Genius Sports Joins Rams and Verizon to Blitz Fans With Data

“Instead of looking to some other location or digging in your phone or trying to understand sort of the immediacy of what you just saw, we display that within seconds of that actual play taking place,” Schuler said.

Schuler compared the in-house replays to the increasing advances in technology fans see in NFL coverage each season. She specifically pointed to the overlays seen on Amazon’s “Prime Vision” Thursday Night Football alternate stream (which also uses NGS) and CBS’s Genius Sports-Powered RomoVision NGS visuals.

Those similarities come by design, according to Manny Puentes, gm of advertising, Genius Sports.

“The arena goes from ‘The Arena’ to your digital ecosystem that you spend your day-to-day life in,” Puentes said. “The arena is a global arena.”

At SoFi, the replays and graphics give casual fans another means of experiencing the game, while real-time stats from around the league—highlighted in Rams blue for the action on the field—provide more avid fans some additional value. For Verizon, meanwhile, it shifts fans’ eyes away from their devices and back to the partnership and message the brand is invested in.

“Every year when we align a partner with a feature opportunity, we obviously take a look at the partner’s KPIs for that upcoming year, the brand messaging that they want to get across, and how can we align our desire to be the most innovative sports team,” Schuler said. “When we can integrate a third-party partner into the mix to provide data, insights, and displays that are the first of its kind in an NFL stadium, you’ve got a bullseye.”

The bigger game

The Rams and Verizon’s partnership is just part of Genius Sports’ broader strategy to connect leagues and their sponsors to fans with help from game data. Earlier this month, Genius Sports took its more than 20 years of amassed sports information and poured it into a new platform—FANHub—designed to streamline the sports media buying process for marketers.