Smarter Navigation, Happier Fans: How PAM Powers the Next Generation of Venues

PAM, a member of Comcast SportsTech’s 2025 cohort, is a Los Angeles–based technology company revolutionizing how people move through the world’s most complex venues. Founded by Stephen Minning in Australia, PAM is transforming big, difficult spaces into pleasurable and profitable places, removing friction, reducing congestion, and creating effortless journeys for fans and guests.

At its core, PAM’s cloud-based Smart Navigation Platform connects every digital touchpoint across a venue — mobile, websites, kiosks, and digital signage — into one integrated ecosystem. Venue operators use PAM to deliver real-time, contextual navigation and communication to every visitor, instantly updating routes, parking information, and messaging across the property.

A key innovation is PAM’s Scene technology, or “navigation playbooks.” These pre-built operational strategies allow teams to instantly adapt their environment for different events, whether it’s managing ingress and egress, optimizing parking, or activating sponsor takeovers, all with a single click.

Beyond navigation, PAM delivers data-driven intelligence through PAMalytics, giving teams powerful insights into fan behavior, crowd flow, and engagement patterns. These insights empower operators to make smarter decisions, improve the fan experience, and uncover new revenue opportunities in ticketing, parking, concessions, and sponsorship.

PAM’s platform is trusted by world-class destinations such as SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park (home of the NFL’s Rams and Chargers), the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, NASCAR, the Australian Tennis Open, the PGA TOUR, JFK Airport, and UTS. From stadiums to city districts, PAM provides a unified system that connects people to place, making every environment smarter, safer, and more connected.

Stephen sat down recently for an interview by Tripp Baltz, Head of Research for Boomtown Innovation, which powers Comcast SportsTech.

TRIPP:

Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about your career journey. How did you get your start?

STEPHEN:

I was on holiday in Dubai visiting my family, who were living there at the time. My sister’s boyfriend was the creative director at an advertising agency, and he offered me the chance to help out in the studio. I thought it was super cool — everyone was well-dressed, well-spoken, and working on incredible brands.

I ended up never really leaving that studio for two years. I got my start in advertising on the technical side — working “below the line” — and eventually moved into “above the line” campaigns for brands like General Motors, Pepsi-Cola, Federal Express, and several others. I spent about ten years in advertising across different countries around the world.

It was intense but an incredible education — a real window into popular culture, brand adoption, and the early days of brand tribalism, when companies were beginning to create subcultures within their brands to connect with different audiences and values.

But after some time in London, I became a bit disillusioned with advertising — with what it stood for and how it operated. I moved into a global branding firm where I began running major events for companies like Ford Motor Company. That shift was fascinating because it gave me insight into brand culture — the internal drivers within organizations — and how those could shape more meaningful outcomes, not just for shareholders, but for the wider market.

I began to feel a real sense of stewardship — guiding companies to realize their values, vision, and culture in ways that connected with customers through their products and services, while also having a positive impact on the planet.

That phase took me far in my career, and then I decided to visit Australia on holiday. I thought, this place is beautiful — the people are great, the culture is fresh. Compared to the U.S. and Europe, Australia was still relatively new in terms of brand implementation and experience design, so I saw a big opportunity to build something meaningful there.

TRIPP:

What came next?

STEPHEN:

I settled in, started a family, and loved it. But about ten years in — around 2010 — I started feeling a bit restless again. I began traveling extensively to the U.S. and joined the Board of Directors for the Society of Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD), based in Washington, D.C. SEGD represents a global community of creatives who bring communication and place together — working with major asset owners like airports, universities, hospitals, and sports and entertainment complexes.

I served on that board for six years, exploring how design and technology could have a positive impact on those environments. Back then — we’re talking 2008 to 2010 — digital tools were still fairly limited to basic websites or apps, each designed differently with its own set of communication principles. It was the Wild West in terms of how to attract and engage an audience.

There were also very few controls over data and privacy. Thankfully, the industry has since matured — digital communication has become far more responsible, respectful, and focused on protecting individual privacy while still enhancing the customer experience.

PAM was born during that period — while I was serving on the SEGD board and running my own creative agency, BrandCulture Communications. We worked with government agencies and major blue-chip organizations to help them define and activate their brands — aligning values, culture, and customer experience.

Through that work, I became deeply involved in wayfinding — the orchestration of information architecture to help people navigate spaces and places. That really resonated with me. I realized that by making places more efficient, we could dramatically improve productivity, profitability, safety, and ultimately, people’s experience of those environments.

When you help people move through a space with confidence and ease, everyone benefits — the guests, the staff, and the business. That’s where the idea for PAM really took hold.

TRIPP:

And so then how did the company PAM get started?

STEPHEN:

PAM was really born out of frustration with how slowly some industries were adapting to digital transformation — especially real estate. It was an area full of opportunity but largely untouched by innovation, which made it a perfect space to disrupt.

That was exciting because it felt like we were stepping into something fresh. Only in recent years has PropTech really accelerated, with more investment and innovation coming into the sector. Disrupting an old, inefficient model felt not just smart, but necessary.

Over the years, we’ve worked across many verticals — airports, universities, hospitals — but after partnering with KPMG to assess the broader market, one sector stood out above all others: sports and entertainment.

Sports unite people. They’re our new global culture — our shared passion. They make us less polarized, more connected, and bring out every emotion — joy, frustration, excitement, pride — sometimes all at once. And that’s powerful.

We saw a huge opportunity to enhance how people interacted with these venues — how they connected with experiences, products, and sponsors. At the time, crowd management and brand engagement were treated as two separate things. On one side, there was branding and sponsorship; on the other, there were operational issues like ingress, egress, and safety.

We realized those two worlds were actually deeply connected. The same systems that help manage crowd flow could also help connect fans with experiences, activations, and partners. That connection became the foundation for PAM.

For the past several years, we’ve focused on exactly that — building technology that brings these worlds together. And we’ve seen incredible success with organizations like the NFL, NASCAR, Formula 1, and the Australian Open. The most innovative operators in sports and entertainment are the ones partnering with us to move this vision forward.

Being accepted into the Comcast SportsTech program was an incredible milestone for us — it’s opened doors into the corporate side of sports and entertainment, particularly in the U.S. It’s where our technology can have the biggest impact: helping teams and brands engage with fans in more meaningful, data-driven, and positive ways.

Our relationship with Boomtown Innovation, through Comcast SportsTech, has been fantastic — it’s really accelerated our commercial and brand outcomes and opened up new collaboration opportunities with other SportsTech partners.

We’ve already partnered with Satisfi Labs, which has been incredibly exciting, and there are several more partnerships in the pipeline as part of this shared innovation ecosystem. It’s a thrilling time for PAM and for the entire fan experience industry.

TRIPP:

How would you articulate PAM’s elevator pitch?

STEPHEN:

How do we create hyper personalized relationships in these spaces and places? Then I would say the operational efficiencies are what’s under the blanket. People always think about, oh, it’s the fan experience. When you’re running these large assets like sports stadiums, 20% are your fans, 80% is your operational efficiency.

How do you manage staff, how do you manage security, how do you manage your vendors?

So there’s a huge amount of operational efficiency. There’s two ways to look at it: Earn a dollar from a fan, and then obviously pay all the cost of sales and tax associated with it. The more you save on one side, the more benefit you can actually give to the fans on the front side.

Engaging in these new technologies is definitely the way forward. The key problem is obviously navigation. How do we get people to the destinations, how do you de-stress those journeys, how do you make them personalized so people feel connected with their environment?

And how do you learn from these environments to continually improve them?

TRIPP:

Who are your clients?

STEPHEN:

A lot of this is very Comcast-centric as you would imagine. NASCAR came to us with a challenge: the Chicago Street Race. Their relationship with the city had to facilitate other major asset owners. Soldier Field, the Shedd Aquarium, McCormick, as they were disrupting the whole downtown lakefront.

They needed a tool that could create a digital map that they could push out to all these different stakeholders and they could send it to their customers to say on these days you’re going to have to take these routes to get into our facilities. We helped them facilitate that, and they loved it.

So then they  took us into Phoenix and said, ‘How do we do this with RVs and getting people around?’ And then they said, ‘How about Daytona?’ Now we’re in discussions with various other speedway owners as a result.

We really love NASCAR – that’s a great, great partnership. We’ve done a similar approach with the PGA Tour. We did an alpha test at TPC Sawgrass. That test really just proves that the technology could work in a very data light environment.

When you’re on a golf course, there’s not a huge amount of connectivity. We’ve just done the tournament in Atlanta and that proved to be really successful. We had 42% engagement of everybody who went to that event.

It’s not just like, ‘Hey, where’s the blue line?’ to get somewhere. It’s like, ‘Hey, what is it that people want to see? What do your customers want to see in this new digital format?’ We’re now talking about scaling that across the entire league for the next five years.

We are working with the LA Rams at SoFi Stadium. That’s been great. We’ve been with them for five years, managing all their digital signs across their entire campus – 250 big massive digital billboards mainly for navigation. You know, car park A is this way, car park B is that way.

There are all sorts of ways that digital technologies can transform these places to become more effective from a navigation perspective, but also how do you connect with brands? We also work with the Las Vegas Raiders. They’re very forward-thinking, great customers.

TRIPP:

Tell us about some of your other clients.

STEPHEN:

More recently we’ve been working with the Miami Dolphins and the Tennessee Titans and some really great concepts that we’re implementing like the integration of public transportation and parking into the journey. How do I get to a car park on one side of the city and then which bus or train do I need to get to? How would I get back and then find my return journey?

So we’re tying in these multimodal concepts for these fan journeys so people don’t have to jump around from Google to Apple to different apps. They’ve got one continuous journey all the way in and out.

Formula One in Las Vegas – we have a wonderful relationship there. We’ve kind of got pretty much most of Las Vegas covered now, including some of the casinos. Navigating them can be quite disconcerting for a lot of people.

We did F1 in Miami, and then in Montreal. Eighty percent of the app users were using our technology to navigate their way around that city and to and from different locations.

It’s highly valuable to know where you’re going when only the event organizers know what’s open and what’s closed, and you know where you want to engage at any point in time. We’re surfacing that information to their customers in a way that’s really meaningful and purposeful.

And again, improving operations and safety and everything that goes around that. We work with the Australian Open, which saw 1.1 million visitors over three weeks. That’s a really interesting customer to work with given their impact on Melbourne and how close that is to the Central Business District there.

We’re doing horse racing at the moment, the Victorian Racing Club, it’s called the Melbourne cup here. We did the FIFA Club World Cup prototype last year at five stadiums from Miami, Atlanta, New York, Seattle, Philadelphia.

We keep building with our customers on larger, more holistic solutions across how they connect with their customers at large. Having a consistent experience for your customer from one place to another, you build a much stronger brand relationship. That’s fundamental to our principles of making places intuitive and building trust with customers.

TRIPP:

What motivated you to apply to the Comcast SportsTech program?

STEPHEN:

There were a few factors involved because when you’re in our scaling stage, when you’ve got a certain amount of market traction, you’ve got validation, you know that you’ve got the need there in the market.

Everybody’s saying, join us, join us, join us. There’s a thousand potential incubators and innovation programs, but at the top of the food chain is the world’s biggest media company, right? That’s Comcast at the end of the day.

And then there’s all the brands that associate with that and there’s the understanding of how to do business at that level. I was particularly attracted by the track record with who you’ve worked with in the past. I have to say, compared to the other ones we’ve been in, this is exceptional.

The reach and the opportunity are the fundamental core drivers as to why we thought joining Comcast SportsTech would be the way to go.

TRIPP:

What’s been the best experience so far?

STEPHEN:

I love people and I love what I do every day. When you meet really good people who are honest, transparent, supportive, that’s quite rare. Every time I’ve spoken to the Comcast SportsTech team, you’ve given us not just five minutes of time, but you’ve said, sure, what else can we do?

And that’s how I approach all of my relationships initially, but with our customers as well. ‘How can we help you initially,’ as opposed to, ‘Hey, pay this, and, you know, we’re on board and we’ll just give you whatever you’re paying us for.’

To me it’s really about getting that personalized connection that I think we’ve built. And they are relationships that are going to last for decades, hopefully. So, yeah, it’s about the people.

TRIPP:

What do you see coming in sports tech over the next 12-24 months?

STEPHEN:

I see the following:

First, more hyper-local, context-aware fan experiences, with venues pushing beyond generic apps to deliver location-triggered, personalized content, such as wayfinding, location-specific offers, and AR overlays, across digital signage and mobile. Teams and districts that tie mapping and signage to CRM/transactional systems will drive higher per-fan spend and dwell time.

Second, the convergence of physical and digital venue infrastructure. Digital signage, indoor mapping, IoT sensors, and ticketing will tighten into a real-time venue fabric. That enables dynamic crowd-flow management, safety analytics, programmatic ad delivery, and rapid reconfiguration of experiential zones for different events

Third, data-first monetization and programmatic media. Owners will monetize venue-owned inventory (digital boards, seat displays, triggered content) via programmatic, measurement-driven partnerships. Attribution tied to in-venue behaviors and POS will justify premium CPMs and new sponsorship models.

Also, we’ll see wider rollout of 5G/private wireless and edge computing to reduce latency for AR/interactive signage; growing demand for privacy-first identity solutions to personalize without compromising compliance; and increased expectations for operational resilience (cyber, redundancy) as venues become more digitally native.

For startups like PAM, the opportunity is to deliver interoperable APIs, real-time mapping and content orchestration, and measurable ROI for sponsors and operators — not just novelty features. That’s where we’re focused: making venue signage and mapping a programmable, revenue-driving layer for sports and entertainment districts.

TRIPP:

Cool. What are some of the startups and brands you find especially compelling in sports tech:

STEPHEN:

FanWide is a grassroots fan-group aggregation and local activation for live-event attendance growth. WSC Sports provides automated highlight generation and personalization for fast content distribution. NearFuture Labs offers real-time mapping and geospatial overlays for dynamic venue experiences.

I look to Comcast and Peacock to expand their media and distribution reach and live-event tech experiments. Meanwhile T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will engage 5G/private wireless pilots that unlock low-latency interactivity in stadiums.