As Advertising Week begins in New York, Genius Sports announced the launch of Fanhub, an omnichannel marketing platform geared specifically for brands to target sports fans. Fanhub will allow advertisers to make programmatic and social media placements, including in connected TV (CTV), display, audio and digital out-of-home (DOOH).
Billed as the first of its kind in for sports, the platform will access the same general market ad inventory that other programmatic companies such as The Trade Desk use to make their buys. Fanhub will provide strategies for ad buys based on live game-time data. The company says clients will be able to scale their campaigns with digital and video creative ads that weave together Genius Sports’ own play-by-play data alongside fan preferences.
“Fanhub finally lets marketers create sophisticated sports-based media strategies, track and manage the full-funnel fan journey from season to season and leverage our live game-time data to drive hyper-personalized and relevant campaigns,” said Manny Puentes, Genius Sports’ GM of advertising, in a press release.
This new offering arrives in a precarious time for marketers. A years-long debate over the use of consumer data by brands, including third-party cookies, continues to simmer in the advertising community. Apple rolled out a much-hyped privacy update in 2021 that restricted brands’ ability to target their ads to iPhone users. Google, however, has delayed its own plans to limit cookie access for several years.
Additionally, brand safety has been a major concern since programmatic ad buying—the automated process in which ads are bought, sold and delivered onto media platforms—became popular in the 2010s. Advertisers often worry about their brands appearing next to objectionable or fraudulent content. This was the case with the NFL last fall after a Media Matters report revealed that the league’s promoted content appeared on the X/Twitter accounts of several prominent white nationalists.
Fanhub is the latest product Genius Sports has launched for advertisers. The company created Trend Genius alongside X/Twitter as a platform to analyze conversational trends among social media users to spot hot topics, then serve display ads from brands looking to connect with specific consumers or gain wider reach. Trend Genius made its debut during the Olympics and has been utilized during this NFL season.
The Fanhub announcement comes on the heels of Genius adding Robbie Bach, one of the executives behind the development of Microsoft’s Xbox, to its board of directors.
