The rise of fan communities as cultural intellectual property
In the pre-Internet era, revenue from teams and events came largely from ticket sales and media buys. The digital era unleashed massive potential with new ways to reach and engage sports fans and has helped turn countless sports teams, leagues, and even individual athletes into globally known brands worth billions of dollars.
Social media and streaming platforms provide the perfect canvas not just for selling, but for something deeper—storytelling. This has been demonstrated by the popularity of series such as the Formula 1-focused “Drive to Survive”, which has generated approximately $290 million in ad revenue for Netflix over the past five years. The series has appeal beyond existing racing fans, attracting many new viewers on the strength of engaging real-life “characters” and strong storytelling.
Meanwhile, “Welcome to Wrexham” has used documentary storytelling and the real-life drama surrounding a little-known Welsh football club to create a surprise global hit for Disney+. The recent financial success of Wrexham F.C., with reported revenue of $36 million in 2025 (a 155% increase from the previous year), underscores how sports teams are becoming cultural intellectual property.
Instead of simply pinging messages at fans during a live broadcast, brands are fostering owned communities where fans can interact with each other. This can involve sponsoring or hosting group chats, specialized forums, or localized, recurring events. This way, brands can become active facilitators of sport story arcs and fan passion.
Reach vs. relevance: The challenge of digital marketing in sports
Fans feel a personal connection to their teams and players, creating memes, engaging in discussions, and participating in fantasy leagues—expanding the community beyond the traditional confines of game days.
Advertisers must shift their focus from merely achieving mass reach via sports coverage to cultivating relevance within these fan ecosystems. Successful digital marketing in sports evaluates deeper audience signals, such as micro-trust (smaller interactions gained through tailored identity-based touchpoints such as influencer partnerships and hyper-localized fan activations), contextual relevance, and long-term brand association.
What’s more, traditional metrics, such as logo visibility, are likely to fall short when assessing advertising effectiveness in micro-communities, which comprise niche clusters of fans who engage around things like specific players and shared local regions. Fans are protective of their spaces, and brands that fail to respect these dynamics will struggle to find success.
Precision marketing has become key to success in sports digital marketing. By leveraging technology, brands can connect with fans in ways that feel authentic and engaging. Creative content should mirror the language of fan communities, using insider cues, tone, and references that resonate with the community.
The attribution dilemma
The shift from passive broadcast-era impressions to community-led engagement and performance-based metrics creates a new challenge for marketers when marketing to sports fans: proving the ROI. When a loyal fan buys a ticket or merchandise, were they convinced by an ad, or would they have made that purchase anyway out of devotion to the team? As measurement evolves, marketers are moving beyond surface-level attribution to understand what is genuinely driving new results.
To separate a guaranteed sale from an ad-driven sale, brands are turning to incrementality testing. A prime example of this methodology is the use of ‘Ghost Ads.’
Solving the ROI puzzle with incrementality testing and Ghost Ads
The Ghost Ads approach involves randomly splitting the targetable users into two groups to establish an unbiased control population. The test group continues to receive ads as usual. The control group, however, simply receives one ad. This single ghost ad serves as a tag, indicating that the user in the control group would have been exposed to the normal stream of ads had he or she been in the “test” group.
These blinded control tests provide a more accurate method for measuring the incremental lift of marketing campaigns, typically showing that 50-60% of attributed sales are truly incremental. This allows marketers to drive actionable insights for future campaigns.
Boosting incremental lift via Deep Learning in sports marketing
Take the case of TickPick, a fast-growing North American resale-ticket marketplace that aims to challenge the traditional ticket industry by shifting all transaction fees onto sellers rather than buyers. TickPick recognized the need to move beyond driving app downloads and towards achieving first-time and repeat sales. To address this challenge, the marketplace embraced Deep Learning-powered performance advertising, enabling the delivery of in-app shoppable creatives tailored to specific sporting events, resonating with fans based on their previous browsing behavior and first-party signals.
This campaign delivered compelling results: a 22% lift in incremental orders and a 20% increase in revenue from in-app performance advertising.
Your game to win—convert fan engagement into action
As marketers navigate the evolving landscape of sports and entertainment, technology can help brands find the best way forward. Proving true incrementality—knowing beyond a doubt that your ad spend drove a net-new sale, i.e., a sale from a completely new customer, rather than just claiming credit for an inevitable one—is now a crucial lever for success in modern sports marketing. The brands that win will be those that understand how to show up, speak their fans' language, and convert fan engagement into action.
Today’s digital marketing in sports requires advertisers to rethink their strategies, shifting from a focus on reach to one centered on relevance and community engagement. By embracing the analytical power of Deep Learning in sports marketing, brands can tap into the immense potential to reach sports fan communities, turning passion into profitable transactions.
In this new era, sport isn’t just a media buy; it’s a community waiting to be engaged.
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