The Moves That Matter

BRIDGET PERRY: I'm one of your fans, Paul.

PAUL BALLEW: You have to applaud excellence. Let's give it up for the Seahawks. Hey, you're somewhere in this room, so let's give it up for the Seahawks.

BRIDGET PERRY: Let's give it up for Paul. Thank you so much for being here with us today. You're not only with this fan, but you're in a room full of your fans.

PAUL BALLEW: Time for some football. Do you miss football? I can't hear you. Do you miss football? All right, there we go.

BRIDGET PERRY: What we're going to talk about is how did you do it — how did you turn all of these people into fans? That's really what today is about. But before we get started, I'd love to take a moment to introduce Paul. Paul is the Chief Data and Analytics Officer for the NFL, a role he's held since September of 2021. Paul is also a seasoned data and analytics executive who has led this function at General Motors, Nationwide, Dun and Bradstreet, Ford Motor Company, and the Loblaw Company, among others. He's also a member of the board of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Welcome, Paul.

PAUL BALLEW: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

BRIDGET PERRY: We all know about the NFL, or at least we think we do. Tell us something that we don't know — something that would surprise us about the NFL.

PAUL BALLEW: Roger hates hugs. Just kidding. He actually loves hugs — he gave me one today, for some reason I haven't quite figured out why. I think there's always this perception that this massive brand known as football is a large, complex organization, and we're really not. We're one of the leanest and most efficient organizations relative to our impact that you could imagine, when you look at both the league and the clubs. It's a very efficient operating model that is absolutely obsessed with its mission, and there are very important lessons in that for the world we now live in. Because everybody talks about being more lean, more efficient — what does agentic mean, what does this mean — but the NFL is a fascinating model because we were lean and brand-obsessed and fan-obsessed before it was even fashionable.

PAUL BALLEW: This has been going on for a hundred years, and really in the last 40 to 50 years we've taken advantage of distribution through TV and other channels. I think that surprises people. There's always this image that if you go to 345 Park, there are 10,000 of us. In reality, there are a couple thousand people working in the league office — that's it. And if you look at the clubs, I call them the world's most successful mom-and-pop shops, because they are incredibly lean, and yet they're brand-obsessed and fan-obsessed. There's a lot to be said for that. If you know who you are and you can execute in a way that adds value, and you stay committed to that brand, you can make your mark in this world.

BRIDGET PERRY: That's so interesting. And it's interesting that you think of the fan as not just here in the US — as I understand it, you have aspirations to build fans around the world. Tell us a little more about that.

PAUL BALLEW: Our goal is to take this wonderful sport that brings people together, and does so with a passion you don't see in all sports. That passion, that commitment, that sense of community — the thing that ties us all together. We can debate and have arguments over politics, we can have arguments over many things, usually within our own families. But when you talk about sport in general, and certainly the NFL, the passion, the community, the engagement — we believe it extends beyond our borders.

PAUL BALLEW: We've been working toward a global presence for a long time, but now it's an intense commitment for us to scale internationally. We're very optimistic — we've made a lot of strides in the last few years and we're putting significant investment behind it. My organization spends a disproportionate amount of time outside the US now, in a good way. We believe that this game we all love — watched on Monday nights, Thursday nights, Friday nights, Sundays, sometimes Saturdays, and soon perhaps even more days of the week — can resonate everywhere.

BRIDGET PERRY: Human behavior has stayed the same — there's still that desire for community, that passion around a sport. But what's changed about your fans? You've seen the evolution over many years and across different industries. Tell us what that means in terms of how the fan has changed and how you have to adapt.

PAUL BALLEW: Three lessons I think are very important for us and for other industries as well. Number one: know who your customer is and make sure that what you're doing adds value to them — that it's a relationship always centered on them. It's easy for companies to talk about customer centricity and say they love their customers. Those are easy platitudes. To actually live it and breathe it is what's important.

PAUL BALLEW: Against that backdrop, two things are shifting that we have to recognize. Number one: the expectation from customers and fans has continued to rise. Why? Because of devices like the smartphone. We talk about hyper-personalization — the smartphone arrived just over 20 years ago — and we talk about it, but we don't always embrace what it truly means. Hyper-personalization doesn't mean you now have the ability to carpet-bomb people with communications. It means that you see them, you know them, and you engage with them respectfully, in context, when it's relevant. You now have that ability through technology, but the technology has to meet the expectation. And the expectation from customers and fans is precisely that: you are going to be hyper-personalized, not because it's a buzzword, but because you're going to live it and breathe it.

PAUL BALLEW: So our focus from a fan standpoint — and we've developed an integrated one-to-one program to do just that — is to see, know, and engage with our fans meaningfully in context. The other dimension we have to take into account, central to our business and to virtually every industry, is that technology goes through disruptive phases. The disruptive phase we're in right now — what we loosely call AI — is really the next phase of the digital revolution, which has been with us for six decades. At each phase, it has changed the rules of engagement. For us, that means how content is distributed and consumed, whether you're talking about streaming, different emerging platforms, social media, or whatever comes next.

PAUL BALLEW: You have to be ready, from an optionality standpoint, to be prepared regardless of what plays out in the future. In 1999, no one in this room — including myself, and I was responsible for forecasting at GM — got e-commerce even remotely right. In 2005 and 2006, with the smartphone and the advent of apps, we largely got it wrong. Some of the smartest people in the world got it wrong. So you have to be prepared for the fact that technology is going to continue to disrupt, and you have to be able to meet your customers' expectations by leveraging technology while also making sure you're not disrupted by new entrants. One of the nice things about the NFL is that Roger has instilled a culture of not resting on our laurels.

PAUL BALLEW: The Super Bowl ends, the confetti comes down, we celebrate, he hands the Lombardi trophy to the winning team — and the very next Monday we're already planning for next season. The off-season is often crazier than the season itself, because it's a continuous obsession with the brand and the fan experience. That's important for anyone in this industry. Provide value to your customers at the end of the day. Embrace the fact that they come first, and that's not just a platitude. Ask yourself: when it comes down to meeting your quarterly earnings targets or doing what's right for your customer, what would you do? I come from automotive — I can tell you exactly what we did, and it wasn't always pleasant.

BRIDGET PERRY: Everyone in this room has been on this journey to help their brands deliver great experiences to their customers, and it hasn't been easy. Are we getting it right? Where are we getting it wrong? The NFL seems to be figuring it out. Can you share what the key unlocks have been and what you've learned along the way?

PAUL BALLEW: It's a really interesting question. I've had the good fortune of going through different industries — being with a Fortune 1 company at its peak and then through bankruptcy, and being with other large organizations. As I look back on that journey, I'm always reminded of an early exchange with Amazon in the late nineties. They came to see us because we were building the first one-to-one marketing capability, and they shared their vision of the customer: they viewed customers as invited guests to the party, and believed they should be treated as such. Let that wash over you for a moment. If you're personally inviting someone to a party at your house, as a near and dear guest, what does that mean you do? How do you treat them? How do you interact with them? How do you put them at the center of your product and customer experience decisions?

PAUL BALLEW: I see so many companies struggle with that because, first, they can't clearly define who they are. Second, even if they do define who they are, it may not be a unique position in the marketplace — and therefore you get commoditized, which is its own interesting journey, especially in manufacturing. And then the third issue is the discipline and commitment required to follow through. Automotive was near and dear to my heart — I'm from Detroit, and we dominated so much of American culture.

PAUL BALLEW: We were the first trillion-dollar industry. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government tried to break us up for antitrust purposes. We dominated everything — GM spent $10 billion a year on sales and marketing, not even counting incentives. But throughout that entire journey, we lost sight of what made us special, and then we failed to honor the commitment of executing against it. We also got caught up in constantly refreshing brand positioning — new positioning this year, new positioning next year, wrapping ourselves in the flag. I used to say our brand strategy was like an ADHD ferret on amphetamines. That's a lesson. In financial services, the lesson is similar: you may be an essential product or service, but not something people necessarily want to talk about. Know who you are, and then relate to the customer. Financial services has done a reasonably good job of knowing that and engaging respectfully when it's appropriate. Those are a number of different lessons it's been fascinating to watch over the decades.

BRIDGET PERRY: Over the decades, has it gotten any easier to know your customer? Tell us a little about how you've done it — the tools you've built, the teams you've had to build, and the way you've had to organize.

PAUL BALLEW: I pinch myself every day that I've had this wonderful front-row seat over a number of decades, moving from simply asking people who they are and what's important to them, to now being able to actually observe them. That observational capability is so important. To do that, you have to get the building blocks right. It's not only about data and infrastructure — what Amperity does in terms of identity resolution and validation services, and the like — you have to think of it as an ecosystem. You can't view it as a collection of one-off technical capabilities without a clear view of what you're really trying to do and how you're trying to accomplish it. You also have to deal with the change management component.

PAUL BALLEW: Is it easier today? Technically, it's dramatically easier than you could have imagined 20 or 30 years ago. When I was at the Federal Reserve early in my career, we had 37 economists, 22 librarians, and five graphic artists. The librarians' job was to pull reports and data for the economists every day, and the graphic artists drew our charts and graphs. That's a true story. Fast forward to today — none of that exists, because of technology, data availability, and smartphones. What we can do technically is amazing. The challenge we still have is the change management side of how businesses actually adopt and embrace these capabilities.

PAUL BALLEW: And we have new challenges ahead: governance. Everyone tends to be sloppy when talking about AI. Please be precise about your definitions. AI is an incredible enabler in its current iteration because we're democratizing technology, and the democratization of technology is a powerful thing. Smartphones are a good example. E-commerce is a good example. Think about what you have access to every day in terms of information to make your lives better — it's powerful for all of us. But the governance component is going to become disproportionately important. You can see it at the extremes with technologies that could be disruptive to society, and you see it in businesses every day: how do you enable your workforce while ensuring bad outcomes don't occur? Horror stories of bad outcomes from insufficient governance happen every day. Privacy and consent are much harder today than they were 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, and every day it grows more complex.

BRIDGET PERRY: So what do you do about it? We're in a room full of marketers for whom data is the currency of how we do our work. With AI, there are new possibilities and new risks. How are you thinking about managing those risks?

PAUL BALLEW: We manage it every day by first making sure you have the enabling capabilities in place. Without the enabling capabilities, forget about it. Good AI requires good enabling capabilities — which includes data, infrastructure, technology, observability, measurement, and everything that comes with it. And then, realize that the balancing act of enabling and governing — governing is a better word than controlling — sometimes requires you to slow down to speed up. It's one of the great lessons in data governance: slow down to speed up, do it the right way. Embrace the fact that data and analytics organizations, and data security functions, exist for a reason. Realize that your technology partners are there to help you on this journey. If you don't get your enabling capabilities right, you'll never scale — or you'll scale very inefficiently. That's the key.

BRIDGET PERRY: Paul, you shared a story earlier about your time at the Federal Reserve and how the world looks so different today. We're now at a big inflection point with AI, and it's going to change how we do our jobs. How are you thinking about that for the NFL?

PAUL BALLEW: We think about it almost every day. There's not a day that goes by without spending some time on this topic, because every organization is, and you get a lot of pressure — from your board of directors, from your CEO, in our case from owners. We think about it in a few different buckets. First, there's the opportunity to use general productivity tools, and we sometimes lose sight of those. General productivity tools should be embraced in a governed environment, and we should enable our entire organizations to use them. We sometimes lose sight of history: those general productivity tools were rolling out in the late 1980s and 1990s too — they were called Lotus 1-2-3, then Excel, Harvard Graphics, then PowerPoint. We have to embrace today's equivalents in the right structure. You're not going to babysit your team to figure out how they're using ChatGPT — or whatever the solution is — to take better notes, improve their presentations, or streamline contract writing and review. That's priority one.

PAUL BALLEW: Second, there's clearly a subgroup of what we call power users who are already using AI or advanced technology for a variety of purposes. It's important to leverage their needs and recognize that there are things within almost any workflow that you can transform — whether you're talking about software engineering or quality assurance processes, we're looking at all of those. And then the third piece is the one that matters most at the end of the day: how are you interfacing with your customers or fans? That matters enormously for us. It could be content distribution; it could be personalizing how fans manage information to optimize their fantasy team. We think about it on those dimensions and probably a few others. We have a cross-functional AI council that tries to put the right guardrails in place, and we track and measure and try to maintain discipline — and we try to stay humble. That's probably my final message on AI: be humble. If anyone thinks they have this completely figured out, they don't. There's a book written about a decade ago called "How the Internet Happened" — a great story, though nobody on the West Coast enjoys reading it because it essentially says, you got it wrong, you got it wrong, you got it wrong. And yet, getting it wrong still led many of those people to become billionaires. So a little humility along the way is not a bad thing.

BRIDGET PERRY: As you're talking about all these shifts in terms of the investments that need to be made and changes in organization, the importance of course always comes back to the fan and the customer. How are you measuring impact? What does this mean for the NFL?

PAUL BALLEW: We spend a lot of time measuring impact — that's another part of my organization. We look at it first and foremost with fans: how engaged are they with us, and how much time are they spending with us? Because our product, at the end of the day — yes, we appreciate jersey sales, and we want you to come to our stadiums and buy tickets — but our revenue model is heavily based on the fact that you have a passion to consume our content. So we spend an incredible amount of time measuring engagement at an individual fan level. In fact, for every fan in the United States, we maintain an individual engagement score that we refresh every month. We then look at the drivers and are constantly testing and learning to validate that we're achieving our objectives.

PAUL BALLEW: That engagement really matters. Lifetime value isn't quite the right metric for us the way it might be for other industries — for us, it's about engagement. And if in this day and age you can do it at an individual customer level, it makes an incredible difference in terms of holding yourselves accountable. We embed that engagement metric into variable compensation, so it's woven into the fact that we all have a stake in this. That matters a lot. To Roger's credit, he cares deeply about all things NFL — and the reason we established this function five years ago is largely due to him.

BRIDGET PERRY: That's wonderful. Paul, it's been great having you. Tell us — what's next?

PAUL BALLEW: We kick off in September. First game is the Seahawks. Second game will be in Melbourne, Australia. For the 49ers or Rams fans in the audience — there you go. Along the way, what's next from a technical standpoint? There's so much going on. My organization supports player health and safety, football operations, marketing, media, and the fan experience. For us, it's about staying on task: improve the game, ensure the integrity of the game, deepen our relationships with fans, and use data and analytics as one part of that equation. Continue to preserve the competitive balance of the game. One of the great things about football is that every year you have a half-dozen teams that weren't in the playoffs the year before suddenly making a run — in fact, both Super Bowl teams this year didn't make the playoffs the previous year. That's very important to us. We obsess every single day around making the game better, more enjoyable, more dynamic, safer, and more accessible. That's what's ahead. It's going to be a great season. Are you ready for some football?

PAUL BALLEW: All right, let's go.

BRIDGET PERRY: Paul, before we close, I just have one last question. Who will the Seahawks be playing in the Super Bowl?

PAUL BALLEW: The Seahawks are in the same conference as my hometown Detroit Lions, so I'm not going to weigh in on that. What I can tell you is it's going to be two of 32.

BRIDGET PERRY: Two of 32!

PAUL BALLEW: I can assure you of that. We look forward to seeing everyone in LA, or at least watching it on TV. Thank you for being a fan. Thank you for watching the games, encouraging us, and rooting for your teams. For me, across all these years of doing this work, it's been incredible — not just because it's fun and everyone wants to talk about the NFL, but to see an organization that is genuinely obsessed with its brand and its fans. It's been such an incredible journey. When you spend decades talking about customer centricity and spending a lot of money on it, to actually live it — that has been quite a highlight. We are who we are. Let's go.

BRIDGET PERRY: Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you all for joining us.