Marcus Mellor is Head of Commercial at Burnley Football Club, who play in the English Football League (EFL) Championship.

One of England’s oldest football clubs, Burnley FC recently became the subject of U.S. investment, with a star-studded roster of investors including JJ and Kealia Watt and popular YouTube collective, Dude Perfect. Burnley FC is on a mission to leverage its partnerships to drive U.S. market growth.

But how is the club’s U.S. audience engagement strategy playing out so far? How does the club use first-party fan data to attract new sponsors? And how is its partnership with TikTok to stream live women’s matches disrupting sports viewing?

In episode 11 of The Fan Engagement Podcast, you’ll learn:

00:29 Introduction to Marcus and his role at Burnley

02:33 Who are Burnley FC?

03:30 The impact of American investment in English football

04:11 Why Burnley is focusing on expanding its fan base in the U.S.

05:46 How to engage new casual fans and avid loyal fans

07:20 JJ Watt and Dude Perfect – leveraging partnerships for U.S. growth

09:00 Communicating Burnley's core values at home and abroad

11:25 Burnley women's team’s unique streaming partnership with TikTok

14:09 How Burnley leverages fan data to engage new and existing fans

15:46 The importance of first and third-party data in Burnley’s growth

17:31 How Burnley uses data to attract new sponsors.

19:01 Burnley’s Take Me to Turf competition in the U.S.

20:25 Explaining promotion and relegation to U.S. investors

23:23 What the data says – Burnley's digital growth

Formerly CTO of MediaMath, Manny Puentes is General Manager of Advertising at Genius Sports. A leading voice in the advertising world, Manny has spearheaded the development and growth of many high-profile programmatic advertising solutions across the last 25 years.

With Google planning to phase out the third-party cookie, the advertising sector is set to undergo its biggest transformation of the last 20 years – but what does this mean for sports advertising?

In this episode, Manny discusses how sports advertisers can get ahead of the cookie phase-out, the growing importance of fan identity solutions, why it pays to be privacy-conscious with your audience engagement strategy and how sports and brands can deliver enriched, personalised fan experiences – in a world without third-party cookie data.

In episode ten of The Fan Engagement Podcast, you’ll learn:

2:13 Third-party cookie phaseout – what’s changing for brands and fans?

7:20 What does cookie depreciation mean for sports advertising?

9:36 Enhancing the fan experience through contextualised data and content

12:07 Leveraging fan identity graphs to create personalised experiences

13:02 Addressing the challenge of cross-device fan fragmentation

Shawn Bryant is a Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting LLP, leading their sports practice having held senior roles at Disney, ESPN, the NBA and the Harlem Globetrotters.

David Jarvis is a Senior Research Leader at The Deloitte Center for Technology, Media and Telecommunications (Deloitte Services LP) and is a co-author of The 2023 Sports Fan Insights Report.

Deloitte is the largest professional services organisation in the world, their sports division advises clients in 40 countries and across more than 30 sports. The 2023 Sports Fan Insights Report is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind and answers some of the biggest questions facing sports rights holders and advertisers.

Are Gen Z fans engaging differently to previous generations – and exactly how? How is social media and sports betting impacting the fan experience? Will immersive technologies become mainstream in how fans engage with sports?

In episode nine of The Fan Engagement Podcast, you’ll learn:

2:40 The 2023 Sports Fan Insights Report - is this the beginning of the immersive sports era?

4:06 How Gen Z fans express sports fandom differently from other demographics

5:36 Why the convergence of streaming, data and betting is changing how sports fans engage

7:10 The fragmented sports viewing experience

9:41 What the data says about emerging Gen Z fan engagement trends

12:57 Why fans are powering the explosive growth of women's sports

14:40 Why female sports fans engage differently to male sports fans

16:49 What sports technology innovation is set to revolutionise the fan experience next?