How Zatap is Capturing Fans’ Attention In Exciting Ways

In today’s hyper-connected world, the intersection of sports, technology, and fan engagement is evolving rapidly.

Fans constantly seek new ways to interact with their favorite athletes and teams. Savvy organizations are realizing that they can capture fan’s focus before, during, and long after a live event. As a bonus, teams are then able to get new insights and data about fans that they never had access to before.

At the forefront of this transformation is Zatap, a company dedicated to redefining how fans interact with their favorite teams. Tim Carter, Head of North American Business Development at Zatap, recently spoke with us about their innovative approach and the future of fan engagement.

Tim’s journey into sports tech began with a passion for merging data analytics with sports management—a journey that led him to Zatap after a successful stint with the Brooklyn Nets. At Zatap, Tim spearheads initiatives that integrate immersive technologies with fan experiences, aiming to deepen fan connections and enhance brand loyalty.

From reimagining sponsorship activations to leveraging blockchain for ticketing solutions, Zatap continues to push the boundaries of fan engagement. As sports evolve beyond the traditional fan experience, Zatap is leading the charge toward a more immersive and interactive future.

Read our full interview to see Zatap’s vision and initiatives that are revolutionizing fan engagement.

Taylor Pipes – Boomtown
Tell me about yourself and give me a brief synopsis of your career journey and what brought you to your role at Zatap.

Tim Carter – Head of North American Business Development, Zatap
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in sales and marketing since graduating from college. It’s been almost 10 years into my career. Five years into my career, I was doing sales and marketing for a company doing corporate interior design. I liked the sales job but hated the content that I was doing.

I have a lot of time left to be working and wanted to figure out what to do for the next 20 or 30 years of my life. We spend so much time at work and so I settled on the fact that it would have to be working in some sort of sports capacity. I started looking at different ways to switch careers and ended up getting my master’s in sports management and data analytics at Columbia. Then, I started working for the Brooklyn Nets for a brief period before leaving to start my own company with a business partner.

In early 2022, I had some life changes, like starting a family, and I wanted to get a little bit more time with them, so I ended up selling that first company and started working for Zatap, which has been great.

I’ve been in the sports industry now for a little over six years and have loved it. Now at Zatap, I head up our North American side of things. The company is based out of Zurich and I’m based out of New York. I would say 75% of my role is business development and heading that up. The other side of things is sales, operations, and strategy. It’s been great and I really enjoy it and have had an awesome couple of years at Zatap so far.

Taylor:
What is the core challenge that you and Zatap are trying to solve right now? From everything I could tell you’re a pretty entrenched and established company, but seem to align yourself in providing a product that solves challenges for the tech sports universe. I’m curious, what’s the core challenge, and how is the Comcast SportsTech program helping get you to where you need to be?

Tim:
I think that the core challenge is how we create engaging products and immersive sports experiences from start to finish including merchandise for teams and improve that fan experience while at the same time doing it in a way that is simple and easy to use.

Likewise, for the team side or the brand side, how do we create a product that seamlessly fits into what they’re already doing and is also able to gather a lot more data on their fans? I think a lot of these teams and brands have massive following on social media, whether it’s through individual players or the team as a whole or the brand as a whole, but when you break down this social media following, brands and teams don’t truly know these fans.

“When you break down social media following, brands and teams don’t truly know these fans.”

There’s a great example of that when Spotify was auditing FC Barcelona’s social media following and their fan base to figure out what it was worth. How much do they know these people to be able to create some targeted ads and targeted sponsorship campaigns? Out of the 300 million followers Barcelona has across all their social media platforms, Spotify found they only know about 1% of those fans. Having a deep, true understanding of fans is something that we’re trying to do for teams while at the same time creating a really rich experience for the fans.

The way we see Comcast being able to play a big role in that is through so many different connections, whether it’s being able to make introductions for us or connecting the dots in a bunch of different areas. How we can potentially integrate into Comcast solutions they’re providing for their consumers and partners, whether it’s teams or leagues, and creating a connected ecosystem and being able to loop merchandise into that connected ecosystem?

Taylor:
Awesome. And how did you find out about the program? I always like to ask the different founders how they learned about the program and what inspired them to apply.

Tim:
So some of our biggest investors are Wayne Kimmel and Chad Stender over at 76 Capital – they are a sports tech investment firm out of Philadelphia. Obviously, with Comcast being in Philly, I think that we were just connected through some mutual connections there. And we were encouraged to apply for the program by a few different people and it’s worked out well.

Jenna has talked a little bit about this, but there are not so many startups in this cohort, but a lot of scaleups. A lot of companies are a little bit more established. We’re looking forward to hearing how Comcast could help us scale up and take that next step, whether it’s making introductions to influential and impactful clients as well as getting the perspective and insights of different partners and people that Comcast has introduced us to as well. That’s what we are hoping to get out of it, and it’s been great so far.

Taylor:
Awesome. I completely agree with you. I’ve been a part of four of these cohorts, and it blows my mind – scaleup is a good word. These are the most high-fidelity, evolved startups. They’re just fully evolved machines in their regard and it’s super interesting to see.

I’m curious if you could walk me through Zatap’s business model. I’ve seen feature-wise, I get what you do, product storytelling, building engagement, loyalty, and ultimately trying to find ways to connect data to the customers. First, who’s the customer of Zatap? Walk me through an example of how, in the sports universe, you might help solve a challenge.

Tim:
So the way we work, I’d say 95% of the time is like a B2B2C model where we are working directly with a brand or a team to create a cool product for their end consumer. I think a great example is what we’ve done with the Nashville Predators. We’ve worked with the Preds in a couple of different capacities and I’ll go through each of them just because I think it tells a pretty holistic story.

We worked with the Preds to commemorate Pekka Rinne who was their goalkeeper for about 15 years. They had a big retirement night for him and a big ceremony and we worked with them to create a custom jersey patch and a bunch of content around the retirement night. So, you can get this Predator jersey that has this cool Pekka Rinne patch. When you tap the patch, you’re able to see a bunch of behind-the-scenes content, whether he’s mic’d up at practice or talking to different players in the locker room or talking about his time with the Preds – content you can’t see anywhere else. It’s a special edition jersey, which is cool and there’s some really special content around that product.

The next thing that we was help the Preds sell their jersey patch sponsorship. So rather than just having a static logo on a jersey, we helped the Preds create this dynamic activation around a sponsorship patch. Now with our tech, the fans can tap the patch, interact with it, and go directly to a link to purchase something.

So many times now, at least when jersey patches started, a lot of sports sponsorship was just around brand awareness. I think it’s transitioned not only into brand awareness but what business can they get from this? What’s the actual value added? Sports sponsorship deals are no longer just done with handshakes on the golf course – “Hey, the owner of the company is a fan of the team, so we’re going to do it.” Now, it’s analytical around numbers and eyeballs, but also what is the ROI? We worked hand-in-hand with the Preds to help them on a few different pitches with potential sponsors around creating active engagements and cool activations for fans, sponsors, and partners.

That’s something that we’re looking to replicate and to do again in the future. We are talking to a bunch of different teams around the country about some cool sponsorship activations. That’s an example of the way that we work and how our business model is B2B2C for the most part.

We are actually in the process of creating a cool experience builder. This content management system will be really easy for an end consumer or for a smaller business to be able to log in and create a cool digital experience and tie that to a physical product. Shortly, we might end up being a little more B2C, but where we currently sit is this B2B2C model.

Taylor:
Well, that’s super interesting. I can’t wait to hear more about that. Super cool. What are you hearing from the sports side? What is the massive opportunity that you think lies ahead? What you’re telling me ultimately is going to roll back to maybe a little bit of personalization, but is data the center of the universe for a lot of things that you’re doing and providing that clean, impactful data back to the end customer? Is that the end game there?

Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. Having a true understanding of your fans is something that teams are constantly trying to do and trying to get a leg up as well as create engaging immersive experiences for fans. And so I think the big thing where teams and brands are most excited about what we do is on the data side.

“Having a true understanding of your fans is something that teams are constantly trying to do.”

A perfect example of that is selling tickets through a Ticketmaster or whatever it might be. Maybe you’re going to get data from the person who bought the tickets, but the person who’s there, who’s sitting in those seats is completely different half the time. Maybe one person buys four tickets or six tickets, and now, all of a sudden, you have one piece of data for six seats. Our goal is to create an ecosystem where everyone’s buying merchandise or participating and tapping and registering the product with their name and email and telling you where they’re sitting. Hopefully, we can get to a point where our data is even more accurate than that of a Ticketmaster or someone like Live Nation. From that purchase point, we can say, “Hey, go buy this merchandise or this shirt and win a chance to get some free tickets when you register it.” Now, we’re creating an experience that fans want to interact with while at the same time getting some cool data.

I think data is central while at the same time, storytelling creates this immersive experience. Teams are constantly trying to figure out how they can engage Gen Z and Gen Alpha and create experiences that can compete with a lot of different things. One thing that we’re doing right now is working with Hugo Boss and a few partners like Imaginary Ones and Ready Player Me to create a jacket that you can wear in real life, but at the same time, your avatar can wear in Roblox as well.

Creating this cool crossover where you can customize a jacket digitally and then have your avatar wear it in Roblox is a cool experience and central to what we do.

One last example of how we are helping teams and leagues get data is on the music side. Republic Records is a massive agency and they sell a bunch of vinyl albums through third-party retailers like Walmart or an Urban Outfitters. The person who is going to that store and purchasing that vinyl album is someone who they want to know. That’s an engaged fan, but currently, there’s no way for them to know who’s buying those albums. They’re not going to integrate into Walmart or Urban Outfitters’ point of sale (POS) system – that’s just not realistic. We’re going to put our tag onto that vinyl album cover, and then after the fan buys it, they’ll be able to tap that album cover with their phone and see a bunch of VIP content from the artists and some cool stuff and maybe a chance to win tickets to a show. But, they first have to register their product by giving their name and email. Now, they’ll have all this data on people who are going and purchasing albums at different stores and different locations that they previously were never privy to where they never had any information. That’s another way teams are looking at it. We’ll put this technology into a T-shirt, and we’ll just give it away. Potentially we could sell it, but we could also just give it away and just have this be a data play as well. There are lots of cool ways to get it from that side.

Taylor:
I feel like I’m seeing companies, especially sports companies, understand access to data in a way that they haven’t previously maybe in the last five years. Why is that? Is machine learning and AI finally catching up to allow teams to be nimble and process information quickly? What seems to have happened that makes what you do so valuable and so interesting to these teams?

Tim:
Yeah, I don’t know how much machine learning and AI is playing a role in this. I think that in the last five years, and you could even make an argument in the last 10 years, teams have had to work so much harder to keep people engaged as this digital universe has taken off. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have gotten bigger, and video games have continued to increase watching people play video games – 10 or 15 years ago, that was not a thing. Teams are constantly having to improve and work hard just to keep fans’ attention, engage fans, and get new fans. If you don’t have clean data, if you don’t have good data, then it’s really hard to create engaging campaigns to actively engage your fans and get new ones.

We talk to so many teams and I would say about 50% of them are still having a hard time understanding their customer acquisition costs. It used to be like, “Hey, if we can get someone to come to a game, then we think that we have a pretty good shot of turning that person into a fan.”

Okay, well what does it cost to get someone to go to a game? A lot of teams don’t know. And so if we can create a cool way to engage with these Gen Z and Gen Alphas to create immersive experiences and engage with them while at the same time creating really clean data, I think teams are excited about that.

Taylor:
I’m curious how you consume sports as a fan, and how much are you thinking about your work and what you can do. Are you watching sports with a new lens or are you trying to just divorce yourself from that reality and just enjoy it? How do you watch sports and what are your favorite sports to watch?

Tim:
Yeah, absolutely. I think a huge percentage of people in the sports industry started as fans. I think I’d probably say 99%. There’s a very limited number of people who are in the sports industry who aren’t fans of the actual sport. So for me, I consume sports a lot less now that I have two young kids and a pretty full plate. But I love basketball and I think that’s my favorite sport to watch and to play. Now, when I am watching a game online, all the signage that you see on the court or on whatever it is on the side, I notice it way more after selling sponsorships and after being a part of that world. I can still unplug and be a fan, but at the same time, I notice a lot more things on the fringe that I didn’t notice before.

I’ve had some incredible opportunities to see a bunch of different events in real-time and live events. I got to see Dwayne Wade’s last game when I was at the Brooklyn Nets at Barclay’s Center – that was awesome. There are still a lot of these moments that are so surreal and so cool to be a part of while at the same time when you go to games multiple times a week; I don’t want to say it loses its luster a little bit, but it can become mundane. And there are times when you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to leave at halftime because I’ve been at an arena three times this week.” Whereas I think in the past it was like, “No, I’m going to stay until the final whistle.”

I am extremely fortunate to be in this industry, and I still try to be a fan as much as I can. I think that’s also what we do – we try to keep the fan in mind with everything we do. For every new product that we release and every update, we try to get feedback from fans and look at it from our perspective. We’re constantly looking at it from the different apps that we use and consume, whether it’s ESPN and how that app works, whether you’re looking at a Peacock or Hulu that also has live sports now, and you’re trying to figure out how fans consume content and looking at different social media sites. I think now my fan consumption is through social media and just looking at highlights and trying to figure that out and incorporate as much as we can into what we do and what we would want from a fan perspective.

Taylor:
Are there any trends you’re looking at internally as you build products and think about sales? Are there trends in sports or technology or even outside of the sports universe that you all are keeping an eye on right now that are interesting to you?

Tim:
Yeah, I mean, by no means are we an AI company. I would say that we’re a blockchain company with our tech being on blockchain. I think that we are trying to figure out how we take the next step with our data from an AI perspective. As you mentioned, we have all this data that we didn’t have before. How do we now turn that into actionable insights, and how do we turn that piece of data into a customer or a fan? And so that’s what we’re looking at from a trend perspective, and how we can utilize these different technologies to then go and create a product that ultimately is better for the teams and fans.

Taylor:
Are there any startups outside of the cohort right now in the sports universe that you are keeping an eye on that you’re excited about doing some cool stuff?

Tim:
Yeah, there is one. There’s a company called Tixologi, their CEO is Asher Weiss and he’s doing some cool and innovative stuff from the ticketing front on the blockchain and doing some cool things there. I think that we’ve all been in the ticketing space or used sports tickets and it’s never a perfect experience. And so Tixologi, they’re doing some really fun stuff there.

Taylor:
Awesome. I appreciate you taking the time and enjoy your weekend.

Tim:
You as well. I’ll talk to you soon.