THE BIG IDEA · ISSUE NO. 2
The TOUR is getting better at understanding individual fans. But the real opportunity may depend on giving the fans it doesn't yet know a compelling reason to engage.
For most of the history of sports media, the business has revolved around a fairly straightforward question: How many people can we reach?
How many watched the broadcast? How many attended the event? How many visited the website or downloaded the app?
Those numbers still matter. But I think there's a more interesting question emerging:
How many of those fans do you actually know?
I remember the early 2000s, when everyone was talking about the stickiness of websites and applications. Getting someone to visit or download something was one challenge. Getting them to return and genuinely engage was another.
We encountered a similar distinction when we developed the World's Best surveys. We routinely analyzed responses from frequent travelers separately and looked closely at people who had actually stayed at the properties they were evaluating.
That didn't mean an occasional traveler's opinion was unimportant. But people who traveled frequently, or returned to a particular property, brought a different kind of experience to their responses. Understanding those differences made the data more useful.
I've been thinking about that experience as I look at what the PGA TOUR is doing with fan personalization.
The TOUR is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its ability to identify and understand individual fans. That's an important development.
But there's a catch: the fans who are easiest to identify aren't necessarily the ones who care most about the game.
The TOUR has been working toward a more individualized fan relationship for years.
Its earlier work with Adobe sought to combine customer relationship information and digital behavior into a single view of the fan. The stated ambition was to develop a one-to-one relationship with each individual.
More recently, several initiatives have begun to make that vision tangible.
Fan Forward has gathered feedback from more than 50,000 core, casual and non-golf sports fans, informing decisions about broadcasts, competition, player storytelling and the tournament experience.
YOURTOUR and the Favorite Players hub allow fans to identify the players they care about and receive more relevant stories, statistics and highlights.
PGA TOUR Pass provides a consistent account through which fans can manage preferences and access content, ticket offers, retail benefits and experiences.
And the appointment of Mike Mahar as Chief Technology Officer brings additional experience in consumer data, personalization engines, loyalty programs and AI-powered customer experiences.
These aren't isolated developments. Together, they give the TOUR more ways to recognize individual fans and build relationships with them over time.
I think that's where the opportunity begins.
But it's important to understand what this information does—and doesn't—tell us.
Here's a personal example.
I have the PGA TOUR app, but I don't use it all that often.
I don't regularly log in to follow my favorite players, track their statistics or customize the highlights I receive.
But I'm a huge fan of professional golf. I watch it religiously when it's on television. I play the game, talk about it frequently and spend a considerable amount of money on golf.
Now consider a 27-year-old who uses the TOUR app every day, follows several players and consumes a steady stream of statistics and highlights.
From the TOUR's digital perspective, that person may be much easier to understand than I am.
The organization can see what they're following, which content interests them and how often they engage.
It may have very little comparable information about me.
But does that make the other fan more important?
Of course not.
We're simply engaging with the sport in different ways.
That younger fan may have an exceptionally valuable relationship with the TOUR. I may be spending more money across the broader golf economy. And someone else might rarely watch a broadcast but travel every year to attend a major championship.
None of those behaviors, by itself, tells us the full story.
The mistake would be to assume that the fans generating the most digital activity are necessarily the most engaged or valuable fans.
That is why I think the TOUR's personalization strategy becomes much more interesting when we look beyond the app.
Formula 1 offers a useful comparison.
F1 says it reaches more than 831 million fans worldwide, but only about 26 million are currently known fans with whom it can communicate directly. Its long-term ambition is to grow that known-fan base to 43 million.
That distinction is commercially important.
An anonymous television viewer contributes to the size of an audience. A known fan creates the possibility of a direct, continuing relationship.
F1 has reported that personalized marketing built around unified fan profiles increased click-through rates by 22%.
It's evidence that greater relevance can improve engagement, although it doesn't establish that personalization alone drives revenue.
The same principle applies to golf.
If I identify Rory McIlroy as a favorite player, the TOUR can give me more relevant content. If I attend an event or respond to an offer through my account, it can begin to understand other aspects of my relationship with the game.
Over time, that information can help the TOUR make my experience more useful.
But there's a difference between building a profile and understanding a person.
My digital activity might suggest that I'm only casually interested in professional golf, even though the opposite is true.
Which raises a practical question: How does the TOUR begin building a relationship with someone like me?
I'm not asking the PGA TOUR to convince me to become a golf fan. I already am one.
I'm asking it to give me a reason to become a known fan.
I watch the tournaments, follow the players, play the game and spend money throughout the golf economy. Yet the TOUR's digital platforms may capture very little of that activity.
So here's my challenge to the TOUR: Show me what a direct relationship with you would offer someone like me. Not another stream of highlights or statistics, but something that recognizes how I actually engage with golf.
Give me access, experiences or benefits that make that relationship worthwhile. Show me that sharing more about myself will make my experience of professional golf better.
And if you don't yet know what would motivate me, ask me.
There are undoubtedly other fans who engage with golf in similar ways. Understanding what would bring us into the TOUR's ecosystem could reveal an opportunity that isn't visible in today's digital engagement metrics.
The TOUR shouldn't just get better at identifying the fans already using its platforms. It should get better at giving the fans it doesn't yet know a reason to identify themselves.
That's when personalization becomes something more meaningful than a technology initiative. It becomes a genuine exchange of value between the organization and its fans.
Golf presents a particular challenge because many fans develop their connection with the professional game through individual players.
Tiger. Rory. Scottie. Jordan. Nelly. Ludvig.
A player can be the reason someone starts watching.
But players miss cuts. They skip tournaments. Their performance changes. Eventually, they retire.
The TOUR needs to give fans reasons to stay engaged even as those individual relationships evolve.
YOURTOUR's emphasis on Favorite Players provides a natural starting point.
Imagine someone who begins following golf because of Ludvig Åberg. Over time, that fan might develop an interest in other players, particular tournaments or the competitive storylines surrounding the TOUR.
Personalization could help make those connections.
The relationship would no longer depend exclusively on the player who originally attracted the fan.
But again, I wouldn't measure success simply by how frequently that person opens the app.
I'd be more interested in whether their relationship with professional golf is becoming broader, deeper and more enduring.
That's a much more meaningful commercial objective.
I don't think the biggest opportunity here is that my version of PGATOUR.COM might someday look completely different from yours.
It's that the TOUR is developing the ability to build more direct relationships with individual fans and understand what matters to them.
Fan Forward provides a way to listen. Favorite Players captures specific interests. PGA TOUR Pass creates a persistent identity. The TOUR's technology investments make it increasingly possible to connect those signals and respond to them.
But I would be careful about defining the opportunity solely through the behavior of people already using those products.
Some of golf's most committed fans may be relatively invisible in the TOUR's digital data.
They may watch on television, play several times a week, attend tournaments or spend heavily on the game without ever logging in to a TOUR account.
Others may engage digitally every day but have very different interests and spending patterns.
Neither group should be overlooked.
The objective isn't to make every fan behave the same way. It's to understand the different ways they engage and find opportunities to make each relationship more meaningful.
And the economics require another distinction: spending money on golf doesn't automatically mean spending money with the PGA TOUR. The commercial opportunity lies in understanding those broader relationships and identifying where the TOUR can provide value to the fan, its partners and its own business.
For decades, sports properties have focused on reaching as many people as possible.
The next phase will be about understanding more of those people as individuals.
The real opportunity isn't just knowing which fans are using your app. It's building relationships with the fans who love your sport—including the ones your app doesn't yet know.
Adobe — PGA TOUR fan data and one-to-one relationship case study ↗
PGA TOUR — YOURTOUR and Favorite Players ↗
PGA TOUR — Senior leadership and CTO appointment ↗
Salesforce — Formula 1 known-fan and personalization case study ↗