– Taking the shot. Technology is rapidly changing sports—from mobile sports betting to the fan experience on the ground. One model for the high-tech future of the fan experience is in Los Angeles, at the 1-year-old Intuit Dome.
Halo Sports and Entertainment, owned by LA Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, opened the facility last year. Longtime Clippers exec Gillian Zucker became Halo’s CEO after its launch. She told my colleague Kristin Stoller at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz., yesterday about implementing tech—including facial recognition—throughout NBA fans’ experience.
The Intuit Dome opened with an atypical ticket policy—requiring visitors to have their own tickets on their own phones. Without that change, much of the experience Halo wants to build wouldn’t be possible. When one person scanned four tickets on behalf of their group, the company was missing out on information about those other three customers or fans, Zucker says. “Everybody wishes they could know everything about their customers,” she says. “We essentially [knew] 25% of the people who are coming in.”
That friction has taken some getting used to for fans, but it gave Halo more information, paving the way for hyper-personalization. Its tech tracks decibel levels at each individual seat—allowing the Clippers to award the loudest fan in the arena at each game. Emerging tech also allows visitors to look at a screen when they enter and be greeted, by name—with every fan seeing something different. “It’s exciting enough that it gets people to engage with their face ID,” Zucker says.
While that might sound like a lot of personal data being recorded just for attending a basketball game, Zucker argues that consumers are comfortable with tech—when it’s not called “facial recognition.” When asked about that technology, they say, “I want nothing to do with it,” Zucker says. “We say, how do you feel about Clear? They say, ‘I love Clear,'” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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