Mark This! Podcast: Episode 35, Stadiums by the Numbers
Heather Dotchel, Senior Director, Corporate Communications
Scott McDade, Vice President for Data Science, Sports+Entertainment
It's time to Mark This!, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
We've previously talked about the logistics of opening major league baseball stadiums for the season and what playoff culinary offerings in football look like. With another football season just about to open, we thought it would be interesting to explore the data science behind the fan experience in our sports and entertainment division, the award-winning food and beverage provider at more than 60 premiere stadiums, arenas, and sports facilities across North America. We're speaking with Scott McDade today. Scott is vice president for data science with our sports and entertainment division, and is about to shed some light on how those culinary choices and fan experiences are shaped when you head to your favorite sporting event.
Can you tell us a bit about your role as vice president of data analytics? What drew you to the intersection of data science and live entertainment?
Sure thing, Heather. Thanks for having me on. If you were to ask my daughters, they would tell you that I count hot dogs for a living. But ultimately, my role as vice president of data analytics for sports and entertainment is to provide tools and data products to our operators to bring the life of our food and retail hospitality programs to the 60 premiere sports venues that you referenced earlier.
What drew me to the intersection of data science and sports and entertainment, I actually started my career on the client side. I was with the Philadelphia Phillies working in ticket sales, which eventually evolved into data analytics. I did work very closely with our teammates at the time at Aramark. Years later, had the opportunity to come back and work in the sports and entertainment space with Aramark, and lead this team and function for the whole division. It was something that, in sports, nothing is the same. Whether you have a baseball stadium, every single one of them is its own unique style. We call them all unicorns because they're all very different. It provides an opportunity to learn, it applies an opportunity to think differently, and apply data analytics in nuanced ways to ultimately deliver for our clients and deliver for the guests that are there cheering on their favorite team.
Scott, how does data science directly shape the fan experience at sporting venues?
I usually like to frame this up as, okay, think you are entering Lincoln Financial Field as an example. As a fan, you're going to go to a concession stand or go to a retail store, and you're going to wait in line. Or you're going to go into a grab-and-go model and you're going to use technology, and you're going to grab the food and drink that you want, and you're going to head back to your seats.
Behind the scenes, there's a lot more going on that we intersect with. Every single day that we have an event, we're providing a plan using data analytics to tell our operators, our GMs of the building and their teams, how many transactions to expect at every single stand. What that transaction make up will look like, from a product perspective. And then, how many people we think they should need at every stand. The goal behind this is that we'll have enough product that when we have peak demand, you're not waiting in line, waiting for product, because we have it. That we have enough people to facilitate that demand, so again, you're moving quickly through those lines. And also, we're deciding where to apply technology.
There are many different variations of that. We have AI self-checkout in the world where you can just put your product down and AI will detect what it is, and you're on your way. We have autonomous stores, where you can walk in with your credit card, cameras will pick up what you ultimately pick up, and then you can walk right out. Then we have traditional kiosk technology or standard point of sale. We have been leveraging the portfolio data that we have of the 60 venues that we operate, and we apply those learnings to every venue.
Again, when you walk in, you are none the wiser of what's going on behind the scenes. Why is this location where it is? Why is this certain product available at this location? We're providing all of that prescriptive game planning to our teams so that we have efficient operations, the guest experience is enhanced to the degree that it needs to be, and then our clients are ultimately happy.
How does Aramark use this game day data to inform menu offerings and staff operations?
Sure. Again, to someone who goes to a sporting event, a lot of times we get highly correlated to hot dogs. Hot dogs and beer. It's a lot more than that. We work very closely with our marketing team and our culinary teams in a couple of different ways.
Obviously, we're going to use all of the transactional data that I referenced before. We'll say, "Hey, here's how chicken tenders are moving within NFL venues." Or, "Here's how cheese steaks are doing actually across our portfolio." Or maybe a specific brand, Chickie and Pete's. "Hey, we have that in Kansas City, we have that in Pittsburgh, we have that in places other than Philadelphia." We provide a lot of learnings that we see across the portfolio that may be applicable to a specific venue.
On top of that, we do actually two other things, so there's three. The other thing that we do, we'll look at what the fans are saying. Our clients will provide survey feedback that they're getting directly from their fans and we'll use natural language processing to understand what the trends are in the open texts. We'll find different learnings around, "Hey, people are looking for a variety of food, or looking for specific brands to come in. Hey, I don't want this specific soda," or maybe the sizes are too small or large. We'll take those learnings and apply that as well. And say, hey, it's an opportunity to look at some local brands or partnerships to bring in to supplement what we do from the core side.
Then the third side of the fence is looking at external marketplaces to see what are fans doing. We have relationships with a few different third party research platforms, so looking at mobile cellphone activity. I can say, "Hey, give me all the people that have gone to Citizen's Bank Park, where do they go restaurant wise when they're not there?" We can look at different restaurants and that can inform maybe who we want to partner with and bring in. Or it could mean that we want to do something similar and we'll do that on our own to some degree. We're using all the data we have within our transactions, all the data we can get from our clients that are coming directly from the fans, and then we'll use what's going on out there that maybe we don't know about now that will help inform ultimately the type of cuisine we want to have at a specific venue.
I believe we also use data science to respond directly to changes in sporting events, like the recent baseball rule changes. How do we work that from a data perspective?
Yeah, that was a fun one and near-and-dear to me because I have that baseball background in working on the team side. Baseball just generally is more fun because of the statistics of it. There's way more events and you can do a lot more with it from a data perspective. There was a bit of mass hysteria I think in the industry heading into the rule changes. I think fans, they were excited because they wanted shorter games. But I think the clubs that we work with, there was some I think intelligence coming from minor league baseball that there was some worry that there would be per-cap decline, and things like that.
Ultimately, what we did was take a look at the buying periods that we had, when people were typically purchasing. We felt rather comfortable heading into this because most of our activity takes place, especially in baseball, probably 45 minutes before the game to an hour in. At that point, that buying period is not going to be impacted. Heading into the season, we were conservative in nature because we had expected, based on the analysis we did, that there wouldn't be huge swings in behavior. That's ultimately what we did see.
Now, we did react through the early parts of the season. We extended alcohol service at a number of venues to the end of the eighth inning. The reason for that was we were getting data directly from Major League Baseball through the relationships that we have and we were studying how long the games were. If we took where games were prior to the change at the end of the seventh and looked at where they are at the end of the eighth now, we could claw back 10 or 12 minutes of that buying period, so we did that at a few of our venues. Interestingly enough, it was probably only a small percentage overall, it was 3% of transactions occurred in that extra window. But when the games were super fast, and a lot of them were, when they were two hours, two hours-and-15-minutes, it was 10%. Our clients felt that that was important for us to continue on, and this year we did expand that as well.
In addition to that, I think it made us double-down to continue what we had been focused on from a grab-and-go perspective. Knowing that these innings were moving faster, people didn't want to wait in a belly-up fashion like they traditionally have. Again, we had been doing a lot of research and piloting with our innovation team around, again, those service styles, those technologies, so we just doubled-down on that and continued to deploy those grab-and-go models to get people in and out. We also worked with our clients on tweaking things like gate times, game times. Were there ways to get people in the ballpark earlier? Were there ways to incentivize spend earlier on so that we capture those activities? And also, again, if you can spread the demand out, it's better for the fans because there's less pinch points, less lines during the typical timeframes.
It was a lot of probably stress early on because what's going to happen, how's it going to change? But I think it was a lot of fun ultimately to learn from and partner directly with our clients. We were giving read-outs on what we were seeing. Since then, we've continued to see growth in MLB, so I think fans have adapted to this. I think the ultimate experience at a baseball game is far better than it was before the rule change. We did do a deep study at the end of the first year. I think the one question or hypothesis we had was was it just the change in buying period, or did people change their behaviors because of it? We looked at things at a customer level. Like did they have less transactions than they did before? Did they visit less stands? Did they transact later or earlier than they did?
The most interesting thing was that nothing changed, or maybe it's that it was not interesting at the end of the day. But for me as a data practitioner, it was interesting. No behavior really changed, just the buying period. Which gave us the confidence to continue doing what we're doing, and getting people faster to their seats, and things like that. Again, it was a lot of fun. Really gave us the opportunity to look at different datasets, like looking at the game lengths, and when there was a pitching duel versus an explosive offense outing. It was a lot of fun. But yeah, we planned for it, we reacted to it, and we advised our clients on how we can continue to grow from there.
Yeah, it's interesting. As a sports fan, and specifically Phillies, go Fightins.
I have to say, to move it a little bit from the super data science wonky aspect of it that we've got going on, it's an event. When my family goes to the ballpark, we get there at gate opening because we travel around, and we get our food, and we get our merch, and then we're in our seats and really able to pay attention to the game because we've done all of that. From a fan perspective, not as an Aramark employee, we really enjoy that.
I do love the pitching clock, so it's all good in my world.
I do, too. When I bring my three daughters, when my wife and I go to the game, we do the same thing, we get there when gates open. We do all the fun things you can do at the ballpark before the game starts because it starts flying from there and you don't want to miss the action. And you get home before 10:00 sometimes, so it's good all around.
I agree. Let's talk a little bit more about fan behavior, though. How does weather or season impact fan behavior? What are fans consuming differently if it's a game in July versus a football game in November? What do we see around that?
Yeah, there's a high correlation to weather and the way that people participate in the food and beverage programs that we have. That's across any venue type we have. It could be in the sporting events, it could be even in our cultural attractions and theme park businesses. In a zoo versus Legoland, as an example in Florida. Weather does have a high impact on what ultimately happens.
Beyond the obvious things of a hot day you have more ice cream, on a cold day you have more hot chocolate. We do see especially in the NFL portfolio because you start out in the dog days of September when it's 90-degrees out in some of our locations. We can't have enough water or enough beer sometimes seemingly to facilitate that demand. Then as you get in the November, December timeframes, people are shifting out of certain SKUs. When you think of fruit-forward drinks are going to be big in September and not so much later on.
What we do is we proactively plan for some variation in what we offer over the course of a season. Again, specifically talking about the NFL, we're going to have in the colder months a shift into more, if we're looking at alcohol, more liquor-based drinks that are seasonal. Something around October, something around the holidays, it's always going to resonate with the audiences we have, especially in our club environments. But even on the concession side, we're going move more towards some different kinds of main meals because people are going to be shifting out of certain SKUs. They're not going to necessarily want the full-on burger, they're going to want something quick because they want to put their hands back in their gloves. We'll have more things that are grab-and-go, more things that can be eaten quickly when we get into the colder months because some of our games are brutally cold.
Yeah, we try to proactively plan for that. Especially as it relates to distribution of these products too, because it's not like we're going to put one stand serving these things. We need to have it across the entire venue. We've done studies that people don't travel more than three sections away from where they sit, so you want to make sure they have what they need nearby and have enough of it to facilitate the supply and demand ratio that we see.
But yes, there's definitely variations in what people consume. An NFL event is still going to be heavy on alcohol, versus an MLB event. I think the other thing too is if we think of outside of NFL, some of it's the fan make up at the event. If you think about MLB, April, probably not going to have a lot of kids in the stands because they're school nights and things like that, but as you get to the summer that changes. You're going to have bigger crowds in the summer months because people, they want to be out in the nice weather and enjoying a Surfside at Citizen's Bank Park. I think the make-up of the fan also has an impact on how we serve and what we need to serve.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that the interesting part here is tying that science in. I've been to a game in the thick of summer misery in Florida, versus shivering in the stands at Lincoln Financial Field for a January Eagles game.
Go, Birds. Absolutely, I'm looking for different things to eat as a fan. You don't think about everything that goes behind the scenes to make sure that those needs are met. I just know when I'm there, what I'm craving at that particular time is available.
What is one surprising insight you've learned from the data that fans might not expect?
That's a great question. Here's one. Especially coming out of COVID, and going back to my days even with the Phillies, the future of the world was mobile. But coming out of COVID as it related to food service, everybody was ordering from their favorite platform on their phone to have food delivered to their doorstep. We had explored at the time what's the best way to do this? How much scale do we need to have for this? As much as people used it, people may use it two times a week now in their day-to-day lives, only about 2% of people use it in a sports environment. I think there's a natural behavior for a fan to get up out of their seats during an inning break, between quarters, in between periods, and walk the concourse and find what they want. NFL fans, arena fans often are creatures of habit, they go to the same locations, they buy the same things. There's that aspect of it where they're not going to use their phone because they're just going to go and get what they want, they know where it is, and things like that.
We have even seen people, when they do use it, are actually scanning QR codes at the stand. They've already gotten up out of their seats and they're going to the stand, and they're ordering it that way. That one, I think would be maybe not what you would expect. That's also why it hasn't grown as much as maybe people would have thought. Because again, it's still prevalent, I use probably three different apps in my family and we use it all the time at home. But when we got to a sporting event, it never really crosses your mind that that's something you want to do.
I'm sure it's always going to be around and we'll continue to figure out the best ways to use it because there will be a subset of fans, especially the younger demographic as that shifts more towards them, and we'll figure out the way to best do that. But that was one interesting one that even our clients were always like, "Huh. 2%, huh? All right, well, let's focus on other things."
Yeah, that is surprising and really interesting. But I suppose it goes to some of what we touched on earlier, which is this is about experience. It's about hospitality. It's not just numbers on the page, although those numbers are incredibly important to make sure that fan expectations are met with seemingly no effort, even though we know everything that goes into the preparation and operations.
What innovations in data analytics are you most excited about for the future of fan experience?
Well, I hope you're proud of me that I didn't say AI until just now. But I think that is obviously all the rage, not just in sports entertainment, but everywhere. It's not new, we've been using variations of AI, and machine learning, and predictive analytics for some time. But I think the technology behind it, the ability to scale it and get it out into the hands of our operators, I think we're going to accelerate into a world of more self-serve analytics. We're going to be accelerating into a world where maybe customers are getting recommendations on what they want, and we're sending promotional offers, or we're giving them incentives, or we're doing things that enhances that overall experience to them that's more, maybe it's not one-to-one, but feels more one-to-one. We're going to have an engine in AI to do that.
I think it's going to help us simplify the ecosystem that we have. In our environment, we have five to six different types of point of sale, we have an inventory system. Our clients are going to have an app, they're going to have a loyalty program. All those things are in disparate locations. I think AI will help us bring all those pieces together and make it frictionless for a fan to interact with us from a data perspective. And again, going back to how we serve our operators, there's a world in which rather than you going and running a report, seven different reports, or 20 different reports even, we run a ton of reports at our accounts. That you can just log into a dashboard and there's an AI summary of everything that you need to know and the action times. Or, "Hey, I've already done this for you because I'm integrated into all these systems. You need to order this, I've already placed the order. It'll be in on this date."
And just makes the day-to-day life a lot easier, which ultimately will lead to more time dedicated to enhancing the fan experience and making things better overall.
Want to know more about sports and entertainment and the fan experience we offer? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. A big thanks to Scott for joining us. We appreciate our listeners at Mark This!
