Editor’s note: This article was written by Ben Fishcer and first appeared in Sports Business Journal, the industry’s leading source of sports business news, events and data.

This season, a Detroit Lions-Jacksonville Jaguars game would be a hot ticket, with two first-place teams squaring off. That was not the case a year ago, when both teams limped into Week 13 three games under .500, making it a challenge for the Lions to fill 64,500-seat Ford Field.

As a first step, Detroit sent one ticket offer to a typical email list: about 200,000 locals who had attended a game recently. But the Lions’ data marketers saw a chance to try something new with NFL’s Unified View of the Fan integrated customer database.

That league-level database mostly contains information teams would have had to buy independently until recently: Data generated by EA Sports, Fanatics, sportsbooks, Amazon Prime and dozens of other parts of the sports fan ecosystem that don’t necessarily overlap with ticket buyers.

By using that data, the Lions found a completely new group of people to email — metro Detroit residents who had never been to Ford Field, but were on record buying Lions merchandise, or those who had played as the Lions in Madden video games in recent years.

With the bigger integrated database, the Lions reached nearly 400,000 new potential fans (while being sure to not send doubles). Engagement with the email grew by 30% compared with the usual click-through rates. Ford Field still had about 4,000 empty seats for the game — the 60,743 on hand for Detroit’s 40-14 win represented a season low for the Lions — but the data marketers at the team and the NFL were pleased.

“I knew we were working in a bit of a silo and didn’t have as much data as we’d liked,” said Ashton Mullinix, the Lions’ senior vice president of strategy and analytics. “It’s one of the reasons I’m excited about this program. The number is going to keep growing as we identify different areas of the business and break down those walls.”

Building lists of email addresses for marketing is as old as the internet itself. But ticketing data is a limited resource in the NFL, where approximately 10% of fans attend at least one game each season, according to the league.

Sometimes, ticket data isn’t just limited, it’s misleading. Historically, most teams assumed anyone who bought a ticket was a fan and put them on the basic email list — even if they wore the visiting team’s jersey and lived far away.

In May 2022, NFL owners approved an expansive data-sharing policy and the standard for how teams identify and talk to their fans has grown higher. For starters, simply eliminating poorly targeted or duplicative messages would be a win for fans who resent a cluttered inbox, and that’s a key NFL goal. But also, blending local data with league sources — properly used to adjust marketing tactics — can improve engagement and sales. The league’s centralized database goes back nearly two decades, but it became much more valuable after the policy was approved.

“The journey on this has always come down to the fact that, if you can see and know fans better, and — respectfully, with permission — engage them, we can take it to the next level in terms of deepening that relationship,” said Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer who joined the league in 2021.

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In some ways, the challenge the NFL is attempting to meet is a creature of its own success. In MLS, for instance, teams might be reasonably confident that an email to local ticket buyers is sufficient. But the NFL’s footprint is so vast and deep that fans are everywhere, in every conceivable consumer category. The NFL believes 70% of NFL fans don’t live in their primary team’s market, and two-thirds of fans have at least one “secondary” favorite team.

In another case study prepared by the working group of data scientists and marketers around the league, the Cowboys tapped the integrated database to promote sponsor American Airlines’ giveaway of a free trip to a road game in Philadelphia last month.

About 500,000 fans got the email, but some of them were chosen because the database showed a combination of two traits: They had shown themselves to be a Cowboys or Eagles fan through purchases or other behaviors, and they’d used a ticket in an NFL stadium outside their home market.

Not surprisingly, those fans were 34% more likely than all others to open the email, and nearly three times more likely to click through on the offer.

Most of the initial use-cases for the database are marginal in nature. But for a league that claims 184 million fans and sells more than 95% of all tickets available, those small gains are how they’ll deliver the growth owners expect.

Take another example, the 2023 NFL Draft in Kansas City. The population within driving distance of the draft location was 16% smaller than it was one year earlier in Las Vegas, said Andy Kauffman, the NFL’s senior vice president of marketing strategy and science. But rather than just assume that would translate into lower attendance, the league and the hosting Chiefs turned to the integrated database with an idea.

The Chiefs hit their own ticket buyers as usual, but the NFL looked at the database to find other possible email targets: People unknown to the Chiefs who were still likely to be interested in going to the draft — perhaps Chicago or Minnesota fans, or people registered at the league’s direct-to-consumer video app NFL+ as Chiefs fans who had never been to Arrowhead (while being sure not to hit the Chiefs ticket-holders twice).

The result: The number of fans who responded to the emails by registering to attend shot up 54% over the prior year.

“It was an incredible atmosphere, an incredible event overall, and I’d like to say the work we’re doing here drove that part of the success, and the vibrancy of that event,” Kauffman said.

Each of the league’s 32 teams uses the service. While consumer brands outside of sports — think Marriott, Procter & Gamble or various airlines — are many years ahead of the NFL, these modest, early success stories are a necessary first step for the league toward unlocking the power of consumer intelligence.

Said Ballew, “Just getting those initial foundational insights unlocks a lot, and the sophistication builds from there.”