Morning, everyone. Quite the introduction. Thanks, Josh. NewFronts Week is obviously, as we can see, very crowded, and it's great to see such a good turnout today. Every company this week will tell you that they can reach sports fans. Almost none of them, though, can reach them when it actually matters. You can buy context and you can buy audiences, but you lose the one thing that matters most in sport: timing. Because in sport, moments aren't just part of the experience, they are the experience. Being near the game isn't enough. If you want to win in sports, you have to show up at the right moment, for the right fan, in a way that actually means something. That's why this is changing.
At Genius Sports, our mission has always been clear: to become the operating system of modern sport. For years, that meant building the foundation, partnering with leagues, capturing and distributing the most trusted real-time data in sports at global scale. Data alone isn't the answer. Understanding fans is. That's why last year, with the addition of Sports Innovation Lab, we further established the Genius Fan Graph, a deterministic view of sports fans that goes far beyond demographics into behaviors, passions, intent. From that, we built FANHub, where official game data and deep fan intelligence come together so brands can activate with real precision. What we proved is simple. When you connect what's happening in the game with who the fan is, you don't just improve performance, you change it entirely.
You also told us something very clearly. You don't want another destination. You want this capability where you already work, inside your planning tools, inside your supply platforms, and inside your existing workflows. No more trade-off. As you're here today, we're taking the next step. The world's most advanced view of the game and the deepest fan intelligence are now available directly across the ad tech and publisher ecosystem. Not as an add-on, as infrastructure. Which brings us to what actually powers all of this. Because if sport runs on moments, then marketing needs to as well. Not after the fact, not in post-analysis, but in real-time. Understanding when something meaningful is happening, recognizing intent as it forms, and making that moment actionable instantly. That's why today we're introducing the Genius Sports Moment Engine, a new way to connect live sport, fan intelligence, and activation so you can show up exactly when it matters most.
Thank you all for being here, and thank you for your partnership. I'd like to now introduce our SVP of Marketing, Gina Waldhorn, who's gonna show you what this actually looks like. Thank you.
Thank you so much. My name is Gina Waldhorn. I'm gonna be your host today, but I don't want you to think about me as your host. I want you to think of me as your coach, okay? We're all a team here together, and we are up against a formidable challenge because we have entered a new age of sport and the fan has changed, the fan has evolved. We're reaching a fluid fan who is open to change, empowered to choose, continuously evolving, and who has never had more choice when it comes to media and entertainment than they have today. We all need a game plan, right? If we're gonna succeed in this new age of sport, we need to be inspired, yes. We need to know what's possible, and we're gonna bring you those conversations from visionaries today.
We also need a game plan to win, and that's what I'm gonna deliver for you today because don't worry, have we got one. Before I get into the game plan, I'm excited to set that foundation and build that strategy for you by inviting to the stage our Chief Revenue Officer, Josh Linforth.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. New Front Week is loud. Every platform is promising reach. Every streaming service is promising premium. Every ad tech company is promising precision. You showed up for sports. Why? Because nothing else in media feels like this. The last-second shot, the overtime upset, the record-breaking play, or the impossible comeback. There is no skip button in that moment, no algorithm deciding what comes next, no passive scrolling. These are the moments that matter, and that's because sports is live, sports is scaled, sports is premium. In 2026, it remains the most valuable media asset in the world. The power of sports hasn't changed, but how you connect and reach fans has.
The average fan now watches the game, checks stats, follows highlights, tracks bets, engages socially, all at the same time. Emotion is concentrated. Attention is fragmented. Intent is immediate. Why are you still buying sports the old-fashioned way with a 30-second spot during the game or programmatically targeting sports fans and hope relevancy leads to impact? That model is outdated. Context is not intelligence. Keyword targeting is not intelligence. None of these media channels connect you to what really matters, being in the moment. In a world where milliseconds matter, almost right is completely wrong. If your data is delayed, you're late. If your signal is scraped, you're flawed. If you congratulate the wrong fan, you're canceled. If your targeting is inferred instead of known, you miss the moment entirely. Moments are not just highlights. They're what make fans feel, and what gets felt gets remembered.
That's why we're here today to formally launch our latest sports media solution, the Genius Moment Engine. Critical ad tech infrastructure for sports media. Built on official live signals, predictive moment models, and our Genius Fan Graph audiences, allowing specific sports moments in-game, around the game, all season to be planned, packaged, and activated at scale. Now accessible natively inside the platforms you already use via deal IDs . Across the channels where sports fans show up. All made possible because no one can see the game like Genius Sports. Our in-venue optical tracking captures every moment of every player with sub-second latency. Not just the scoring play, every second of the game. Layered on top of that is GeniusIQ with its predictive analytics running across the NFL, NCAA, Premier League, NBA, and more. We don't just detect moments, we predict them.
We can see when probability swings, when momentum turns, or when history is forming in real time. Because a touchdown isn't just six points. It might be a rookie breakout, a playoff clincher, a momentum shift, the start of a comeback. These signals don't start at the highlight. They build before it. Our technology is installed in thousands of venues around the world. More than 400 leagues and federations trust us as their official data partner. We have deep relationships with the NFL, NCAA, English Premier League, NBA, and WNBA, to name just a few. Sportsbooks build their trading engines on our data. Broadcasters enhance their live coverage with it. Leagues operate with it. Coaches and players rely on it. We are not adjacent to the game. We power it. If sports is the most powerful media channel in the world, Genius is the intelligence layer underneath it.
With the Genius Moment Engine, your brands aren't chasing moments. You're predicting them. But it's not enough to just see the game. You have to know the fan inside it. Because not every fan experiences the same play the same way. For some, it's joy. For some, it's anxiety. For some, it's money on the line, and for others, it's legacy. Emotion is personal, which is why our Moment Engine connects directly to the Genius Fan Graph. With 250 million U.S. consumers built on deterministic transaction-based data, not cookies, not lookalikes, not broad demographic assumptions, real behavior. The teams they follow, the games they stream, the bets they place, the brands they buy with official, exclusive, first-party data you cannot get anywhere else.
With the addition of Legends and Covers, that graph grows even stronger, adding additional search, betting, and intent signals to solidify the Genius Fan Graph as the only scaled, addressable consumer data cloud purpose-built for sports. When the momentum shifts on the field, we don't just know what's happening, we know who it matters to and what they're likely to do next for the right moment, the right fans, and all within the existing programmatic media buying workflow. Because intelligence doesn't scale if it requires a separate buying path. Today, we're announcing a series of transformative partnerships. Genius Sports has integrated the Moment Engine directly into the world's largest SSPs and premium publishers, including Magnite, DIRECTV, FreeWheel, Equativ, The Weather Company, Index Exchange, OpenX, and PubMatic, with more to come.
The world's largest advertising holding company, Publicis, will be integrating the Moment Engine directly into Epsilon, giving Publicis clients early access to the groundbreaking technology. Now layer that intelligence and activation into premium rights-based inventory. BetVision, where official data, live odds, and brand messaging live inside the stream. NBC and FanDuel Sports Network, scaled environments enhanced by real-time signals and data. Covers, one of the most engaged betting communities in North America, where fans actively declare intent. The fan journey is always on, and Genius Sports is there. Today, we're taking another step forward. We're proud to partner with Univision to introduce moment-driven in-game ads across Liga MX, the most-watched soccer league in the U.S. This is what it looks like when intelligence meets scale, where brands don't just show up in the game, they become part of it.
Today, for the first time, the same official data layer that powers leagues and sportsbooks is embedded directly into the native advertising ecosystem. Whether you're buying our owned environments or activating across broader premium supply, the intelligence travels with you. This isn't about choosing between reach or precision or between premium and performance. It's about operating with both. That unlocks a new framework for 2026. Own the season, activate the moment, extend beyond the game. Own the season through rights-based environments where your brand is embedded in the most valuable properties in media. Activate the moment with predictive signals and deterministic audiences while emotion is rising.
Extend beyond the final whistle into culture, community, intent-driven environments, all powered by the same Moment Engine. If sports is the most valuable, emotionally-driven asset in the world, Genius is the infrastructure behind it. Over the next hour, we're going to show you exactly how to plug in, how to plan smarter, how to activate faster. This is the year you see the game, know the fan, and win the moments that matter. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Josh. I love something Josh said. He said, "What gets felt gets remembered." That's what we're all here to do today. I, you know, I mentioned I want to be your coach today. Some of the best coaches were players once. I was part of your team, okay? I was a buyer for over a decade at Carat, at GroupM, and I've been to these NewFronts and dozens of these presentations. After the LED cube shut off and after the big announcements are made, you've got to go back to your desk, you've got to issue dozens of RFPs, and you've got to figure out a way to activate, to make this real. I mentioned we've got to have a game plan, and we do. There are three things that I heard Josh tell us today.
Step into my proverbial locker room, and we're gonna kind of leave here today with our plan to go to market. Josh said three critical things. He said, we've got to see the game. He said, if we want to succeed, we have to know the fan, right? Once we can see the game, and once we truly know the fan, that is going to allow us to win the moment, and specifically win the moments that matter. I want to start here. I want to start with seeing the game. When we say game, what do we think about? Well, for most of us, we kind of think about this, right? Game time and everything that's happening in the game. For fans, for fluid fans, it's not just about this, right? It's about what happens before this.
It's the pre-game, it's the build-up, it's the emotion and what happens after the game, right? It's the post-game because the fan journey is always on. The fluid fan journey, the emotion of sport does not stop at the final whistle, and it builds even pre-season. When I think about how we're gonna create an always-on fan journey that allows us to truly see the game and see the moments that matter, I think about creating a narrative. I think about what leagues have truly created everlasting narratives that transcend culture and conversation, that become part of the zeitgeist, and I think of the NFL. Nobody creates storylines and narratives just like the NFL. I want to lead us to a conversation that's going to inspire us with some visionaries from the NFL, from one of their sponsors, Lowe's, and from Publicis.
I would like to welcome to the stage for this next conversation our moderator, EVP of North America from Genius Sports, Sean Conroy. Joining him, Marissa Solis, SVP of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing at the NFL, Chief Creative Officer from Lowe's, Kyle McCarthy, and CEO of Publicis Sports, Suzy Deering.
Thank you, Gina, and good morning, everyone. As Gina said, the topic of our first panel today is Designing the Ultimate Fan Journey. We're gonna talk about the NFL and how the league, some of the league's most defining moments, both on the field and before, during, and after the games, have driven fan emotion and connection and impact, and what that means for brands. We're delighted to be able to get perspectives from the league, as well as from a brand, as well as from an agency.
Maybe let's start with some quick introductions, and I'll start, Marissa, with you on my left.
Yes. Hello, everybody. I'm Marissa Solis. I lead our Global Brand and Consumer Marketing at the NFL. I have been there five incredible years, where we have seen a tremendous amount of change in terms of how we tell stories and how we engage with a new fan base that's quickly evolving.
Great. Good morning. I'm Suzy Deering. I'm the CEO of Publicis Sports, but I also refer to myself very often as a recovering CMO. That's probably more the truth. Huge fan, love sports, but great to be here with you all today.
Good morning. Kyle McCarthy. I'm Chief Creative Officer at Lowe's. We are in our, I believe our fourth year with our NFL partnership, right? It’s not only one of the most fun things we do, but one of the most powerful engines that we have for the brand.
Marissa, as I think everyone in this room would agree, the NFL drives unique and very powerful storylines, rivalries, breakout performances. This isn't just on the field. This is throughout the course of the season. Can you talk to us about how at the NFL you think about creating narratives that sustain throughout the course of the season beyond just on game day?
Yeah, I mean, first of all, that's the power and the greatness of the league. There are so many stories, and the myth is that it's during the season, right? I mean, last year in 2025, there were over 15 billion conversations about the league, 365 days, 24/7. It just doesn't stop. If you look today, we're talking about the great prospects coming to draft in Pittsburgh. We're talking about stadiums being built. We're talking about who's trading to who. So there's always a story. What I love is that the stories can range from great things happening on the field to who's showing up at the stadium and who you can see on broadcast, to the tunnel walks, all the way to, you know, what's happening in culture.
It is a very, very powerful thing that, you know, partners like Lowe's really can get a handle on and create great storytelling.
Kyle, you've obviously, as you said, been working with the NFL for some time now. What makes the NFL such a powerful platform for brands to connect with?
Yeah, I think for us it's three things, right? It's the scale first and foremost, right? Then who that scale is reaching, the audiences that engage with that. Then finally, for us, it's the activity around the game, the behavior around the game. Scale. 180 million fans watch, right? It's not just on Sundays, as you said. This is their lives, especially within the season, right? There's a cadence there. Then 100 million of those are Millennials and Gen Zs, and everybody wants to talk to Millennials and Gen Zs, Lowe's included, right? The last part is maybe the most interesting for me, which is the behavior around the game, right? There's a lead-up. There's an anticipation. Sunday is an event.
If you're hosting, that means you're cooking. That means you're fixing things around the house. It's a real natural place for Lowe's to fit into that world, right? We're showing up on a regular basis to an audience that we wanna reach in a situation that they have a lot of love for in an authentic way. That's a real powerful mix.
Marissa, the storylines around the NFL are not necessarily new, but what is new is the availability of data. You know, I think about Genius's role with the NFL and the types of sports data that we're collecting now and the understanding of fans and the data that we have on fans. Can you talk a bit about how the league is beginning to harness that data to tell better stories and amplify the great storytelling opportunities that exist across the league?
Yeah. I mean, data is everything, right? Data is everything. I think what it helps us to do. You mentioned the ultimate fan journey. There is no ultimate fan journey. There's thousands of fan journeys, each very, very unique. What the data allows us to do is, yes, harness insights at scale, where you can have a massive Super Bowl commercial, but also harness the very personal insights. If you allow me to indulge, I have a very interesting example of how we're able to reach a very avid male fan versus, maybe a casual, female fan with the very same player, and that's Joe Burrow. If you guys recall in 2024, the great game versus the Cleveland Browns, where Joe Burrow literally fell and threw that last-minute pass, it was unbelievable. It captured our avid fans in a crazy way.
I mean, that had tremendous amount of conversation, but 80% of that conversation was led by male fans. Fast forward to Paris Fashion Week. When Joe Burrow walks onto the stage with a backless suit, looking fab. Guess what? Tons of conversations, but led by our female fans. That's why the journeys are so different, and that's why the data matters, because it's details that like that really allow you to reach different fans in different ways with the same player.
Suzy, I may ask you a similar question. I know from the work that we've been doing with Publicis that you're at the cutting edge of how you use data, all forms of data in your types of experiences. Can you talk to us a bit about how you are using data to drive new types of opportunities for brands and for fans to connect across a variety of different digital platforms?
Absolutely. Number one, I would say, you know, data's not new. We've been talking about data forever and ever. I think the biggest change for us is, and I would say that too in the sense of what Marissa just talked about is. I think what has changed tremendously is, and I give the league a ton of credit in this regard, which is we've turned it into not just a sport, we've turned it into lifestyle. To turn it into lifestyle, we now have taken it past just the game that happens on the field. To do that and do it authentically, and especially on behalf of brands, you have to have the right data to make it living. It can't just be data for data's sake. You have to make sure that it actually is actionable.
For us at Publicis, that's why we talk about being very disruptive in the sports space, making our Fan Graph, you know, on top of Epsilon, which is what you talked about. We really take that very seriously because it's not just the moment. The moment matters, but being able to take that moment and take that data and making it so that we can action off of it, being very nuanced. The nuance matters because the nuance of not just being in that moment, but being able to take it across the journey, the journey of the season is a season, but the season now is 365. The fan doesn't shut off.
We have to make sure on behalf of our brands, we can connect that data to where it's very relevant across every moment at which they're going to wanna connect with that experience. For us, we've gotta make sure that we can show up in the right place, make sure that that connects to our creators that are gonna wanna make sure that they are also creating the right content at that moment. For where we sit in the ecosystem and making sure across this very fragmented space, that we can ensure that we can have that moment and that data that ensures that connection, and the authenticity sits there and is relevant for our brands.
Kyle, I think you would agree, the NFL is not just about Sunday afternoon. It's about the weekly rhythm leading up to it. Can you share with the group your approach to building the Earn Your Sunday campaign around those sort of pre-game rituals that fans have, and what that allowed you to unlock creatively for Lowe's?
Yeah, I mean, it started with a simple human truth, right? Sundays are for football. You know, I work at a home improvement company, and nobody wants to be fixing anything during the season on a Sunday, right? You wanna be watching about the game. Like, that reframed everything for us, right? We then became the enabler of that, right? We help you earn that moment. Get all your things done, right? The to-do list is not going away, but we can help you get it done, so you have that sacred time on Sunday to enjoy those moments and those stories that you really love. It's an active role for us, right?
We are along that journey with those fans from giving them inspiration to showing them how, getting them the right product. Then, finally, like, when it's close to the end, right, like it's Saturday, we can help you get that done really quickly. For us, it's capturing that journey, capturing that moment, and being part of the experience versus just showing up on Sunday and selling you things.
Marissa, the NFL, as we've talked about and as we all know, sits at the intersection of sport and culture, and that provides opportunities to engage new generations and new types of fans. Can you talk about how brands can authentically tap in to those more cultural moments around the sport?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the key is understanding your brand, your values, where you wanna be, and then creating your own fan journey. You know, clearly for Lowe's, it is about, you know, the rituals, but it's also about home improvement. At the end of the day, you gotta drive your guest to your store. For any other brand, it's really tapping into, you know, what is happening in culture that has to do with my brand. We have incredible partners, whether it's Toyota talking about heroes and tapping into flag football, whether it's Abercrombie & Fitch tapping into this craziness around fashion, and the tunnel walks, and everything in between, whether it's P&G and Tide and laundry and doing your laundry, you know, on game day in a very similar insight of, "Hey, game day is for game day. How do we get the laundry done?"
There are 1,000 ways that you can tap into, whether it's pop culture and what's happening with the creators and influencers, and how your brand can partner with the NFL to do that, or whether it's moments that are very functional, right, that are also tied to your brand, so that at the end of the day, you can leverage the partnership to drive your customer or your consumer to the action that you need them to do, right? To be loyal to your brand, to leverage your brand, to go to your store. There are many, many ways to do that, and I think tapping into what you said, the data, the fan journey, and where your brand fits into all that culture and storytelling is the key.
Building on that, Suzy, as consumption shifts from linear to digital, where are the new and real monetization opportunities around these new digital touch points, and how is that changing both the depth and the frequency compared to more traditional linear broadcast formats?
This is my favorite question ever 'cause I just laugh when I think about maybe I've been in this industry too long when I go back in time and think, you know, gosh, it must have been really boring. It didn't seem like it then, but you know, when it was just a one-way conversation, and now I look at it and I go, gosh, we think it's so complex, but gosh, how incredibly rich it is now that we have so much opportunity to really engage and engage at such an incredible level with customers. Let me also give you a little dirty secret.
Most marketers will come to you and tell you, I just speak from experience 'cause I was one of these animals that would come to you and tell you, "Here's our customer, and here's who we're going after." We didn't really know. We think we know, but the reality is that we needed data, and again, living data that would really try and tell us how to sharpen and really understand all the audiences that we were missing because we thought that we had perfected our understanding and research so much that we could really target as to who we wanted to, you know, really reach.
Now, because of the fact that we do have this fragmentation and because we have so many other ways that we can truly engage, we, again, from our standpoint, being able to take the data, being able to put it from a Fan Graph standpoint, put that on top of our, you know, our Epsilon data, one of the things I love because, again, if you think about it, we look so straightforward and think about a fan as a fan, and we miss the fact that like, oh my gosh, they have all these other characteristics to them that we can grab a hold of. Guess what? They love fashion. They're actually interested in music. They actually have entertainment that they're interested in. We have so many other ways to capture audiences, females, younger audiences.
They may not be engaging in broadcast. They may be in TikTok. They may not be just on a Saturday or a Sunday or on a Thursday. They may be engaging in other ways. Now because of this, we can monetize in such a really play, like a massive one on platforms that we didn't have that advantage before. Even if we did have the advantage, we didn't have the signals to tell us. Now we have that advantage in the sense that we can take and go back to our brands and say, "Hey, I know you told us that your audience was this, but guess what? We also now can tell you missed all of these, you know, customers and consumers over here that are engaging with your brand. And you need to now put the right creators and content in front of them in a different way." To me, it's a playground.
It's amazing. We have so much opportunity.
Kyle, for you, this digitization of sport, it will enable and is enabling more opportunities for personalized, adaptive creative. Can you share some of the opportunities you see it in the context of your role at Lowe's?
Let me reframe that a little bit. I think of it more along the lines of timeliness, right? To steal a theme from today, showing up in the moments that matter, right? One of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is there's actually a really interesting parallel between a home improvement project that you do and how your favorite NFL team prepares for the game on Sunday, right? There is inspiration, there is planning, there's execution, and there's reward, right? The NFL team early in the week, they are looking at film, they're putting in a game plan. The middle of the week, they are practicing that game plan, then they're in the film rooms together, right? They're honing that. Sunday is the execution and reward of that.
Same thing with your project. You know, maybe Monday you get inspired or maybe Monday you decide you can't put that thing off any longer. You know, you make the decision to do it. The middle of the week is figuring out the how and the what. What product do I need? How do I do it? Then towards the end, it's that execution. There's a really nice parallel that allows us to show up in the right ways, right, with digital, TV, social, all of the places in a meaningful way. We're not just there to sell things. We're along for that journey.
Marissa, looking ahead, this is a topic dear to my heart as a Brit living in New York in the States now and becoming a huge NFL fan. One of the big focuses for the league is expanding the global footprint. Can you talk a bit about which trends and strategies you see being fundamental to driving that international reach, and how partners and brands can best tap into that focus?
Yes. You know, we were talking a bit offline about our international expansion strategy, and it's really fascinating for us because we are truly the students in this. We are not the lead brand. We are not the lead sport abroad. We're a challenger brand, and it's really forcing us to think very differently about how we approach the sport, how we approach the fans. Education is massive. We know that if fans don't understand the sport, they can't engage with the sport. Figuring out really creative ways through the data to bring to life those incredible plays, the stories of our incredible players to this audience is gonna be key.
One of the things as we talk about creators and influencers that we've learned is, you know, if it was 10 years ago, we would take a very glocal approach, right? You wanna be global, but then you also wanna connect with the local community, great.
What we're learning is that communities aren't tied to geographies anymore. You know, Gen Z in Shanghai looks very similar to Gen Z in New York. How do we tap into those communities through the power of influencers and creators to really get to these moments that matter, these cultural points that get people to connect and start that spark to engage with our game? Very cool example, we're doing creator flag games now. IShowSpeed, you know, Tom Brady maybe doing, you know, these incredible flag moves that people who may not be as familiar with the sport get to see, get excited about, and just sparks that interest of, I want to learn more. I want to get more engaged. That's really been our strategy, spark those cultural moments to get them interested in the game.
Thank you very much. I notice we are just up on time. Thank you so much for joining us, guys. Thank you for the support, and thank you.
Thank you.
All right, you guys turn that off. Thank you, guys. You'll probably give us some more. Thank you. All right, we just heard a lot about. I love something that Suzy said. She said, "You need live data. You need signals in order to tap into those moments that matter." Again, if I'm sitting in your shoes, I'm also starting to wonder, is it worth it, right? Sports is premium. Sports is expensive. Getting in those moments of peak emotion, what we call the moments that matter, is it actually worth it? Well, Genius Sports teamed up with industry research leader, Media Science, to study just that thing.
We looked at how live, intense moments of surprise, emotion during live sports, what kind of impact did that have on the ads that ran directly adjacent and after those moments of surprise and emotional intensity? What we found is that brand recall was 2x higher when a brand ad followed an emotional moment that mattered. It does. It matters. We're gonna go back to our game plan. How are you planning to execute against the moments that matter? We need to start thinking about a different way to buy, and we need to start thinking about the game a little bit differently. Here's how a lot of times we're buying today, right? You're going in, you're buying a little bit of the, you know, pre-show. Maybe you're buying some in-game spots.
Maybe if you're lucky, you hope one of those spots is gonna air after a touchdown. You know, things end, maybe you're gonna do a little post-game recap, right? This is how we're buying sports today. We're buying early. You're making these commitments nine months in advance, right? This assumes that all games are created equally, and you're making this buy ahead of time, and you don't know where these other moments are gonna hit. When you have those live signals, when you can see the game like Genius Sports, you start to see that not all games are created evenly. Because what if there's a game and there's an intense rivalry between these two guys? That makes for a totally different game. What if there's a record chase?
This game is all the more meaningful because somebody might go ahead and hit that 2,000-yard club, right? What if there's a new rookie breakout, right? There's some player news that makes this game completely more valuable, and the game hasn't even started. When we're in the game, before this touchdown, did you know that there was an unbelievable interception right before that touchdown? Oh my God, my G. There are some game-making moments that change the game, right? What about if there's something a little bit controversial, right? A controversial call. Maybe right here. Maybe we don't know, but there was a VAR, and we had a complete turnover of a ruling on the field. The game ends, right? We've got the score over here. Oh gosh, the game ends. Well, that game end is very different.
Somebody is ecstatic and somebody is not so happy, right? There's emotion, there's different fans, there's different stories. Maybe there were some other injuries, so there's new player stories at the back of this game. This is what that always-on fan journey looks like. It's not just these three points, right? Now we're seeing an ebb and a flow, and this is also how you're able to find scale, right? Because today, when we think about that model, how we're buying sports today, we're mostly over here, right? It's premium, it's live, it's in-game, it's a bit scarce, and you don't know. You don't know if you're gonna hit one of those moments that really matter. Maybe you're trying to complement that buy with scale and precision and audiences kind of over here, right?
Oh, that is not a box. Right? You've got your audiences. Maybe you're buying some contextual. You're going onto espn.com. Again, you're missing the emotion. This is running anytime, always on. Nothing until today has been able to close that gap, and that is what we are bringing you, a new buying model. This is where Genius Moments sit, and they sit through deal IDs within your existing buying framework. This is how you see the game.
When you have the underlying infrastructure, as Genius Sports does, you can package up these moments to change what it means during a game and follow all the moments that matter ahead of time, so that when they hit, your brand is there and you are there when what gets felt gets remembered. Now that we've got a plan, we know how we're gonna structure packages in order to be always on during the moments that matter, it comes to the point where all right, we got 'em during a moment. We hit 'em at the right time. What are we gonna say? That's all about storytelling. That's about creative formats. That's about bringing them an ad message that causes conversation.
When I think about who's out there drumming up conversation, bringing the drama, bringing the heat, I think about women's sports, and I think about WNBA. I think about storytellers like NBC and Peacock. I'm excited now to bring our next conversation, our next set of visionaries to the stage, moderated by Genius Sports Director of Media Operations, Anabella Chiossone . Joining her on stage, please welcome Phil Cook, CMO of the WNBA, Sam Levy , EVP of Optimum Sports, and Kevin Lappen, SVP Sales and Sports Sponsorships at NBCUniversal. Come on up.
Thank you.
Yeah. Get 'em. Go get 'em.
Is this on?
Where are you gonna sit?
I'll be first. Well, thank you, Gina. Thank you everybody for being here and joining us on this lovely chat. I'm honored to be here. Yeah, let's talk about a little bit about creativity. Let's talk about what we actually are going to message these fans, because these fans are different. This is not the traditional fan. This is a fluid fan. It's a fan that is here, is there, it's everywhere. We have to really deep dive into who is this fan, and I want Phil to tell us a little bit about this fan, this fluid fan I think that you guys at the WNBA have a great experience here. Probably we should give two minutes of what you do at the WNBA.
Sure. Hi, everyone.
I forgot about that.
My name is Phil Cook. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of the WNBA. I've been there. I'm in my sixth season this year.
Kevin Lappen. NBC Sports. I've been with NBC for about 25 years. Maybe a payroll glitch, but I'm still there. Yeah, it's great. Yeah.
Sam Levy , Executive Director of Sports Marketing at Optimum Sports, and I'm in my 11th season with Omnicom Media.
You're the rookie.
I'm the rookie. That's it's awesome.
I was gonna say--
We're the rookies, and we have glasses.
Yeah. Okay.
That's good.
That's good. Okay.
Let's talk about the fan. Let's talk about this fluid fan. What has changed on the fan? How do you reach this fan to keep them engaged? What is it about this fan that is so different from past generations?
The WNBA has been experiencing this tremendous growth of unique fans into our ecosystem over the last few years. Thank you Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese. The result has been, these are fans who are first time experiencing the WNBA, and they're coming in because so many of our athletes are building identities and brands in advance of them coming into the W. Fans are following them early in their careers, college, or maybe even international, and they're following them into our ecosystem. What we're finding is this fan is very much aligned with the brand values of these athletes. Secondly, they certainly recognize just how good they are as performers, and I'm gonna give you, kinda two examples.
Sabrina Ionescu a couple years ago, NBA All-Star Game takes on Steph Curry for a three-point contest, and Steph hits the, you know, three of the last five balls in the rack, final rack to beat Sabrina by one point. What that did was it validated just how good our athletes are. Immediately fans are like, "Shit, these players can hoop. I didn't know that." They were watching NBA, they got a taste of WNBA, and it surprised them. We were authentically connected, and we validated just how good our athletes are with a young fan who watches things like All-Star weekends, and that fan came into our ecosystem thanks to Sabrina.
A year later, Angel and Caitlin have this rivalry in college that they bring into our sport. The rivalry is on the court. Two very, very distinct athletes as individuals. Two great basketball players. One really leaning into the culture. Angel Reese is undeniably a cultural icon, and this again connects to that new fan who enters into the WNBA ecosystem through a different door. Not through the magnificence of a three-point shooting door, but through the fact that Angel is rocking the cover of Vogue, or she's over at Paris Fashion Week and she's, you know, driving cultural influence because of her connections outside of the game of basketball. This is what we're finding is the fan is a very, very distinctive fan that is aligning themselves through the performance aspect of our athletes, through the cultural influence they carry, and the third piece of this or the third lane of connection is through our--
Authentic connection with purpose. We as the WNBA, we're in our 30th year, purpose and social justice has always been a part of our DNA since day one, and so we have a very distinctive fan that aligns with the W through that lens as well. This fluid fan is coming in through different doors, aligning themselves, engaging themselves with the WNBA, and it's incumbent upon us to serve them where they are with content and stories and insights around those three different lanes of performance, culture, and purpose.
This is really interesting. I didn't know about that. Tell me a little bit. This is for you, Kevin on NBC. We always look up to these like amazing moments. We're waiting for like these specific moments, the dunk, the interception at the last second, even the pass by in a race in the last curve. These are just some moments. How do you keep engaged the audiences during long seasons? Some seasons could be not full of these moments. That's the reality. It's a game. This is not script.
Tell us a little bit, how do you engage this audience also, and fluid fan and fluid audiences with this momentum?
Yeah. I mean, I think our job primarily is being prepared for the moments. It's kinda harkens back to some of the conversations we've had earlier, is that these moments are gonna happen obviously throughout every sport. Everything is comprised of these big moments. We, you know, as from a table stake side, need to make sure that we, you know, prepare all the sports that we broadcast and stream in the same way that we have obviously a, you know, a stellar pre-game that's focused on the matchup and the athletes. At halftime, it's kinda jumping on some of those zeitgeist moments. Obviously, you know, a wrap up of the game that's gonna obviously segue into the season and give a little bit of momentum.
Beyond that, beyond the surface level of production, we need to evolve sort of how we, you know, take advantage of our rights with our league partners and figuring out ways, you know, how do we present content in unique and new ways? How do we broadcast to different audiences, to Phil's point? Obviously we have the mass reach and scale of a broadcast network, but not everybody's watching it that way. We have a huge, obviously, audience on Peacock, and that's a collection of cord cutters, shavers, nevers that are not watching broadcast, and obviously in many cases, different demographics. How do we program that? In order to gain momentum, we have to do that consistently across all the sports that we have.
Regardless if it's, you know, baseball to the NBA, to the WNBA, to Sunday Night Football, we wanna make sure we have some continuity in terms of how we what fans expect and we need to evolve. We obviously need to evolve and we need to figure out how we're presenting those specific games, you know, to get that momentum. From a moment standpoint, that's changed. Obviously, new platforms, new opportunities to distribute, you know, across social and kinda really hone in on those zeitgeist moments beyond our four walls of our broadcast and our streaming properties. How do we take advantage of that? Obviously it's incumbent upon us to make sure we're maximizing our rights so we can put that out there.
Also, are there kind of those moments that we know are coming, that we're preparing for, where we can really take advantage? An example that Phil and I were talking about is, you know, we did a, you know, with State Farm back. We broadcast Big Ten basketball on Peacock, and we had the game exclusively when Caitlin Clark broke the scoring record for the NBA. When she did that, we actually had an iso cam dedicated to her because fans were so into it. It was a zeitgeist moment, and we kinda did that on the fly because obviously that's what fans expect. There's so much hype around it.
We had the rights to do so we worked with a partner like State Farm to figure out a way that we could actually bring that to fans. The way you wanna bring advertisers in is actually demonstrate that utility. That you're bringing fans something that they can't get beyond, you know, the traditional streaming or broadcast. That's what we're focused on is it's definitely evolving, but really being in a position that we're prepared for those big moments, across all the sports that we have.
Thanks, Kevin. I wanna switch gears a little bit on creative, okay? I think I've been in agency, what? 20 years ago probably. The creative war rooms were very different. It was literally the copywriter and they took the lead, and it was their decision. How is that war room changed right now? We have data. We work with partners directly, not only broadcasters, but the leagues. We're all sitting in the same room, and then adtech partners like Genius. We're all sitting in this room and we have to collaborate. How has that changed the creative room, Sam?
Well, the data used to tell you know, who to reach, now it tells you know, what you need to say to them in that exact moment, and it's scary. It's a burden frankly. You know, it's an open canvas--
Old days were easier, p robably.
When I say it's a burden, it's an opportunity because, you know, and we tell this to our clients all the time, it really drives in the need for relevance, right? I mean, no one has a higher BS meter than a sports fan. We've talked a little bit about, you know, not being interruptive, but amplifying and adding value to the equation. That is sort of, you know, the sort of gold star o f achievement that's needed with real-time creative marketing and real-time actions off of these insights and these triggers that we have at our fingertips.
Just to riff a little bit on Phil's points around the evolving fan. I mean, the sports fan, it's not he or she is not a passive fan, right? The days of sitting, watching the game, you know, going to bed, maybe looking at the box score in the morning, or maybe the really engaged fan would put on sports talk radio, right? Now, there's multiple engagements happening during the game. There's gambling, fantasy, group chat, social chatter. All of these signals that are captured, you know, offer that opportunity for brands to maintain relevance.
You know, the war room has to reflect that reality in real time, and that's a scary challenge, but a great opportunity.
Perfect. Next point we wanna talk about is how do we not interrupt the game? 'Cause people don't want distraction. You're watching the game. You're actually engaged on the TV, on your connected TV, in your iPad or iPhone or phone. How do you do something different that does not involve distracting actually the game? This is key because, as we know, some placements and ad placements are finite. Traditional media is finite, so we have to enhance, generate relevance, but also not interrupt that key moment. Phil, why don't you take this?
All right. I'll give it a shot. I think we're fortunate at the WNBA. We're pretty much a blank canvas. There was no broadcast or streaming just five years ago. It was impossible to be a fan of the WNBA 'cause we were finding our games on the Hallmark Channel if we're lucky, right? Or on back then, Twitter and which is great, but we've evolved tremendously in the last five years. With that comes the opportunity to trial without, I guess, disappointing or frustrating our fan base because our fan base is growing every day.
Our fan base is coming from an environment where they've been watching other sports and that's really who we're chasing every day, is the casual sports fan who is dabbling in many different sports leagues and wanting to give the WNBA a consideration for engagement or viewership or just following because of, you know, the noise that's been created in our league the last couple years. We're attracting a fan who's familiar with other sports. They recognize the value of the data that they're getting when they're consuming other sports. Partner that with the fact that we have tremendous broadcast and streaming partners who are really, really good at knowing what moves a fan, what adds value to a broadcast or a stream or a highlight.
We lean on them tremendously because we haven't had this history of decades of trial and error where we are disappointing or shunning our fans because we've made mistakes. We are learning every day, and we lean heavily again on two things, fan behavior that comes into our ecosystem from other sports and what they're looking for, they let us know, and then our partners, like NBC, who provide us tremendous insights around what they've learned over time, around what value add comes into the engagement or the viewing experience that we can then lean into.
The final piece of this is we now have partners who are coming into our ecosystem saying, "I like being in your game. I like my 30-second ad, but how do I get closer to the game? How do I get my brand incorporated?" Just like what Gina was speaking to earlier today. "How do I infuse my brand into the actual game flow, into that 40 minutes of game time? I want my brand there beyond just an attribution or a signage on the, on the court. I want to be involved in the game." They're challenging us as well, which is a great opportunity for us to think differently and again, use our partners like NBC to solve for that.
I wanna go with that topic. I wanna stay with that topic because I think in terms of streaming and broadcasting, there's been a huge evolvement over the years, and I think that these, and Kevin, you can share with so many years at NBC, how the industry has to evolve, how you guys often have to change that mindset, bring new canvases to life, work closer to everybody else. Before it was just you receive a 30-second commercial, you put it out there, and that's it. Now it's collaboration. It's teamwork. It's let's look at my data. Let's look at your data. How can we co-create together? How technology has also helped us. Look at, let's say in NBC and Genius, we are doing augmentation for basketball games.
So Kevin, for me, it's critical, like where do you see? How do you create these new canvases, new spaces? Be creative. Attract new buyers and brands without interrupting the game.
It's a lot, yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, when we look at sort of where we're going and obviously streaming sports and where the marketplace is going is something that sort of has been paramount to our strategy for a long time. We've been streaming live sports for over 15 years, and we've always had DAI in mind. So to start, we wanted to have the ability to kinda surgically target specific audiences. We know that obviously broadcast has that blunt instrument of mass reach and scale, but really when it comes to streaming, you have the ability obviously through ad tech to target those audiences. That was sort of like the base level that we started at.
Now obviously the table stakes of what fans expect, it matters, right? Whether you're watching, you know, an NBA game and you wanna see performance view with dynamic stats, that is kinda in real time happening with what kind of overlays over players themselves, or you wanna watch all cams of specific angles of a pitch, or, you know, you wanna view inside the dugout and you wanna see, you know, what's going on in a specific baseball game. I think those types of things are gonna continue to evolve. We have a lot of different unique presentations that we bring to a lot of the sports that we have. We've done a Madden Cast around our SNF games in partnership with Genius.
We just got nominated.
Yes. Which is--
Exciting time.
It is. I think that again, like, when you think about the different audiences that are consuming, you're gonna have passive audiences, you're gonna have super fans. Super fans may be more inclined to watch a performance view with those dynamic stats. A more passive fan may be watching a Madden Cast to kinda watch it in a unique way, like it looking like a video game. I think the way that you actually serve up content has to continually evolve. Obviously from a streaming standpoint, the way you bring marketers in, I completely understand you want it to be less interruptive.
I think there's certain sports that cater to a less interruptive experience with like if you're doing golf and you do a double box or a break where you're actually showing live golf at a very base level that's helpful to the fans, that's you know providing utility or you're doing commercial free by, you know, Callaway or a different advertiser for an hour. They recognize the fact that you're skipping an ad break or several ad breaks for more content. Not to mention there's all groups that you can show and obviously different angles and perspectives you can show. We need to continually evolve that. From a streaming standpoint, the canvas has actually expanded.
Obviously I mentioned before social and having the ability to actually, you know, really hone in on those like iconic moments and actually bring in new audience back to our platforms because an amazing game is happening and a record may be broken. Those types of things and being able to use all the levers you have to kinda bring what fans expect is something that we're hyper-focused in on. I think that obviously, you know, that'll evolve and we lean on partners like Genius Sports and WNBA and our partners at OS to figure out what's next. Like we're here obviously to evolve and really maximize our rights. You know, putting things on broadcast is not table stakes.
That's a major part of our offering. We need to figure out ways that we can actually expand on our rights and really hit a longer tail audience and actually get a little bit more granular with the opportunities for marketers.
How do we measure this? Past was viewership. Viewership is not enough. How do we measure this and how do we generate value when a lot of the times we're sitting in desk and we're just looking at numbers and KPIs? Sam, why don't you take this one?
Yeah, I mean, reach is no longer enough. I think if anyone's had a conversation with a CFO or someone from the finance department, you know, we need to talk in terms of full funnel measurement. It's moving beyond reach to things like relevance, resonance in the moment, and then ideally action after the fact. That's the incrementality that is the ultimate goal here with regards to driving business results. I know we at Omnicom Media have worked closely with you, with Genius, you all on a study that we're about to see the final results on.
From the sneak peek of results, you know, we've seen, you know, strong data points that should, that suggest, you know, all of these augmented live experiences that we're talking about are driving mid and low funnel action. Ultimately, you know, that is what is going to keep the lights on for a lot of our businesses. When we think about reach, you know, it's not that simple, but it's largely attached to investment. It's very challenging to buy relevance, and I know the tools that we're talking about here make that a lot easier. Ultimately it ties in all of the messaging that we're talking about and responding to those signals in real time that will drive that resonance and relevance for brands and ultimately conversion and action.
Thanks, Sam. Well, we're short of time, but I want to leave. Before I leave, I want each of you to think of just one word, only one word 'cause we don't have any more time, about what will happen in the future. How do you see this in 10, 15 years? Let's start with Kevin.
Yes. It's gotta be one?
One.
Customization.
Oh, man.
That was yours? Sorry.
It's like the synonym game we're gonna play here. Personalization.
That's better. That's good. I gotta iterate on that.
Moments.
Globalization for me. Globalization.
That's great. Thank you. Thank you all three.
Thank you guys. All right. Again, we talked a lot about I loved hearing Sam say, "Nobody has a better BS meter than the sports fan." We wanna know when we do things like augmentation, when we put overlays into live games, do fans want it? More importantly, does it work? As Sam mentioned, we partnered with Omnicom to launch a study that looked at the efficacy of in-game augmented ads by Genius Sports. What we found was that first off, 83% of fans are already on their second screens searching for more information about the game they're watching. When we presented them with augmented sports, they enjoyed the game more. They actually said it made the game easier to understand, and 82% of fans liked or loved the augmentation that we put in the games.
If you haven't seen it, check out the sports bar on your way out, we've got it playing. Again, that's good. They want it. They're here for it. It makes the game better, but does it work for your brands? We continued that study, and we looked when video ads were paired with augmented ads, did it deliver impact? The answer is a resounding yes. We saw 5x stronger brand lift in recall, in favorability, and more than 3x higher lift in search and purchase intent for distinct audiences when we paired an in-game video ad with Genius Sports augmentation. It works. That's the good news. We heard a lot about this, you know, BS radar. We're gonna go back into our locker room, and we're gonna figure out how we game plan this. Okay, we've seen the game.
We know how to find these moments. We know how to package them up. We know how to get them into the ecosystem. If there's a BS meter, man, we better know this fan, okay? We're in New York, this is gonna be a Liberty fan. Here's our fan. We have got to know this fan. How do you know the fan today? Well, you're probably buying some demographics. You know, this is a male, 25-34. We probably have got their household income, maybe their DMA, but we gotta be more intelligent. We're gonna layer on sports fan or maybe women's sports fan, if we can. All right. Not bad. Maybe we've got a little viewership data. They're watching, you know, ESPN or NBC. Okay. This is how we're thinking about targeting the sports fan today, and that's okay.
That does not tell us enough of the story to be able to drive the relevance and the resonance that our panelists were talking about. You've gotta know how do they sport? All right, their favorite league's the W. You've got to know that. You've got to know that they're a Liberty fan, but that also they travel regularly to Chicago 'cause that's where they're born, and they're also a Sky fan. How do they fan? They love their merch. We know with the Genius Fan Graph that this Liberty fan spends on average $270 a year on merch, and their number one merch provider is Playa Society. We know when they stream, they're a parent. They've got a kid who plays youth sports, so they have a subscription to DribbleUp at $40 a month. This is how they sport.
This is the type of sports fan and women's sports fan they are. This is how you start to create relevant messaging, but that's still not enough. That's only telling you half the picture of who this fan is. You've gotta know, are they values-driven? Well, women's sports fan are. They're 3x more likely to be buying values-driven brands like TOMS Shoes. They're concerts and festivalists. They love to go to places like Coachella. In fact, they're 2x more likely to buy concert and live entertainment tickets. This fan happens to be also 2x more likely to be in the sober curious community. They love their NA beverages, right? So now when we're looking at these moments, when we can see the game and oh my gosh, it's coming down to the wire and Natasha Cloud, there's like two seconds left. She shoots that ball.
It's going in there. Oh my gosh, she scored. This guy is absolutely elated. You can serve him an ad that says, "You know what? Celebrate with a Heineken 0.0%. Yay." But if you don't know the fan, you cannot deliver that relevance. Which is why we've connected the Genius Fan Graph within the Genius Moment Engine to identify the moments, connect them with the right fan, deliver a deal ID that ultimately serves the right ad all in your native ecosystem and ad buying infrastructure. Great. We've got it set up. You can go back. Those deal IDs will be sitting in your DSP. Now we wait for the moment. Like we said, all games aren't created equally. Well, neither are all moments created equally. Sometimes you hit, and you get a moment that is iconic, that changes the history of sport.
I wanna talk to you about one of those moments today. Actually to come up here and actually tell us a bit more about one of those specific moments, those iconic moments, those history-changing moments, please welcome to the stage Josh Walker, CEO of Sports Innovation Lab, a Genius Sports company. Josh?
Thank you.
There's a different one there.
All right. I told Gina that I was gonna mark up her whiteboard. If you haven't taken a picture of this, get on it 'cause it's about to get dirty. Where are my Patriots fans? Yeah. Sorry about what's about to happen to you. Where are my Giants fans? All right.
Those two groups of people absolutely remember Super Bowl XLII. Josh said earlier, the moments that get felt get remembered. Maybe some of you didn't get all those feels in real time. Some of you didn't watch the game. Let me set it up for you. We're in Phoenix, Arizona. It's Super Bowl XLII. Some games are built different. This one has the New England Patriots coming into Phoenix 18-0. They haven't lost a single game. The only other team in history in the NFL to do that was the 1972 Don Shula Dolphins. This is the Tom Brady and Bill Belichick dynasty. They're coming into this game, they just won three Super Bowls. They're at the peak. They want a 19-0 record on their resume, and the Giants shouldn't even be here.
Let's be honest, David. You guys were a wild card team. Wild card teams don't make the Super Bowl, let alone win them, so it seems like a foregone conclusion. This game doesn't even need to happen. The Giants are merely a stepping stone for the Patriots to march into history. They're a two touchdown favorite, 12 points. As the saying goes, that's why we play the game, and we do. The game starts. It doesn't disappoint. We get out to a really slow start. These guys are beating the crap out of each other. It's a defensive struggle. The Giants scored first with a field goal. It's three-zero at the end of the first quarter. The Patriots waste no time, come back in the second quarter, and now it's seven-three, and that's where we are at the halftime. Low scoring game, seven-three.
The third quarter's not much different. Another defensive struggle. Nobody scores. Nothing happens in the third quarter except really hardcore defense. Something happens that's never happened before in the history of the NFL. We have three lead changes in the fourth quarter. This little heart rate is going nuts. The first score in the fourth quarter, Eli Manning finds a guy named David Tyree in the end zone. It's now 10- 7. If the Giants don't win this game, you will never know the name David Tyree, because nobody knows the name of a guy who caught a touchdown for the losing team in a Super Bowl. Unfortunately, that looks like what's about to happen, 'cause Tom Brady, true to form, comes back on the field, finds Randy Moss in the end zone, and all of a sudden it's 14- 10. Giants fans are dying.
They can't believe what's about to happen. There's only three minutes left on the clock, and for those of you who follow American football, you know that the last two minutes are some of the most intense, heart beating, nail biting action ever. Why? Because they have to run the two-minute drill. The quarterback has no room for error. Screws up, gets sacked, fumbles the ball. Anything could happen. The clock ticks down. Game's over. Eli Manning gets behind center, starts marching his team down the field. Not only is it the Super Bowl, but he doesn't need a field goal, he needs a touchdown. It's getting crazy. He's running around. He's absolutely frantic. There's only 1 minute and 15 seconds left. Giants fans are losing their minds. It's third and five, and then this happens.
Pressure from Thomas off the edge. Eli Manning stays on his feet, airs it out down the field. It is caught by Tyree. Inside the 25.
Yeah, you can see him.
A timeout taken.
He's here.
Oh, my God. This ball's thrown and Tyree just goes up for it like a basketball player. Harrison trying to knock it down. Eli Manning, I don't know how he got out of there. I thought he was on the ground and then he came out of the pile and just slings it. That's a great catch by David Tyree. Now with 59 seconds left, the Giants needing a touchdown, the ball is at the New England 24. Pressing it against his helmet as he goes to the ground and not dropping it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the helmet catch. If David Tyree doesn't make that catch, the Giants don't win the Super Bowl. The legend, David Tyree. You're here.
I gotta hire you, man.
I don't know, man. I think I just felt like you needed a hype man. Some of those conversations before weren't doing you justice.
I love it.
That's a moment.
Hey, Boston fans. Hey.
One of the things I do love about Boston fans is that if you go back and you watch this on YouTube, all the comments just give you tremendous props. It's like the UN of football plays. Like, it brings everybody together. Like, nobody can hate on this because it was so incredible.
Yeah. I mean, like, I wish I could say I planned it all out. My whole life. Yeah, I was absolutely destined.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I wanna ask you probably a question you've been asked 1 million times. Like, the craziest thing about this play is it's lasted almost two decades.
Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's been a hell of a run. I appreciate it. It's worked out for me.
There are kids, and mine are of the age where they weren't alive when this Super Bowl was played, and they still know this play because the NFL recycles it. It's in the top five plays ever in the NFL?
Oh, wow. Top number three. I did in the 100-year anniversary. I felt like it was number one.
Okay.
I mean, you know, when you have a name like Immaculate Reception. It's kinda hard to overcome.
Yeah. No, yes.
You know, like, "Yeah, they were.
Yeah.
It's been that unthinkable journey because even when you experience it, you expect to make the play. If you're a high-performing individual, you expect to get the job done.
Yeah.
You didn't know what the job was.
Right.
You didn't know that it was to that magnitude, and it actually has taken years for me to realize the weight of that moment and the staying power. You know, it's you never grow up playing sports and thinking like, "Hey, I'm gonna be a part of the story of the game that changed my life.
Do you ever get tired of talking about it?
Well, it's cool for me because I don't go home and talk about it.
Right.
You know, my wife makes sure I--
Your wife is like, "again?
I have a built-in mechanism that makes me like no one. That's my wife. She's like, "Who cares?" Yeah, so
Yeah.
You know, I guess for lack of better terms, like I said, people can find that I got seven kids. When you go home, I'm just Dad. Yeah, I mean, like the helmet catch is high up there, but raising seven kids was actually harder.
I was saying to David earlier, and he has a stat that puts him in probably the number three or number four NFL dad. Ryan Fitzpatrick was on stage with us once, and he has seven kids, too, and he's like, "My wife can't keep her hands off me 'cause of the beard." I asked David what's his superpower.
Yeah, my superpower, it's probably you know, it's the jersey water. I mean, like, I put the jersey--
The jersey water.
On. The swag is through the roof.
The jersey water, and you have seven kids?
Yes, yes.
That's all it is? Yeah?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
The jersey swag is through the roof. Essex County all day.
All right.
Three stars in Montclair. That's how we do it. Hear me. Hear me.
I know that athletes often get, you know, just defined by what happens on the field. Everybody's here 'cause they wanna hear you talk about this, so just, you know, ingratiate me for a minute. Alexis, can I see the helmet? I might put-- Yeah, I might put this on.
Here you go. All right. Good.
Okay. The thing is about a helmet, guys, and I don't know how many of you took physics. It's round. Right? We can all agree on that? It's round, right. What is a football? Also quite round. There's not a lot of surface area. How'd you do it?
Yeah, that's E equals MC squared and the theory of relativity.
Yes, exactly.
You know, when you talk about
It makes no sense.
It makes absolutely no sense, and I think that's the glory of it. And people would ask. I mean, like, they ask me, at the end of the day is I went up, and I did everything that I was trained to do as a wide receiver. You see a ball, you wanna high point that ball. You wanna reach it at the highest place, and that's actually what you saw. Nothing else mattered once I felt like I had it.
I love seeing your face. If you guys go back and watch this on YouTube, look at David's face. The determination on his face, you can't even in every acting class you possibly take, you could not replicate this. You were not dropping that ball.
Listen, I had it. People ask me, they say, "What was going on in your head?" Catch the ball. Once I had it.
I had deep thoughts. Deep thoughts.
Once I had it, all I knew is I'm not letting it go. You see a clinching moment. You see it in my face, and what I didn't know was that the ball was on my helmet.
Yeah.
What I did know is that there was, you know, there was the struggle. Mentally I'm preparing for contact. Yes, there's things going on that prepared me for the contact, and I think that made it not a surprise.
Yeah.
Yeah, at the end of the day, it's just like I'm not letting this sucker go. I only get a few catches a year. I gotta make every single one of them count. Dang it.
I just shared with David a Sports Science episode from ESPN where they say that if Harrison doesn't cradle you like a baby and carry you softly to the ground--
Thank you so much, Rodney.
You don't catch that ball.
Yeah. You know, it's so many different factors, right? I think that's what makes the magic of the helmet catch. It's the circumstance. It's the two Hall of Fame quarterbacks. It's the two Hall of Fame coaches. It's the undefeated narrative. There's the David and Goliath narrative. I'm literally the guy out of nowhere. I'm the right, going against the Goliath of the world, the Rodney Harrison. You cannot create that many storylines in one moment.
For the most powerful potential moment within our league in relation to a modern-day team in free agency going for an undefeated season. I say, you know, the only way to get over it is to recognize that no one's perfect.
Right.
Hey, hey, New England, no one's perfect. Right? I think every athlete is pursuing perfection.
Yeah.
In that moment, you realize you just have to meet the moment.
Yes.
I think I was just fortunate, chosen, if I could be in a humble way, chosen to be a representative of all of our imperfections but rising to the occasion.
You were definitely touched that day. I mean, there's no question about it. Okay, so again, I've had the pleasure of talking to a few different athletes on stage, and again, I wanna move past a little bit of this moment.
You said something really cool when we were talking beforehand. You said, "Look," and this is for the advertisers in the room that are trying to figure out, like, how do they get ready for this? Like, 'cause this is, like, completely u nanticipated. Like, how the heck did this happen? What do we serve up now? How do we engage Patriots fans? How do we engage Giants fans? How do we take this thing that happened and bring it after the game? Gina's graphic, you know, is like, how do you tell this story after the game? How have you told this story now over the last few years, either with brand partners? You know, you told me you did some work with Amazon.
Like how does this, like, come to life in the corporate world or in advertising where they're still leveraging the energy and the emotion of this thing?
It's the story behind it. I would call the helmet catch for me, it was a memorial, but it was also a lifetime of preparation leading up to that moment.
Right.
For me, I think most people wouldn't know that I won the third wide receiver position my third year in the NFL, which is a starting role. That's young Eli coming of age. It doesn't go as well as I anticipated for all the other reasons, being a special teams player. It's the lifetime narrative of never being good enough but yet still being respected and being reliable. When you have your opportunity, what will you make the most of it? For my personal journey, it was embodied in one.
My entire journey, life's journey as a receiver at the highest level was embodied and satisfied in one moment.
It's a punctuation point because you're basically weaving together your entire journey, and then you're like, "When?
That's right. I think that's what we have to kinda recognize is that everybody's looking for, you know, fire in a bottle, right? We, you know, I'm the microwave generation now. Obviously everything is at your disposal in a moment. The reality is, the moments that actually last, they don't come along that often.
Yeah.
The most meaningful moments. We can talk about virality, but viral is happening every day. Just because it's viral doesn't mean it's important, doesn't mean it's lasting.
Well, the craziest thing about this, and this'll make a lot of you feel very old in this room, is the iPhone went on sale for the first time the summer before David Tyree made this catch. More people had in their pocket a BlackBerry than they did an iPhone when he made this catch.
Yeah. I actually got a BlackBerry.
How did it get shared? How did it get hyped? You know, 100 million people basically watched this Super Bowl. It was a record at the time. We've now exceeded that. Like, how did you hear the buzz afterwards? 'Cause I know you went to the sideline. I could see your face on the sideline. You're like, "What the hell just happened?" Like, after the game, like, now we have social media, now we have all that stuff. How did you hear and really start to appreciate the significance of what you did?
Yeah. I think, you know, like, number one, you're in your mind you're doing your job. I didn't see the replay. I actually didn't see the replay until I got back to the hotel to celebrate post-game. I gave Eli all the credit post-game, and I was like, "Give me some of that.
He didn't know where that ball was going. He did not know where that ball was going.
It was two miracles in one play, right?
Yeah.
To be honest. I think, you know, you got the Black guy who can't jump. That's me. You got, you know, Eli. You could blow on him and he would fall back in the day. You know, but I would say it was slow in relation to like, man, I'm the most content nobody in the league. I was the highest paid special teams player at the time. I'm like, "I'm living the dream." I got a wife who loves me. I got twins on the way. My twins were born 2.5 weeks after the Super Bowl. I'm kinda like this just keeps happening, whether it's Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Kimmel.
That's kinda like the immediate effect. I actually get recognized more now than I did the year or two after. The Helmet Catch. It's just because of the visibility of the internet. You know, the different breaths and ways that I've been able. It's just a very interesting dynamic. For me, I really was never been a limelight guy, but I think I enjoy people. I enjoy holding court and allowing stories to have their impact. Being chosen in that moment just kinda meant the world to me 'cause the game has done so much for me.
Well, I know you're not a limelight guy. You said you know, like, in just talking to you're an incredibly humble guy. This play meant so much to so many people, and it's awesome. You know, we talk a lot about our technology, and our technology wasn't available in 2008 to do the stuff we do today.
Yeah. I need a job, man.
Well, hey.
Life is different.
Okay. With that said, what I wanna do is leave you, because we really appreciate you coming here, with your own highlight in the way that Genius would've done it back in the day.
Oh, wow.
Here you go.
Pressure from Thomas off the edge. Eli Manning stays on his feet. Airs it up down the field, and it is caught by Tyree. Oh, my gosh. This ball is thrown, and Tyree just goes up for it like a basketball player. Harrison trying to knock it down. Pressing it against his helmet as he goes to the ground and not dropping it. That's a great catch by David Tyree.
David, thanks for coming, man. Guys, give it up for David Tyree.
Appreciate it.
Thank you. All right. Thank you, David. Thank you, Josh. Let's get one more round. We're going back into the locker room. We've had a successful game. We've showed you how to see the game through the lens of technology and data signals. We've showed you how you've got to know the fan, and now it's time to put it all together and win that moment, and we've done that for you. When you leave here today, we have put together packages because you've got to combine all of these different moments if you want to get scale and make sure that you show up in the moments that matter. Let me give you an example. Coming up this summer, the biggest sporting event the world has ever seen.
Do you know that the World Cup is gonna be equal to 108 Super Bowls? For the host cities, it's gonna be as big as running eight SEC championships in a row back to back. We've gone ahead and built packages around these moments that matter, including something like rivalries. Every time, you know, Messi and comes up against Ronaldo, or there's a big other player rivalry, your brand can show up. Anytime somebody goes for a record chase or a record break, no matter what it is. Let's say it's an unbelievable header goal from a distance never seen before. Because we know the fan, if you've got that package, I don't know, maybe you're Advil, and every time there's a header, you're able to serve that Advil ad.
We have packaged up all of these different moments into individual thematic Genius Moment packages, each structured, as I mentioned, with its own deal ID. To be pushed to your preferred buying platform. To be combined with our Dynamic Creative Optimization and our Genius Fan Graph to deliver that performance that truly makes the moments matter. We started today talking about how we needed a new buying framework. How just relying on premium live sports with limited inventory, not sure whether or not you bought the games where moments happen, or rely on contextual ads running across sports content targeting sports fans. It might give you precision, it might give you scale, but it doesn't give you emotion. Genius Sports gets rid of that trade-off.
Our Moment Engine and our Genius Moments packages bring you contextual relevance with a programmatic deterministic audience connected to the emotional journey that aligns with your brand campaign, and it's scaled with precision. When you leave here today, you'll all be sent access to a dedicated portal of our NewFront packages dedicated to the World Cup with things like knockout round moments or record-chasing moments customized with your brand's audience because we have that graph connected to Dynamic Creative Optimization to bring your campaign to life. We've done this for the World Cup. We've done this for the NFL. We've done it for women's sports. All of the major 2026/2027 sports calendar now comes with Genius Moments, deal IDs, and packages. That augmentation we talked about, getting in the game, delivering 5x brand recall, 3x search intent and purchase intent.
Our augmentation packages with NBC and the NBA are all packaged up together for you. Coming soon, our partnership with Univision and Liga MX, as well as our recent announcement to integrate moment-driven augmented ads into the Pac-12. I thank you today for being with us, for spending your morning, for helping you see the game, know the fan, and win the moments that matter. Thank you.