The retail media revolution of data-driven, digital marketing monetization is coming to the sports industry.
On the innocuous end of the sports marketing spectrum, this week, Pacers Sports & Entertainment (PS&E) debuted what it calls the Fieldhouse Media Network in partnership with Deloitte and Yieldmo. PS&E owns the Indiana pro basketball teams – the NBA’s Indiana Pacers and WNBA’s Indiana Fever – as well as the arena, which hosts concerts and other events.
The partnership aims to extend sponsorship marketing from the stadium and other local promotions to ads around the web. The plan is to target stories, videos or online searches with keywords with player names (Caitlin Clark and Tyrese Haliburton are the best-known stars of the Pacers and Fever) or timely basketballs terms (like “trade deadline”).
Don’t expect the idea to stay in Indianapolis.
In the 24 hours since announcing the Fieldhouse Media Network, “the amount of inbound calls we’ve received from our partner [NBA] teams and from other leagues has been sort of overwhelming,” said Joey Graziano, PS&E’s chief commercial officer. “We’d be very excited for other teams and leagues to launch their own RMNs” along the same lines, he said.
But everything is an ad network nowadays. That’s hardly a sin.
Parents are paying the price
For parents, keener data and marketing prowess means an increase in the costs of youth sports.
The booming youth sports industry has “only one big winner,” jests the headline of a WSJ profile of Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier this month.
That’s largely because Dick’s is the biggest seller of baseball equipment, and baseball occupies the upward-trajectory line in our new K-shaped economy.
The Aspen Institute-backed State of Play report, last updated in December for the full-year 2025, rates baseball and softball as having the biggest drop-off in overall five-year participation rates in the US among the major…