At a glance, you might think an NBA basketball team, especially one winning championships, would essentially sell itself. The fan base is massive and dedicated. The money appears to flow mightily.
But Mike Malo, former vice president of brand and marketing for the San Antonio Spurs, would have you know that fan bases grow older and there are competitors around every corner. So, even if you have Tim Duncan and a handful of championship rings, you have to keep finding the next group of fans.
“It’s not just about growing a big fan base, it’s about growing an engaged fan base,” he said in an interview with Austin Inno.
Now, Malo, who has also worked with the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Diamondbacks, has been hired as vice president of business development at Umbel, an Austin-based sports and entertainment data startup. He's essentially bringing a pro team's marketing perspective to a software company that wants to win over more clients.
In fact, it was Malo's experience using Umbel's software when he was with the Spurs that got him thinking about a career change. The platform, he said, made it incredibly easy to get insights and data visualizations from mountains of Facebook data and create quick, targeted campaigns. He said the software paid off in a matter of days for the Spurs.
And Umbel is a natural fit. The company, now tightly focused on sports and entertainment sectors, already works with the Minnesota Timberwolves, Brooklyn Nets, Oklahoma City Thunder, Indiana Pacers, Phoenix Suns and the WNBA's Dallas Wings.
“A lot of sport entertainment properties have good data coming in, but how they aggregate it and use it is the next step for the industry," Malo said, noting that social and behavioral data is generally lacking. “The industry is evolving from ‘let’s buy a list and go and call people on that list to drum up some business' to now with social insights, ticket data and other data you can be laser targeted…”
But Malo said he's not a tech guy.
“To me it’s wizardry," he joked. "I come at it from a user experience standpoint... and this platform does it better than anything I’ve seen before."
As for leaving a big time pro sports team to join a relatively new tech startup?
“It allowed me to combine my passion with sports and being sort of a data junkie," he said.
