Everybody’s Chasing the Fan. Ekkobar, the “DNA behind Social Decision Intelligence,” Has the Map
Ekkobar is revolutionizing how social media—the largest data set in the world—is harnessed, analyzed and applied to uncover the insights that matter most to brands. With its groundbreaking Social Decision Intelligence™ platform, Ekkobar cuts through the noise and transforms social media from chaos into a competitive advantage, enabling brands, studios, networks, sports leagues, teams, and agencies to seize market opportunities, stay relevant, build loyalty, and drive bottom-line results.
A member of the 2025 Cohort of Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech, Ekkobar emphasizes questions and answers to derive meaning for supporting decisions and enhanced profitability, empowering sports and entertainment brands to protect their legacies and increase their revenues.
Ekkobar co-foundes Rhys Ryan, CEO, and Amber Dodson, Chief Growth Officer, sat down with Tripp Baltz, Comcast SportsTech Head of Research, to discuss the company’s beginnings, present, and future, and what its solutions will mean for the future of sports.
Rhys, with a traditional background in computer science and mathematics, worked for Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, AT&T, and Boeing. While at MCI, he pioneered the art of “scraping” data, which ignited his passion for solving complex problems.
Bored with big company life, he found his home in the startup world during the mid-90’s. This led him to becoming a CTO and Co-Founder at AudioBase, where he and his team created some of the dot-com’s leading audio technology. After the fizzle of the dot-com era, AudioBase was sold and Rhys moved to LA with aspirations to be a screenwriter.
But his passion for technology and solving problems led him to create Scenechronize, a script and production management system. This is where he met Amber, a former producer with desires to venture into the startup world. Together, they grew Scenechronize to become the #1 production management system in the world, still going after 19 years.
Amber, who described her career path as “not linear – nonsequential,” began her career with history studies at Colorado College before entering the corporate world at Dish Network in marketing. After leaving corporate culture, Amber became an independent producer in Denver creating commercials before making a bold move to Los Angeles where she was hired as the right-hand assistant and later, associate producer to one of the producers and founders of James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment.
In Hollywood, Amber gained comprehensive film industry experience across the entire production lifecycle, describing it as “20 years of education squeezed into a few years” while building an extensive professional network.
As head of business development at Scenechronize, Amber leveraged her Hollywood network to sell a cloud-based production management application that became the industry standard. She and Rhys hustled their way around Hollywood, snagging endorsements and getting to know celebrities. They got such productions as “Breaking Bad,” “True Blood,” and “Game of Thrones” as customers. Eventually the company sold, and Amber and Rhys left Scenechronize.
Amber relocated to New Mexico, leading the Albuquerque city film office for the Mayor and later, was appointed by the Governor to lead the state film office for the past 4.5 years. While there she successfully overhauled the state’s film incentive program to make it more competitive while ensuring local residents benefited. During her tenure a record-breaking $3.3 billion was spent in the state by the film industry – and of marquis directors flocked to the state bringing projects including OPPENHEIMER, “Ransom Canyon”, “Dark Winds”, and thousands more, whereby New Mexico was elevated to international acclaim, becoming a premier filmmaking hub.
After Scenechronize, Rhys helped start and become the CTO of another entertainment-focused company. After CallPlease, Rhys was contracted by NOAA to help with an AI/big data project. After finishing the project, he moved to Boston and earned an advanced degree at Harvard in AI and data science, all while working as a transformation executive at Google.
Tripp:
What is Ekkobar’s solution?
Amber:
Ekkobar is a revolutionary way to unearth all the treasures that sit within social media. And all of that treasure is everything directly from your customer, or your soon-to-be customer’s mouth. Their dreams, their desires, their hopes, their complaints, their wants, their needs, and their price points.
It’s all there. Unfortunately, legacy analytics just show dashboards of numbers, and there are no real answers there. And social listening tools just focus on keywords. There’s just been no way to unearth all the value within the conversation. And that’s what we do, find the value in social media to help drive your business forward.
Tripp:
What’s the challenge you’re trying to solve?
Rhys:
There are many, but they center around understanding value and achieving goals. One great example is related to sponsorship. How does Coca-Cola find the perfect athlete who already loves their products and wants to promote them? How do you help an athlete on a professional sports team grow their social media impact and expand their brand so they can get endorsement deals?
Another great example is research. If you’re writing a human interest story in the news or on television, like for the Olympics, how do you find the stories that really connect to an emotional heart? And lastly, how do you find true influencers or understand how a clip or a trailer drop is working?
The one place where everybody talks is social media. It is the largest dataset in the world and it has all the answers. But you can’t get answers to questions if you don’t understand the question; that’s the first step. I wanted to build a system to utilize questions to surface the answers that sports, entertainment and brands need, quickly and easily.
Everything we build, every page, must answer a real business question. We don’t have legacy analytics dashboards, we have business applications that serve you and your bottom line.
Tripp:
How do brands turn those data into revenue?
Amber:
There is immense noise in marketing right now. Everyone is trying to cut through that noise and find entertainment, inspiration, meaningful experiences, and authenticity. Authenticity is in fact one of our core values at Ekkobar. You can make all kinds of assumptions all day based on numbers, likes and followers. However I think what we provide is the key to unlocking insights within the vastness of social media. With Ekkobar, you can optimize your critical thinking and decision-making to find answers to big questions about your business.
You can, finally, cut through noise, using our AI, to find out exactly what your customers are talking about, how to reach them, and more importantly, how to monetize them. There is not another platform out there that allows businesses to capitalize on the depth, breadth, complexity and context of social media like we do.
Tripp:
Can you explain how that’s valuable?
Rhys:
There’s a lot of inherent value in social media. The key is, how do you get it the right way? People will say, “I’m just gonna go look at a bunch of posts.” Well, if you’ve got 10,000 posts, you can’t go look at all of them, it’s just impossible. And you’re not going to see them all anyway because you can’t see them all due to the algorithms on the social media platforms.
But Ekkobar sees all of them, everything. Then we start with the question such as “is this spike in posts an iceberg or an ice cube? If it’s an ice cube, don’t worry about it. If it’s an iceberg, is it trending good or bad for you?”
Tripp:
Could you define what you mean by a spike?
Rhys:
Naomi Osaka, before she dropped out of the French Open in 2001, was getting 500 to 600 posts a day. When she announced she was dropping out for mental health reasons, she got a quarter million posts in 24 hours. That’s a spike. The question is, using the concepts of linear regression, how long is that spike going to live? You cannot look at raw data and accept it at face value. You have to do things to determine what’s valuable and what’s not.
Tripp:
You separate the wheat from the chaff so it’s actionable insights, right?
Amber:
Exactly. It’s not just analytics, like how many “likes,” followers, etc. Yes, we have all that jazz. But we also have answers related to deep narratives, sentiment, tone, story conversation chains, influencers, topics of conversation, conversation drivers…impact. We go far beyond how many likes did this post receive, we tell you what did this post mean, what impact did it have, and what do we do now?
We look at impact, reach, popularity, push, influence, sentiment, narratives, relevancy and effectiveness. And all of these things are insights that stem directly from the data. It’s really about the interactions on social media and the meaning behind them, what’s where the value truly starts to surface.
When you have people like our initial sponsor, Damon Phillips (former Senior Vice President, NBC Sports Digital and Emerging Businesses), who’s a master at what he does, and knows exactly what he wants, he knows how to also look at his business and see his blind spots – then ask the right question to surface vital insights. That’s another premise of our company: If you don’t understand the question, you’re not really going to get an empowering answer.
With Ekkobar, you can ask any question. You can’t do that with a traditional social media analytics tool. With legacy tools, you’re going to get numbers in return. With us, you’re going to get a paragraph, maybe four paragraphs describing sentiment, popularity, reach, emotion, desire, opportunities and diamonds in the rough. At the end of the day, we provide insights for people across the enterprise to make better decisions.
When Damon saw what we were doing, he knew exactly what he wanted and how to marry the two. This led us to create a brand new product called MIRA. It took the manual process of finding the right NIL talent from 2-4 weeks down to minutes, basically increasing velocity. To this end, we created the Ekkoscore™, a measurement of someone’s impact on social media. Finally there’s a single number that expresses impact value, think of it being the FICO score of social media.
Tripp:
Explain what you mean by velocity.
Amber:
The Sports Athlete Direct program, we were told, spends two to four weeks identifying potential athlete candidates for various brand campaigns. For example, one of their stories was about Sephora – they wanted a particular type of female athlete for a marketing campaign.
Sephora would give that criteria to NBC Sports, and it would take weeks for that team to identify viable candidates. The team wanted to intelligently collapse that time to get back to Sephora candidates not only faster, but with better, more relevant, and synergistic candidates.
Regarding velocity…we collapsed that search time frame down to seconds. Now, when Sephora calls NBC Sports, they don’t have to have a second phone call. While the client is on the call, the salesperson at NBC can input the criteria into MIRA, our product, and respond saying, “Okay, right off the bat, I have five great candidates for you.” Not only are we delivering on velocity…not only the speed of finding great brand / athlete candidates for campaigns or sponsorships, but we are also providing more relevant candidates that may have otherwise been lost in the social universe, or weren’t authentic matches to begin with.
Rhys:
We have the applications that help with sponsorship, marketing, characters and story arcs for writers, casting, information security, and other enterprise-level departments. There are all these great conversations out there, but no one’s listening. And it isn’t just listening. You have to hear and understand. You have to figure out how to clean and correct and massage the data to make it useful to analyze.
We’ve done work for CBS, FX Networks and for Fox TV’s The Cleaning Lady. In fact, they did a lot of press for season one, but they had no idea what worked and didn’t work, because ratings don’t provide answers anymore. We were actually able to show them exactly what worked and didn’t work. In fact, we gave them 23 points between what worked and didn’t work.
Tripp:
The way that society thinks about media is changing. How does Ekkobar fit into that?
Rhys:
It’s helping the entertainment companies understand how to derive value from what they do and try. They could create five trailers for one movie, and they want to know which one performs better than the others. They put it on social media, they let people look at it, right?
And then they look and see that it had this many likes, random views and the many comments and go, “Oh, we know which trailer worked.” But they’re not thinking about the concept of engagement interaction.
If you look at a post, it’s worth a penny. If you click on like, it’s worth two pennies. If you retweet it, it’s worth three pennies. If you reply, it’s worth four. And if you quote it, it’s worth five. Let’s talk about how much money you have at the end of the day. That’s how you understand performance.
Now add to that the concept of the conversation chain. Legacy analytics looks at every post in a singular fashion. We don’t. We take the data, we rebuild into a three-dimensional model we call the conversation chain. If I know the chain, I know who’s involved, what impact they have, and their actual reach, not just the potential based on follower count.
So if you put out a post about Harry Potter and all of a sudden Mark Hamill or George Takei – who are very influential on social media – starts promoting and talking about it, that trailer has more value and we capture that and then take it to the next level.
That’s why we’ve created a whole new type of AI called Ekkoscore. Similar to a FICO score, Ekkoscore is one number that measures a person’s impact on social media.
Tripp:
Who are some of your clients?
Amber:
We value and honor discretion first and foremost, but I can tell you we’ve done work with NBC Sports, of course, CBS, Fox TV, and Amazon MGM, to name a few.
Tripp:
And who would you say are your biggest competitors or threats?
Amber:
We don’t ever rest on our laurels as founders, but right now, no one else, that we are aware of, is doing what we are doing. We are ahead of the game, and we’re going to capture the market. However, it’s also been a challenge because no one else is doing what we’re doing, and that requires education and helping people to open their eyes.
Just like with Scenechronize, we are in that seat again of changing minds and showing people across sports and entertainment that there’s a better and extremely powerful way to tap the social media conversation–Ekkobar. And sometimes, you know, people understand something groundbreaking right off the bat, and sometimes people just don’t want to change. We are certainly competing against the traditional legacy social media analytics tools out there – that people have been using for a long time.
Tripp:
Describe how you came into Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech.
Amber:
Rhys and I both love sports. I’ve always been a major sports fan and was an athlete. But neither Rhys nor I knew the business of sports or the industry per se. We knew from the get-go that Ekkobar would be a fantastic fit for the sports industry, and thus it is one of our beachhead markets.
But we weren’t sure how we were going to break into or navigate sports, neither of us coming from that world, nor having connections. We learned about Comcast SportsTech a few years ago and thought this could be our ticket into sports.
We watched all the YouTube videos, we talked to previous cohorts, we asked about their experience. We did our own due diligence and we heard nothing but positive things from the other founders, who told us it was absolutely worth every minute. And I promise, I’m not just giving you all lip service!
Some of our investors didn’t know about Comcast SportsTech and admittedly, were a little reticent, saying, “Are you sure this isn’t just an accelerator that you might not need right now? Do you really get access to these sports teams, leagues and brand partners that they promise?”
Meeting the Comcast SportsTech team, hearing all these stories from previous cohorts, and learning about their success, made us think, we have to do this program because this is the ultimate door into the sports industry. And the people are phenomenal.
Rhys:
It’s a bit of a fun story. Last year at SportsPro, up comes a gentleman who says, “Hi, Rhys. Nice to meet you. I said, “Hi, do I know you?” And he says, “No, but I’m with Comcast Sports Tech. I know about you guys and I thought I’d come for a demo.”
So we gave Geoffrey Cheng (SportsTech Investment Manager) a demo, and he said, “We turned you guys down the previous years?
And I said, “Yeah, you did. But, to be fair, we weren’t quite ready with the products yet.”
Then he said, “Okay, are you ready now? You’re going to apply this year?”
I said, “Sure, sure.” But I had no intention of applying. I didn’t want a third strike after having failed the previous two years, to steal a baseball analogy. Then I kept getting an email every month from Geoffrey and Jose Vieitez asking, “When are you going to apply?”
I finally applied less than two weeks before the deadline. We kept making it through each round and I was personally shocked. And then we had to do a pitch deck for the partners, and that got us to the final round.
The last hurdle was an actual interview with the partners. I was in L.A. working with CBS at the time for some of their shows. The meeting was at 6 a.m. because of the London folks, and I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to be chipper and peppy for that.”
So Amber started calling me at 4:00 a.m., then again at 4:15, just kind of keeping me going so that I was awake and ready at 6:00 a.m. We were doing the pitch and Damon, along with the Comcast SportsTech folks and other partners, were on the call.
I remember Damon specifically because he had his arms folded and his head tilted with one eye watching the screen. And I’m watching him thinking, this is the guy I need to impress. We did our demo, we did our pitch, we were answering questions and having a lot of fun, laughing and joking, then all of a sudden I gave an answer that changed our world. I don’t even remember what I said.
Damon turned his head, leaned forward, pointed his finger and said, wait a minute, what was it you just said? So I explained a little more. And then he spent the rest of the meeting looking directly at us. It was at that moment that I let go and went for the gold.
When we got the email saying, let’s have a call to tell you the results, we were terrified. We had to wait a week and entrepreneurs are not patient people. We got on the call and everybody’s chit-chatting. Jenna Kurath, the Head of Comcast SportsTech was there, so we had high hopes for a positive outcome. But while we waited, Amber and I were messaging each other like, how much longer is this going to go on? When are they going to tell us yes or no? We were convinced it was “no” after failing the previous two years.
When Jenna said yes, we both immediately lost it. I sat back in my chair so no one could see me tear up. Amber cried on camera. We knew we had just won the golden ticket to the chocolate factory and that our lives would change forever, and they did.
Amber:
And it has been a joy and learning experience of a lifetime with some of the most wonderful people we’ve ever had the pleasure to know. Our Comcast SportsTech advisors are invaluable to us, like family. We couldn’t even put a price tag on it. Everything has been incredible with the program, from organization to delivery, from access to expertise.
When people see we are a part of Comcast SportsTech, it is instant credibility. Your reputation is stellar. The fact that you could have direct access to the Premier League NASCAR, the Olympics, PGA Tour, NBC Sports, and others, you know, we are forever honored and humbled to be a part of it. We worked hard to get here and we never take a second of it for granted.
I think a huge benefit to being a part of the Comcast family is also not just access to all of the advisors and partners, but having a sherpa, someone to rely on and ask questions when you don’t know the answer, because you will never have all the answers.
Meeting these other founders to have conversations about their challenges and their triumphs has been immeasurably valuable to me and even with previous cohorts. For example, meeting Kelly (Pracht) from nVenue. Wonderful conversations with her as not just a fellow founder, but a fellow female founder who’s farther down the line than us.
You know, I think a huge benefit of the program is access to other companies in the program. And I think that benefit could be even more amplified. You’re getting access to these other innovative, visionary founders and companies that are truly changing the game of sports tech, and otherwise you might not know about them, nor ever have a conversation with them. There’s just so much potential crossover and cross-pollination among the companies in each cohort.
Further, NBC Sports Digital has been extraordinary. They saw our product and said, to paraphrase, if you add some additional features to what you have already built, and figure out how to do it, fast, we have a whole new product … and it’ll give us what we need.
And the thing was, when they said it, it went all the way back to Day One: How do you find the right person for a marketing campaign? It went full circle all the way back to that formula. They gave us four weeks to build it. The pilot was successful, and now we’re moving forward. They have vision. And Jenna’s got vision. Chris (Traeger, SportsTech executive director) has a vision. In fact we haven’t met any of the SportsTech leaders or consortium partners who don’t have vision.
We seek people out with vision. And why? We’re going to innovate a better product because of their vision. And the industry is going to win because of their vision.
Our job as entrepreneurs and founders is not to push our vision on the world. It’s to come up with the creative spark, to figure out how to make something better and to allow the customers the free freedom to express their vision right together to create it.
Tripp:
What are some of your predictions for sports tech going into the next couple of years?
Rhys:
The biggest advice, I would say is, a lot of the people who think about data, marketing and sponsorships, they need to get out of their own way. There are many younger folks in marketing positions and sponsorship positions that think social media is a throwaway. And the reason is, is because they’ve only ever had legacy analytics.
It’s like saying to someone, I’m going to give you this dry burger that you’ve been eating at a fast food restaurant for 50 years, you don’t want it anymore. But if you say, I’m going to give you a Five Guys burger, which is moist and juicy and fresh and everything else. And they’re going to be like, what is that?
We meet people who just don’t think social media has any value and it’s hard to change their mind because they’re just stuck. So what has to happen is there has to be a shift into the model of value and data, right?
There are those organizations that value data – the Olympics, NBC Sports Group, they get it. They know there’s value in data. There’s other groups we’ve met, not so much.
Amber:
What’s super exciting with sports is, I think, is that it’s a universal language. And up until about, well, now, sports has been so sliced and diced just for certain demographics. You know, mostly catering to a lot of males in certain areas of the world. Many other audiences, fans, athletes and sports have been secondary, an afterthought, or nonexistent in media.
What’s exciting about the future is that everyone can be a sports fan. I really believe that. The question is, are you meeting your fans with the content that they want and how they like it? We’re already seeing that shift, you know, finally, with the WNBA getting airtime, generating ad sales, securing marketing and sponsorship dollars for the league and teams – and athletes.
Today’s sports landscape is exploding and inspiring people like my little seven year old girl. Everyone can derive joy from and enjoy sports – it’s a collective and community event at the end of the day. Plus, diversity in sports is finally happening on a larger scale – athletes that are different genders, different colors, from all over the world with different backgrounds and stories. There’s an infinite opportunity for sports to uplift brands, inspire people and bring people together.
Tripp:
Ekkobar, it seems to me, is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that.
Amber:
Exactly. Also our insights can help inform other more sensitive, specialized situations. We did a case study with NASCAR after they banned the Confederate flag. And you know, we all have our own preconceived notions about what maybe the NASCAR crowd’s political beliefs are or not.
Well, we looked at the data and found the majority of fans were in support of the ban. But not only that, there was another significant faction of fans who didn’t go to the races, but said they are willing to go after the ban, because they would feel more safe.
It’s cool to see that overall, you see that humans are good and usually support positive things. And people are looking for authenticity, and humanity more than ever…in their lives, in social media, and the brands out there want to deliver on that in their marketing. We can find those authentic connections between audiences/fans and brands.
Rhys:
A big shift needs to occur in fan engagement. Everybody is trying the same thing over and over with a different set of lipstick and makeup on it. I don’t care what you do, you cannot create fan engagement until you turn the fan from a passive viewer to an active viewer. You need that transition to occur using an app to say, oh, I liked this.
The long term play is how do you connect the human to the conversation and feed back to them enough that they feel active in it? That’s the evolution of fan engagement. And we know exactly how to do that.
The reason a lot of companies have never done it is because you’ve never been able to value the results. They don’t know what is being said, who’s saying what, who are the influencers, who are the hidden micro influencers, who are the silent killers?
They’ve never had anything except how many likes and followers. The game has changed because Ekkobar is here. NBC Sports Direct with Damon’s vision, they can find the right NIL athlete for a campaign in minutes versus weeks.
We can help the Olympics find the human interest stories in minutes without him having to sift through Google searches and articles and trying to find it. We can surface the answers with a few button clicks.
When you look at the younger generation and how they consume sports, the challenge is, how do you get them to be more interactive with the sports? Many are using an app, like “Here’s a quiz,” and calling that fan engagement. It’s not. That’s a fad. There are other ways to engage them that make them part of the conversation.
You have these pontificators on ESPN and other sports news shows. They’re out there thinking they know what fans want to hear and what they’re saying, but they never look at social media to understand what the fans really want to know. They’re guessing. It’s time to end the guessing game.
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Be on the lookout for our next 🎤 Founder Spotlight in August as we continue highlighting the game-changing tech and innovation shaping the future of sports.