Peyton King on Pioneering the Future of Sports Marketing Through Data-Driven Insights
The Associate Director of Marketing at Sports Innovation Lab empowers brands to precisely target consumer segments, optimize media investments, and inform better business decisions
Peyton King is the Associate Director of Marketing at Sports Innovation Lab. Peyton works across all facets of the business with clients ranging from sports teams and leagues to media agencies to Fortune 500 sponsors. Day to day, Peyton spearheads the launch of Sports Innovation Lab’s addressable solution—Sports Innovation Lab Audiences—facilitates Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club and lays the groundwork for the company’s CRM and marketing strategy.
Peyton co-created the IAB’s first-ever NewFront, which is dedicated to women’s sports. She is one of the driving forces behind Sports Innovation Lab’s Women’s Sports Club, which now has over 700+ senior-level executives from Fortune 500 brands. As a result of this work, Peyton was named Advertising Week’s “Future Is Female” Winner for 2024. She is one of the youngest-ever recipients of this honor.
Although Peyton’s job revolves around data, she is a creative at heart; she has written a novel, published culture-driven articles, and co-produced multiple comedic shorts, including a mockumentary film project acquired by NESN called “The Shovelers” as well as the viral “Minnesota All Hockey Hair Team” series.
The Continuum sat down with Peyton to discuss why sports fans are an important marketing audience and how digging into the data can lead brands and leagues to a larger and more passionate consumer base.
Can you tell us how you found yourself at the nexus between sports and marketing?
The sports part is easy. I’ve loved sports since I was little. I’m from Minnesota. Basically, I was born and put on skates. I played hockey in high school and club hockey at Boston College, and I’m also a tennis player.
I was an English major in college. I think there are two types of English majors: those who do it because they love reading and those who do it because they love writing. I’m the latter. I love to write. I sought classes that taught me how to discuss complex things: race, gender, politics, music, and so much more. My English degree prepared me to have eloquent conversations and write about any topic, which is a dying art in today's society.
I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the degree, though. I toyed around with the idea of being a professor or attending law school, but nothing felt right. My dad worked in advertising for a long time, and when our Minnesota All Hockey Hair Team videos blew up on YouTube, he founded Pulltab Sports. That made me see the sports marketing industry as a unique space where my passion for sports and creativity could come together.
How did you get to Sports Innovation Lab?
Sports Innovation Lab was co-founded by Angela Ruggiero, an Olympic women’s ice hockey champion I idolized growing up on the rink as a fellow defender. She played in four Olympics, starting in 1998 when she was just 17, and was my role model.
When I graduated and was first looking for a job, I saw on LinkedIn that she was starting this company, and I reached out. I had an informational interview with our CMO, Gina Waldhorn that went great, but they weren’t hiring then, so I took a job as a media planner at Mediahub during COVID when clients were pulling back on media spending. I found myself doing a lot of platform work for Outback Steakhouse, who had cut down on their ad spend because no one could go to the restaurant at that time, and they were working on a pivot. I was launching ads, developing audience segments, talking to partners, and trying to figure out how to reshape the narrative so people would see them as a place for takeout.
I also got to work with Mediahub’s R&D team, which stands for radical disruption. Even though it’s a very data-driven media company, they like to incorporate really creative stuff. Some of the things they've done for companies like Netflix are almost more like old-school advertising; I worked on a PBS project promoting a new documentary about Muhammad Ali, where we had to come up with 10 activations to promote it. I loved the creativity there.
After about a year and a half, I was ready to move on. That’s when Gina called me out of the blue and asked if I was still interested in making the jump to Sports Innovation Lab.
Can you tell us a little bit about what Sports Innovation Lab does and your role there?
At our core, we’re a data company. We've made the industry's premiere fan graph. We have an array of data sources that we're pulling in under our umbrella, including transactional data, demographic data, occupation data, and numerous other data sources on sports fans. We’re smart with AI now, but to get things going we also manually went through almost a decade of data and tagged things that would be important to marketers looking at sports. We have specific sports communities that we've built out. If we see in transactional data, for example, that somebody has purchased running shoes and signed up for a 5k, we can mark that person as a runner. Brands and properties usually work with us through our three main product lines: insights reports, programmatic audiences, and Enrichment/DaaS.
We can use our data to work with companies in all different areas of the sports industry: leagues, teams, brand sponsors, ad agencies, and beyond. For instance, if a sponsor is curious about where to heavy up their sports dollars in their marketing spend, they might come to us and say, “We’re considering a partnership with the NFL, but we're unsure who NFL fans are and if they are a good fit for our brand, can you help us?” So, we analyze our data to help them navigate that and inform business decisions and media spend accordingly.
Or, hypothetically, take a brand like Dick's Sporting Goods. They know what their consumers buy at their stores, but we know what they buy the other 23 hours of the day. And we know who they are. If we see that Dick’s recently had a high customer volume of youth soccer parents and volleyball players, we might suggest that instead of working with big, professional leagues, they create a more grassroots sponsorship of youth sports. We can also help them activate on those target segments using our programmatic audiences. For instance, if they are using a youth sports creative in a campaign, we make sure it's seen by the right consumers, which in this case is likely parents who care about youth sports. The targeting in sports has historically been really bad because marketers don't have all of the ecosystem data that Sports Innovation Lab now offers.
We have a pretty lean, mean marketing team, which means that in my role as Assistant Director of Marketing, I’m involved in everything we do. Anything that comes from the brand - email marketing, social media, event programming, website design - originates from my team.
“At our core, we’re a data company. We've made the industry's premiere fan graph. We have an array of data sources that we're pulling in under our umbrella, including transactional data, demographic data, occupation data, and numerous other data sources on sports fans.”
You’re a B2B company that’s selling a marketing tool. Essentially, that means you’re marketing to marketers. Is that harder than, say, marketing to consumers?
Yes, it’s definitely harder to market to marketers because they're more skeptical. At Sports Innovation Lab, we focus on maximizing our messages and hitting the right people. We're lucky because our product is differentiated and actionable, so it usually makes sense to the right people. It’s just a matter of getting to those people and getting them to understand that what we're doing is completely unique and will lead to results for them. We get the right people to enter the funnel, where, hopefully, it leads to more.
You co-launched the Women’s Sports Club. Can you tell us what it is and how it started?
Sports Innovation Lab has been known as a thought leader in women’s sports for a very long time because it is in our company's DNA. Angela was not only an Olympic athlete but also on the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for 50/50 gender equality in the Olympic Games. The recent explosion in women’s sports has been great to watch, and Sports Innovation Lab predicted that explosion over 5 years ago, well before the mass market. In 2021, after analyzing purchase data, we published The Fan Project report detailing why women’s sports would be the next growth area in the industry, and we’ve published an annual update each year since then. It’s become the global go-to resource on women’s sports commercialization.
The club came about through our work with Ally Financial. At the onset, they were a leading women’s sports sponsor and had pledged to have a 50/50 gender allocation in their sports marketing budget. But they ran into an unexpected problem: they had all this money to spend on women’s sports but couldn’t find the inventory. The inventory opportunities for women's sports were not being brought on stage in the same way that men's sports were.
To solve this problem, we started a deal-making club called the Women’s Sports Club, comprising women's sports executives and brands. Ally became a leading sponsor of it. We have virtual and on-site meetings where people can get together and make deals. We’re very clear that it’s not a networking club. The goal of this club is to spend money on women's sports. It provided a place for Ally and other big sponsors to come in and mingle with the women's sports properties directly. We closed over 12 deals between women’s sports properties and major brands in 2022, our inaugural year. Ally was our sponsor that year, and the next year, 10 other sponsors—including Google, Morgan Stanley, and EA Sports—joined them.
“The targeting in sports has historically been really bad because marketers don't have all of the ecosystem data that Sports Innovation Lab now offers.”
Your other big project was the IAB NewFront for women’s sports. Can you tell us about that?
This was a big highlight of my career. For anyone who doesn’t know, IAB NewFronts are like UpFronts in television but for digital media instead. Last year, Sports Innovation Lab put on the first-ever NewFront dedicated to women's sports. We only showcased women's sports inventory and data solutions. We partnered with Trailblazing Sports Group, which works with leagues and production companies to find inventory opportunities and sell them to brands. It was such a great partnership because they brought the inventory, and we brought the data, the reach, and the scale for everything. We put all of it up on stage, and you could tell that the brands in the room had never seen anything like it.
We did this last year and are considering doing another one.
“Yes, it’s definitely harder to market to marketers because they're more skeptical. At Sports Innovation Lab, we focus on maximizing our messages and hitting the right people.”
What are some of the things you’ll be expecting in women's sports in the near future?
I think you already see many brands leaning into women’s sports, and I expect that to continue. There will be an uptick in sports betting on women's sports, which will engage more fans. I also think many female athletes are doing a great job representing themselves on social media and telling their stories on a personal level, so I think there is a massive growth opportunity in investing in female athletes beyond traditional sponsorship models. The stories and platforms these athletes have will increase in value moving forward.
I mentioned Unrivaled earlier, and I think that will be great. Not only is Unrivaled player-founded, but it's also very focused on the fan experience and integrating elite basketball with unmatched pop culture and entertainment. For instance, they're mic’ing players up when they’re on the floor for content, which is so awesome for viewers. They have great sponsors lined up, including Ally, State Farm, Ticketmaster, Under Armour, Miller Lite, Vista Print, Sephora, Samsung Galaxy, Bodyarmor, and Icy Hot.
There’s also League One Volleyball (LOVB), which just raised $100 million and is very promising.
As a hockey player, I must say that the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) had an amazing inaugural year. My friends on the Minnesota franchise won the league’s first championship, which really heightened my fandom.
Sports Innovation Lab works on men’s sports as well. What are the trends you’re seeing there?
The World Cup is coming up, so we’ve been profiling U.S. soccer fans. We’ve also seen brands and leagues want to get involved in pickleball. This isn’t really a shock; it’s a pop culture thing that everyone seems to want to be a part of, though I’m curious to see how it will evolve at the league level. I will say that nobody has pickleball tagged in their data set besides us, and people are spending a lot of money on pickleball.
“I think you already see many brands leaning into women’s sports, and I expect that to continue. There will be an uptick in sports betting on women's sports, which will engage more fans.”
You won Advertising Week’s “Future Is Female” award last year. What does that mean to you?
It meant so much to me. I was actually in the midst of a health crisis when I won that award. Looking back, I think I’d been sick for almost three years. I’m an athlete, and I would wake up after playing hockey, and my joints would hurt, and I’d be exhausted. I went to the doctor many times, and they couldn’t figure out what it was. Over the summer, I started to get very sick. I couldn’t digest food, and I was having trouble walking. I was in pain every day. It turns out that I had severe endometriosis, adenomyosis, and polycystic ovary syndrome.
In some ways, I found it fitting that I was shortlisted for the "Future Is Female" Award during this battle because endometriosis is just one of the many silent battles women face. The whole thing made me realize just how strong women really are and led to me finding strength within myself that I didn't know I had.
I had to take a bunch of pain medication prescribed by my doctor just to walk the night of the awards ceremony. It felt like the universe was telling me to hang in there. It also reminded me that we never know what other people are going through—especially women. We’re working our butts off at work and succeeding, but a lot of us are also dealing with invisible things at the same time, whether that’s being a mom or having health issues. I had endometriosis surgery right after the awards, and that’s helped me feel like myself!
You’re having a lot of success, but it’s still early in your career. What do you see yourself doing in the future?
I want creativity to be the center point! I love storytelling, writing, and shaping brands, and I aspire to lead a business or even start something of my own one day, but I want it to be the right thing. Time will tell, but I am very excited for what is ahead.
March 18, 2025
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