Genius Sports Limited’s New-Found Audience Granularity
Who are your fans? More specifically, who is your fan? Genius Sports Limited’s recent acquisition of Sports Innovation Lab, promises to make both scale and granularity possible when building an audience.
Sports Innovation Lab is a data, analytics, and insights leader. Its research on fan behavior through its Fluid Fan™ Graph has helped global brands, including Legends, Kellanova, NASCAR, and Monumental Sports and Entertainment, curate audience insights and drive revenue.
Josh Linforth, Chief Revenue Officer, Genius Sports, explains why the acquisition makes sense and what Sports Innovation Lab brings to the table.
How does this acquisition help Genius Sports’ in fan activation?
It unites the industry’s most comprehensive, official live sports data with Sports Innovation Lab’s deterministic fan graph, allowing Genius Sports to create a single, real-time platform that knows who the fan is, what’s happening in the game, and which message will drive action.
Explain how real-time fan engagement, such as gameday activations, retail tie-ins, or city-based campaigns, will be possible?
Expect more moment-responsive media with creative that adapts to official data events, integrated gamification, and city-level retail offers synchronized to the live game. With exclusive NFL rights (official play-by-play, Next Gen Stats, betting feeds) and the Sports Innovation Lab’s Fluid Fan™ Graph, buyers can optimize end-to-end programmatic through premium inventory across digital, social, and CTV. Genius Sports BetVision extends this into the stream itself, layering real-time stats, interactive moments, and calls-to-action, so now even more highly targeted engagement takes place without leaving the viewing experience at global scale.
Where does hyperlocal personalization fit into the mix?
We build custom, team-based audiences that go beyond simple fandom to reflect how fans in each city actually live and behave. If one market’s fans skew toward yoga and wellness while another leans into sports betting and outdoor pursuits, we capture those differences and activate them. That means you can target by DMA or ZIP code and also align creative to local behaviors and preferences so the right message reaches the right consumers. Because our deterministic fan graph tracks purchase affinities across more than 8,000 individual brands, we can see how brand choices vary by market, use that for smarter segment design, and prove ROI with local-level outcomes like sales lift.
Can local businesses and regional sponsors tap into this enhanced fan data to compete with national advertisers?
Our deterministic fan graph spans over 250 million U.S. consumers, local businesses and regional sponsors. They can extend team sponsorships with targeted media that actually reaches the right people with real scale. We syndicate audiences through major distribution partners (LiveRamp, Google DV360, The Trade Desk, and more), so brands can add meaningful reach across channels without sacrificing precision or performance. In practice, that means activating locally relevant segments at the DMA or ZIP level, then carrying those same high-accuracy audiences into digital, social, and CTV to drive measurable outcomes.
Sports Innovation Lab has some pioneering research into women’s sports. Can Genius Sports leverage that expertise to better engage diverse fan segments?
This partnership will move the market from research to in-market activations in women’s sports that deliver the ROI brands need to see to continue investing. We’ll pair official, moment-by-moment game signals with Sports Innovation Lab’s audience intelligence to build precise women’s-sports segments based on real behavior across attendance, viewing, and purchase, going beyond simple intent. That enables more relevant creative, better conversion, and clearer ROI for partners investing in women’s sports across channels and markets.
How will the integration of Genius’ official league data and Sports Innovation Lab’s deterministic fan graph, provide a competitive edge over existing sports media targeting solutions?
Most solutions offer either contextual signals or survey-based intent. While survey data is important, and viewership is useful, the truest expression of fandom is through a consumer’s wallet. Our technology goes beyond the surface to uncover hard-to-find patterns in sports, media, and entertainment, connecting the dots that others miss. We connect verified fans based on transactions to verified moments based on actual behavior: official live data from 450+ leagues fused with deterministic consumer signals. The result is a closed-loop system that spans insights, targeting, activation, optimization, and measurement, tying media exposure to real outcomes such as subscriptions, ticket sales, app installs, and retail sales.
Will Genius Sports ensure data accuracy and privacy while tracking billions of fan transactions?
Our data is accurate in that it is 100% deterministic and passively collected. This isn’t self-reported, it’s actual behavior. Everything in our graph is privacy compliant, SOC II and OneTrust approved, and follows CCPA and GDPR compliance.
Can you share examples of how FANHub, combined with Sports Innovation Lab’s insights, might redefine sponsorship opportunities for mid-market or local sports teams and their advertisers?
FANHub pairs Genius’ official, moment-by-moment game signals with Sports Innovation Lab’s deterministic fan intelligence, rooted in observed behaviors like transactions, attendance, and viewing, to build precise, local segments for mid-market teams. These audiences activate directly in FANHub to trigger dynamic creative on relevant game moments and to measure outcomes end-to-end; they are also syndicated to major DSPs (LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads) for regional scale without sacrificing accuracy. Because we surface fanbase-level insights, we also guide the activation itself, so if a market leans sunrise-yoga meetups over traditional tailgates, brands can tailor experiences and creative that resonate.
