November 6, 2025
Andy Thwaite
Head of Commercial & Brand Engagement, North America
Community sports make an incredible marketing platform for brands
Community sport has an incredible proposition – it has the audience (Super Bowl TV sized numbers involved on a weekly basis) and the loyal engagement (a very important part of family life). BUT because it’s so fragmented – a brand only needs one conversation to buy a Super Bowl ad, but they need thousands to reach the equivalent sized community sports audience – its packaging is a massive barrier to entry for brands.
Brands can be heroes
If community sports packaging can match its proposition, untapped brand spend can really make a difference in funding the industry to make it better and more available to all. Every dollar a brand spends through community sport strengthens local clubs, keeps kids active and delivers measurable social return.
At ActiveXchange, we believe a healthy community sports industry, focused on ‘growth for good’, needs a healthy community sports advertising business.
Packaging community sports for brands
Digital advertising now accounts for over 70% of a brand’s media spend. Billions of those dollars are spent with Google and Meta because they have massive audiences (data) and provide the ability (ad-tech) to easily run audience targeted campaigns.
But Retail Media Networks (RMNs), like Amazon and Walmart Connect, are the fastest growing media channel, soon to overtake TV, because they have even better 1st party audience data and an ad-tech solution that can be used for highly effective targeted campaigns delivering better results.
In short, brands want audience data and easy to use ad-tech to power better advertising. A “Walmart Connect for community sports” where brands can easily spend and run campaigns to the audience segments they value, at scale, powered by community sports audience data and ad-tech, offers a way to provide the ad packaging advertisers don’t have today.
Community sport already has the scale; what it needs now is the same simplicity and targeting power brands expect from mainstream media.
The community sports brand solution
While RMNs have the benefit of all their customer data being in one place, community sport doesn’t have this luxury. Data ownership is very fragmented, as the industry is, therefore needs to be consolidated to build the necessary scale. Under the principle of ‘the best data wins’, this requires the collaboration of different data owners within the community sports ecosystem.
A spirit of collaboration, not competition, is key to making ‘the best’ data in community sports available for brands to find and use. Different players in community sports shouldn’t be fighting over the same smaller ad budgets. Together we can create the scale brands want and significantly grow the size of the prize, finding pro sports-sized ad dollars for their pro sports-sized audience.
By connecting membership, participation and location data into a single, privacy-safe ecosystem, brands gain the reach and relevance they’ve been missing. Our growing global network of sports bodies, governments, facility operators and businesses already demonstrates what shared insights can achieve.
The data
Creating a single, connected database of community sports audiences requires collaboration, especially when you consider how many organizations currently hold these datasets.
- Registration data: captured across thousands of teams, leagues, events and tournaments.
- Membership data: held by National Governing and Promotional Bodies, together with fitness and recreational centers.
- Purchase data: from uniform and sports gear sales, tournament entrance fees, and the food and beverage bought from concessions stands.
- Media consumption data: drawn from websites and management apps used by the teams, leagues and community organizations.
- Community, location, household and survey data: adding deeper context and helping to create a more complete view of audiences for brands.
Combined, these data sets represent millions of participants connected through tens of thousands of organisations. A network already rich with insight, but still disconnected.
The ad-tech: AX Connect
Having this audience data is only half the solution. Once the data is available it needs to be managed and analyzed so audience segments that are valuable to brands can be created – think of it as a data clean room. From there, these segments need to be targeted and reached on the media channels they use, where a single omni-channel ad platform is needed.
From the team apps they are using (“on-site”), the social channels they are following along on (“off-site”), the programs and devices they are watching (“CTV”) and the signage they pass by (“DOOH”), an ad platform is needed to target the right person at the right time in the right place, in the moments that matter. Done right, omni channel audience campaigns can reach the sports community along their “fan” journey.
At ActiveXchange we have developed an ad-tech solution called AX Connect to turn this vision into a reality. A vision where a 100M community sports audience is available for brands to target in one scalable media network, bringing in ad dollars to rival pro sports for the good of community sports.
