital and production engineering team. For a company of 1,300 people, the technical output is significant.

Brian acknowledged this is a storytelling gap, not a capability gap: "That story, I think we have not told as well as some of our counterparts." For any sports organization, the lesson is that technology investment only builds brand equity if you communicate it effectively to your audience.

Key Takeaways

- NASCAR's media rights strategy deliberately fragments distribution to match shifting consumption patterns, using streaming platforms as audience development tools rather than just revenue sources.

- The $60 million Concord production studio was built before the media deal closed, positioning NASCAR to say yes when new partners needed production support.

- The Driver Ambassador Program redirects $15-20 million from media rights revenue into direct incentive payments for drivers who grow their public profiles, turning athletes into a distributed brand-building network.

- NASCAR's vertical integration across tracks, media, data, and production powers a bundled sponsorship model that delivered a record new business year in 2026.

- Schedule innovation, including street races and international events, is driving significant younger audience growth while maintaining core fan engagement.

The common thread across all of NASCAR's moves is control. Control over production, control over data, control over schedule, control over how drivers build their brands. That control is not an end in itself; it is what allows NASCAR to move quickly, package value for partners, and make long-term bets on fan growth without answering to quarterly earnings pressure.

For any sports property or media platform thinking about the future of sports fandom, NASCAR's playbook is a reminder that distribution is just one piece. The organizations that will win the next decade are the ones building the infrastructure, both technical and commercial, to own the full fan relationship.

Still not sure if a vertical fan engagement strategy can be applied to your platform? Get in touch today to learn more.

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