When Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics' GM, approached the 2002 MLB draft, he threw out the old statistics teams used to gauge players. Avoiding subjective metrics like stolen bases and fielding percentage helped the A's fill out their roster with undervalued players, and brought them to playoffs in 2002 and 2003. He saw through the noise and knew prospects inside and out by taking a cold, hard look at the data.

As a marketing researcher, I enjoy learning thing and observing my environs, even when "off the clock." I've never been shy about intertwining personal time with my chosen profession. That's partly why I love going places, whether it's to all 30 current MLB stadiums or 45 of 50 states. I continue to relish as much time on airplanes as my stamina and family will allow.

For most sports franchises, the season ticket holder is the holy grail of fan. And for good reason: according to research from Deloitte, season ticket holders "spend five times as much money as non-season ticket holders on non-ticket purchases from sports organizations and authorized partners."

Although it is not the be-all and end-all of a team's success or popularity, social media is a good barometer of how well a team connects with fans and keeps its best interests, marketing and otherwise, front and center.

No industry needs to leverage real-time marketing quite like sports, an industry where unpredictable events can happen at a moment's notice. Their fans are always connected and engaged, whether they are sharing their reactions to key game moments on social media or checking on their fantasy team ranking.

After a serial killer used Facebook Live to broadcast his confession, having used their video platform to share footage of himself murdering an elderly man, many marketers were left asking: Do we really want to be on the live bandwagon right now?

When the defending NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers signed a deal with Goodyear last week to have the company's Wingfoot logo on Cavs' jerseys beginning next season, it raised a lot of eyebrows and upped the ante on advertising in pro sports.

For anyone tuning in to an NBA game during the playoffs this year, the endless stream of three-point attempts being launched is ample evidence of how the use of analytics has revolutionized the game over the last few years. Less obvious, but just as impactful, is the role big data has had in behind the scenes efforts of sports franchises. Filling millions of empty seats takes a huge amount of audience data, as well as a deeper understanding of consumer mindset, and sports teams are extremely aggressive in adapting new technologies in an effort to both better understand and more ...

One hundred audience-facing jobs weren't the only things lost, with the recent bloodletting at "The Worldwide Leader." We've heard for years in other verticals, that marketing to "the segment of one" is a fast approaching reality.