It used to be that sports sponsorships were a "nice to have". They were a way to use up the last part of a marketing budget after all the ad buys were completed. Find out what the CEO’s favorite sport is, buy some signage, get some tickets and call it a day.

Not any more. Sports are one of the last places that capture our extremely fragmented attention, so sponsorships have become far more important to marketers. Rights holders know this, so the cost of partnering with sports has exploded. Take F1: the cost to sponsor a team has doubled in just the last 5 years.

So as the costs have gone up, so has the pressure on marketers. In this data driven world, responding to questions about measuring effectiveness just can’t be met with “well, it’s hard…” Marketers need to have an answer.

And more often than not, that answer can be found with Jay Prasad, the CEO of Relo Metrics.

Relo Metrics is a leader in measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of sports sponsorships. An early adopter of artificial intelligence, Relo has been providing marketers with essential insights into how their sports investments are performing for over a decade.

Jay has been around data analytics and online video since, well, there has been online video. That depth of experience has he and Relo ready to continue their hockey stick growth in the coming years. In our conversation, we talk about his arrival at Relo, what he’s hearing from marketers about sponsorship measurement, his advice on using their data to improve performance, and (perhaps most importantly), what the future holds as generative AI produces an overwhelming new set of capabilities.

00:02

Jay Prasad

Hey, this is jay prasad, CEO of Relo Metrics. And this is the sports business conversations podcast from adc partners.

00:25

Dave Almy

Hey, this is Dave Almy of ADC Partners. And let me tell you, the stakes for sports marketers have never been higher. Now it used to be that sports sponsorships were a nice to have. They were a way to use up the last part of that marketing budget after all the ad buys were completed. Find out what the CEO's favorite sport is, buy some signage, get some tickets and call it a day. You're not anymore. Sports are one of the last places that capture our extremely fragmented attention. So sponsorships have become far more important to marketers. Rights holders know this. So the cost of partnering with sports has exploded. I mean, take F1. The cost to sponsor a team has doubled in just the last five years. So as the costs have gone up, so has the pressure on marketers.

01:18

Dave Almy

In this data driven world, responding to questions about measuring effectiveness just can't be met with. Yeah, well, it's hard. Marketers need to have answer. And more often than not, that answer can be found with. Jay Prasad, the CEO of Relo Metrics. Rollo Metrics is a leader in measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of sports sponsorships. An early adopter of artificial intelligence, Rallo has been providing marketers with essential insights into how their sports investments are performing for about over a decade now. Jay has been around data analytics and online video since, well, since there has been an online video, that depth of experience has he and Rello ready to continue their hockey stick growth in the coming years.

02:05

Dave Almy

In our conversation, we talk about his arrival at Relo, what he's hearing from marketers about sponsorship measurement, his advice on using their data to improve performance, and perhaps most importantly, what the future holds. And as generative, AI produces an overwhelming new set of capabilities. So thanks for listening in on my conversation with Jay Prasad, CEO of Relo Metrics. Hope you enjoy. And I've already learned something from this podcast. I've been calling it Relo Metrics for as long as I've known about the company.

02:40

Jay Prasad

So many people do. And it was a name based on a word that doesn't truly exist. It's an adaptation of Relar, which is to watch in Spanish. And they named it Relo. I inherited the name. I decided to build it and brand it. But I am planning a hello Relo campaign for people to understand what we do and like ask a AI widget some sports marketing questions and what's your favorite brand? And what Kit, all that kind of stuff. Maybe that helps us solve the branding problem.

03:09

Dave Almy

And plus this podcast now, I mean, is completely going to reveal to everyone the correct pronunciation for Relo Metrics, starting with the host. But this is right now. But this is nothing new for you, right? You've been in and around online video and starting companies and startups since there's basically been an online video I was.

03:31

Jay Prasad

Fortunate enough to be around. And maybe also now I'm giving away old enough.

03:37

Dave Almy

I remember the day when.

03:40

Jay Prasad

Yeah. When the Internet was just coming out.

03:42

Dave Almy

Yeah.

03:42

Jay Prasad

We got email my senior year of college. Right? Yeah. That we grew up in. And that means just a couple years later, you know, I'm out of school. I had gone and studied in London. I came back and was doing management consulting, you know, for the big four firms and didn't love it. I don't think I was that great at it either.

03:59

Dave Almy

The number of times I've heard that particular story is unbelievable.

04:03

Jay Prasad

Yeah, you know, it's like this boot camp and you know, it's like there's a prestige, you know, to getting offers from these types of firms and you know, went to a big city. In this case, I went to Chicago. But I quickly realized that when the Internet started to become, you know, this huge massive wave and it was like Obviously the pre.com crash, but the bubble era, you know, I took my shot at creating a first software company and in essence it was the precursor to cloud computing. Right. We were basically having rental of applications. It was called Applications Service providers.

04:37

Dave Almy

Service providers. Boy, you really are dating us here.

04:41

Jay Prasad

So. Yeah, I mean, application service provider. And then that was sort of the entree into digital media because we had digital media partners and some content stuff. So I really learned about how the world of digital media would be really creating this whole new wave of entertainment. And that led me into a great series of experiences working on early video semantic search, which just sort of rooted me in the part of things and then taking all of that to Yahoo for a couple of years when, you know, Yahoo was, I mean it is still is the fourth largest property on the Internet. But you know, Yahoo and Yahoo Sports was really seminal early on and you know, I was able to work on some of those really early programs there. So that's how I started to get into the sports mix as well.

05:25

Dave Almy

Do you remember sort of your first interaction with seeing sports in an online video environment and thinking, oh, this is the thing. Like this is going to change the game as we know it today?

05:39

Jay Prasad

06:17

Dave Almy

It's funny to remember like mlbam, they were leading the charge. Advanced media was for Major League Baseball. They were on the cutting edge of a lot of the new technologies that we all kind of take for granted of today. And it's funny you make when you're said, you know, when you just did your piece there. It's funny to think also about how experimental everything was in that timeframe that you're talking about. Like everybody was trying to figure out what this thing was. So a lot of the things we just sort of take for granted of, well, of course I'm going to watch the highlights on my phone and of course I'm just going to stream the game. Everybody was like, how is this going to be deployed? Because there's a 70,000 different ways that it could possibly evolve.

06:58

Dave Almy

And you kind of saw this happening.

07:00

Jay Prasad

What's the business model? What are the constraints? You know, what are the copyright protections, what are the rules and rights? So most things were not like there wasn't legal contracts for these things. And also the monetization, you know, so like post Yahoo, I went to company called Freewheel which was bought by Comcast. And Freewheel is the sort of professional broadcaster. I mean every streaming company, all of the big, you know, NBC, cbs, everything, you know, uses free will to do ad decisioning. But it also has the ad rights we used to call it. You sell. We sell, right? So at Yahoo, you know, we sell these, you know, these breaks or these types of positions and you sell these things. And so, and if you think about then the original deals with like YouTube in sports, right?

07:47

Jay Prasad

There was a, the Beijing Olympics was a partnership with NBC and YouTube because at that time, right, NBC didn't have a platform that could like handle the volume of something like the Olympics. So you have sort of YouTube and Google involved, you have NBC Sports involved. And it's like who sells what ads for what sports and what countries and all that. I mean, chaos and eventually that stuff all gets orchestrated in the software. So I mean, that shows how like the distribution of sports into digital started and now we're like in the complete streaming era.

08:16

Dave Almy

Well, and it's interesting too, like all those elements created new business opportunities as the Internet came along and it started to create, well, how are we going to do this and how are we going to do that? It starts to also produce for people who can see around corners and things like, oh, well, we're going to have to address that challenge and how to be able to do that. Which kind of sort of in a sort of tough fur segue sort of way takes us to Relo Metrics from the standpoint of.

08:40

Dave Almy

And I'm not even going to say anything more because what I'd like you to do is for people who are unfamiliar with the company, can you Give the quick 30,000 foot view of Relo Metrics and the problem that it is solving for people in sports business from both media side and from the partnership side?

08:57

Jay Prasad

Yeah, Ultimately, Relo Metrics is a measurement and data platform that tracks all of the exposures of sponsorship, ad sets, branded content integrations, basically anything that's not an ad runs during an ad break. But the world of sports and live entertainment is surrounded by marketing integrations. So how do you measure that? How do you track all the exposures? How do you unsign how many people viewed it on TV versus viewed it on streaming versus engage with it on social media and then actually put a media value to it, Meaning that got you $3 million worth of media exposure for the sponsorships. But then we have gone deeper into, well, what did people think about it? What did the search volume and search behavior look like after the college football playoffs?

09:46

Jay Prasad

Like all of these things now we can calculate into sort of reloadcomme, have a whole ecosystem of partnerships, including a really important one with video amp, which is a currency which by the way, you didn't get through my whole career, but I was on the video amp 11 years ago. It is now. Right. The secondary currency and being used more and more in sports because it measures audiences across all platforms and not just age and gender. Right. Like Nielsen just measures how many adults watch something. And so we can now get to audiences and we can get to outcomes. So the problem we're solving is what is all of this worth? How do you optimize it? How do you do it better? And when Both sides, whether it's a buyer or a seller. So you know, you've got media companies who sell certain assets.

10:27

Jay Prasad

You got the teams and the leagues, you got three people selling assets and then you have multiple forms of agencies involved. You got the sports agencies, you have the media agencies and ultimately in the corner is a brand. Right. Big brands use multiple agencies. A lot of mid market health and banking brands that you see all over stadiums. They often work with us directly. So you know, we touch all parts of the ecosystem because anybody buying or selling or optimizing needs data and measurement in which to do it.

10:53

Dave Almy

And this is such an important point for I think what you are doing at RELO from the standpoint of, I think for years and years people have understood the measurement of sponsorships in the terms of media equivalency. It's a, it's a quantitative approach to measurement. Your, your logo is on the screen for this period of time and it means this much money. And that's absolutely still part of the equation. But where you take it now is sort of the qualitative part of this. Okay, your logo is on the screen, but how do people react to it?

11:17

Jay Prasad

Yeah, there's the qualitative, there's the engagements, there's the reactions, there's the, I mean we're even testing with a company, a partner that has in home facial cameras. Right. People are being paid. So like what are you paying attention to? You know there. And that's company called T Vision. We're also partnered with a company called Media Pulse which actually has like an aura ring type thing which measures your parasympathetic response. Are you excited? And so we say when are people getting excited? And then we think and we look at it and say, okay, well what was happening in that moment? We now have sync it up. Yeah, you sync up the excitement to what was happening and then what brands were exposed when that happened. Right. So now you've just got a deep excitement. Data points.

11:58

Dave Almy

Yeah. And sports is going to obviously produce so many of those in an unpredictable fashion. Right. That's the big challenge here. Like traditional tv, we're building to that moment.

12:09

Jay Prasad

Yeah.

12:09

Dave Almy

Like you just never know. So being able to sync that up. Can you talk a little bit about what attracted you to. I mean you're running the show there. You are the CEO of the company. What, what attracted you to RELO Metrics in the first place? Was it category industry? Like what sort of made you turn your head and go, interesting leading up.

12:29

Jay Prasad

13:16

Jay Prasad

We may have, you know, more competitors than I would think or I would like. Of course I'm a competitive CEO.

13:23

Dave Almy

But only a few competitors in name only, Jay.

13:25

Jay Prasad

Yes, only a few will actually ever become truly integrated, right? So you also have a chance to build something special and measurement. So I liked measurement and then the idea of focusing on sports and entertainment exclusively as well as solving for the non advertising because everything else in measurement was really orchestrated around measuring ads, right? Google monetizes searches better than anyone. Amazon knows what you want to buy and they can use that to target.

13:52

Dave Almy

Ads on it sometimes before I even know what I want to buy.

13:54

Jay Prasad

I mean Instagram ads tend to preempt your desire for like new stuff and you know, very, you know, catchy ad creatives that get you in. But what about things that are not ads that really wasn't paid attention to for a long time. We were talking stopwatches, notebooks and VHS tapes and then eventually YouTube and writing down a log for you were on screen. Well now we're at a point with computer vision based AI and now where we're going with agentic AI, where we can just do mass analysis, get mass understanding and meaning and context and then actually automate what are the insights, what should you have known, what you should do about it and would you like the agent to do it for you? It's just like a whole different ball game. And if we do our job well, guess what that means?

14:38

Jay Prasad

That means more monetization into sports, which means more women's sports. It means more new sports. It just opens up the aperture for sports and also live entertainment. We're doing more music than we have ever done before.

14:50

Dave Almy

Because also the decision making goes from while maybe I think we can generate X TO well, there's 32 examples of this where partners similar to ours have been able to generate tens of thousands of dollars in impressions and equivalencies in action. Yeah.

15:04

Jay Prasad

One of our platforms is called Relo Census, which is a census view of the sports market. Right. So now we have 10 different leagues in there, mainly all the big North American ones, including college and women, but Also now Formula 1. So we'll be expanding Census globally. But this tells you what's happening across all these sports. What activations are working, what brands are getting what share of voice by what sport, which teams have the best performing asset around. Scoreboard. All that's in one place.

15:30

Dave Almy

Right.

15:30

Jay Prasad

So that's super useful to a lot of our agency clients and those that are doing planning.

15:35

Dave Almy

Yeah. So you're talking obviously to a lot of brands about measurement and analytics and sports and where the crossover is that exists for them. What are you hearing from them? What are the brands telling you that what they want to learn from the data, Is it simply just about visibility and engagement or does it start to go in variety of different places that are both within your wheelhouse and things that you are building towards?

16:01

Jay Prasad

Yeah, I would say if you zoom back out from the brand C suite level. Right. What is the anchor of your brand marketing strategy? More and more of the biggest brands in the world are anchoring around sports. They do it in the US and these are their anchors and then globally it's different sports. But that's the common thing, right, is that we're no longer just going to create super cool creative that maybe has a celebrity. They're still going to do that, but it's going to be around the road to the Super Bowl. It's going to be around the Heisman house.

16:35

Dave Almy

Yeah. It's not an either or the World Cup.

16:37

Jay Prasad

So the anchor of their strategy is global sports. So then how do you build a 360 strategy for that? And that's it's a ton of work. Right. And there's a lot of different moving pieces, but the measurement of that in multiple ways is a requirement. Right. Because you're looking at F1 sponsorships that are averaging 36 to 40 million dollars. You're looking at World cup deals that are 400 million. So that's not going to just be for the month of the World cup, that's for the year leading up to the World cup and then probably for a little bit of time after.

17:10

Dave Almy

Oh, and that's just the rights fees.

17:12

Jay Prasad

Well, yeah, those are the sponsorship fees. Yeah.

17:15

Dave Almy

Right. So there's all the things and all the expenses these brands have to spend to leverage those.

17:20

Jay Prasad

So that's the entry ticket. Then you have all the creative and then you have to like do all the supporting media and you have to buy all that media. You're not just going to be seen in the game and in the pregame show. You're going to be on digital out of home, you're going to be at the airport, you're going to be all over the place, you're going to be online. And so there's a lot of different measurement that has to be there. And obviously there's people who measure the content, there's people who measure the ads, and then there's people who measure all the other stuff, including everything on social media. Right. And that's where, you know, we have built our business.

17:50

Dave Almy

And that is also, I'm assuming, placed a incredible emphasis on what it is you're delivering to the market. Because as more and more brands look to sports, and I'm assuming this just has a lot to do with the fact that this is one of the few things that people pay attention to in real time, in large numbers. If they're going to be putting it at the center of a 360 degree total marketing campaign, you sure as heck better have a sense of how it's going to perform or at least have a plan to be able to evaluate how it's going to perform, which has sort of, I'm assuming, produced good outcomes for you.

18:25

Jay Prasad

Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about it like if you're going to take $400 million and put it into.

18:30

Dave Almy

Sports, okay, I will.

18:32

Jay Prasad

Instead of. Right. Instead of just buying search ads and ads. Because if you're selling paper towels, is that the trade off you want to make? You know, or if what you're selling is insurance? Insurance has proven that like awareness and integration into these environments over the long run builds huge brand equity for them. So when you need insurance or need to switch insurance, you're picking State Farm, you're picking Geico, you're picking one of the things that is around the stuff you love. So if you're going to do that, then, you know, you need to be able to plan holistically, but also then understand what's happening to justify what you spent. Because you could have just bought search ads, right?

19:11

Dave Almy

There has to be an outcome that you look at and say, this is the why, right? This is what we're going to generate.

19:16

Jay Prasad

The boards of these companies that are public, that have these shareholders, okay, you spent a billion Dollars in sports. So how much product did you sell? What is your P and L look like?

19:24

Dave Almy

Right.

19:24

Jay Prasad

So you can't just do this as a vanity project.

19:27

Dave Almy

You can't go, well, I think.

19:30

Jay Prasad

Right. Or it's like, I want a luxury box and I want to, you know, like, get all the games. I love the team. You know, I like to have access to the coaches and the players. That does exist, of course. Right. There is a big.

19:41

Dave Almy

There is an emotional component to this.

19:43

Jay Prasad

Yeah, there's definitely an emotional and status component to, you know, being a part of something so incredibly appealing to billions of people around the world. What else right now is appealing to billions of people around the world? This podcast that in measurement.

19:59

Dave Almy

That measurement, between the two of us, we've conquered the world. Jay.

20:03

Jay Prasad

Got it.

20:04

Dave Almy

Now, it's one thing to have in the data when you are providing a lot of information to the people that you work with. Yeah, it's quite an entirely thing to know how to use that data.

20:16

Jay Prasad

Yes.

20:16

Dave Almy

So I'm assuming that part of the cake that you're baking here is assistance on guidance for brands on what to look for and effectively leverage the data that you're providing with them. I mean, that's part of this equation, isn't it?

20:35

Jay Prasad

Right. So for a long time, measurement was just sending report cards, you know, many weeks or months after something happened. We are capturing things in real time, and within days, you have the data in a measurement platform. So this is where, you know, all of these different entities have business intelligence and marketing analytics groups, and they can go in there and filter on the data in very deep ways and what the learnings are. But as a sort of AI first company, we want to automate that. So, well, what are the top five things you need to know? So when you log into our platform, it's right there. And then the card will tell you, here's the things that are important. And then if you dig in, it'll tell you, here's why it's happening.

21:17

Jay Prasad

And what we're building now is this is what you should do about it. Would you like the relobot to do it for you?

21:23

Dave Almy

Yeah.

21:23

Jay Prasad

Right. And then can our agents, our autonomous agents, connect to other agents in the ecosystem? And now you have people working together, and this is kind of the stumble stuff we're building with Nvidia. So, yes, the world is awash in data. What matters is, well, what did you learn from it? Okay, great, I learned something. But the most important thing is what action did it take? Should you take. Can you take that action and then what was the outcome of that action? Right. So rather than be a report card, it is a moment in time in which to maximize value.

21:53

Dave Almy

You know, it's an agent in the truest sense of the word. It's like, here's what's happening and here's what, here's the action that you should take related to that specific action. All happening in the background while the decision maker is awaiting that response.

22:08

Jay Prasad

Right. And this way you're not waiting for a long time. Right. We have cases where, you know, social media teams want to know, well, what are the high value moments for my brand? I'm at an agency, what can I leverage? It's the Super Bowl. What content am I going to very quickly put out during the game? Because, you know, this stuff does have a shelf life. Right. So you want to be.

22:26

Dave Almy

And it's shorter and shorter.

22:28

Jay Prasad

Yeah. Pregame, in the game, post game, like you need your content machine running. Well, guess what? We feed what those social media teams can use, you know, and that is a really important factor in maximizing the opportunity for that sponsorship.

22:43

Dave Almy

I'm wondering if you have an example of someone that you've worked with, whether a brand or a team that has taken the data that you've provided them, pivoted based on that result, and really had an outcome that improved the result of that partnership. Maybe you don't have to name them specifically, but like a general example and the lessons learned that other brands can take from that example.

23:07

Jay Prasad

Yeah, I mean, one of the classic examples is what does your creative look like on camera? What does your creative look like when it's a different production? Right. If you have a regional sports network broadcast versus Fox national broadcast, very different production setups, the assets are going to appear very differently on those also based on your creative. Like what is the color, what is the logo, is it animated and how does that look on camera? So we have suggested to rights holders and media companies and the brand, if you made this change to this placement and put it from here to here, if you change the creative from this color to that color, or we run scenarios on fonts, then we estimate you will increase that value by 30% and make those changes. It's actually more than that.

23:57

Dave Almy

So it's so funny.

23:58

Jay Prasad

Right.

23:59

Dave Almy

It sounds like such an incremental thing, like looking at fonts and, you know, looking at colors and things like that. But the amount of time and energy that's been spent looking at those things and the ability for those adjustments to make manifest changes in the results of the programs is pretty substantial. So I'm assuming then that Rello can play that role in filling out the answers to what some of those questions mean, just based on what you were saying right there.

24:26

Jay Prasad

Yeah, White space analysis is one of those areas. And now I think where white space analysis is a cool thing that's coming next with physical AI is going to be crazy. Right? Like simulating entire environments and fan experiences and brand experiences and being able to estimate values and then making this change over here, swap that fan experience, make this marketing thing bigger. That's all going to give you basically like projections. So you can now use it for true planning. But white space analysis at its core and then using measurement to inform how to increase performance. Yeah, that is table stakes. That happens every day. People use this data to make changes.

25:04

Dave Almy

We talked just a minute ago about the cost of sponsorships and the cost of media rights have accelerated dramatically over the last 10, 15 years based on what the data is telling you. Are those high costs also producing higher returns from the partners that you're working with? Is there like is the hockey stick sort of layered over one another for the brand partners because of the data that you're taking a look at?

25:33

Jay Prasad

Yeah, I mean I think the bigger value deals are obviously getting very prominent placements. Right. Like one example would be like these virtual assets in the NHL and the NBA. You know, during the, you know, any NHL game you have these animated deds behind the goals. We've measured that to actually driving like real outcomes to QSR restaurants. The NBA during the in season tournaments, right, has like these crazy cool courts that are different and then they're these virtual assets for it's in coinbase and I mean those are getting a ton of attention and airtime and recall. So those are not going to be inexpensive but they're also going to produce a ton of value.

26:16

Dave Almy

Right. And that's what your data has been able to say. Like those.

26:19

Jay Prasad

26:40

Dave Almy

What should I be paying attention to?

26:41

Jay Prasad

Sport by asset type? What are the insights? We have global trends in there as well. So you know, those reports are definitely something that you Know, we get a lot of people downloading.

26:50

Dave Almy

The other thing that's going on here too is that clearly fans are changing the way that they consume sports. So what does the data say about those changes, like how fans are consuming sports? And what kind of things should sponsors be thinking about in terms of leveraging that change in consumption to their benefit?

27:15

Jay Prasad

Well, number one is just the fragmentation of rights. So, you know, you got to do a little homework right now to know where things are going. And there are like, you know, the platforms are making it easier to understand where things are happening, you know, and also like the NBA as a game finder app. So like, who's your team? And we'll tell you every day what you're on.

27:32

Dave Almy

I have the thing on my wall with the string connecting all the things. It looks like I'm tracking a serial killer in here.

27:37

Jay Prasad

Yeah, you've got like your. That fragmentation is showing that what now? Like 42% of sports viewing is on streaming platforms. So I mean, that is a huge change from like 90% on linear TV not that long ago. Then you also have younger fans who are tuning in more, right? Like MLB had a great playoff and attracted a lot of young people who are actually watching, you know, full MLB games. Maybe not the full 18 inning game, but they're watching that in the playoffs now during the season, those younger fans may be just, you know, doing a little bit more engagement on social. You know, in Formula One, for example, globally like 80% of their value is coming from broadcast viewership because it's like a huge must see TV, right? I mean, every race weekend gets over 100 million viewers.

28:25

Jay Prasad

That's basically super bowl every weekend. Right? But it's global. But in the US 80% of the value to sponsors in F1 right now comes via social media. So it is a lifestyle sport. And all the brands and the teams and the drivers are lifestyle figures. They are culture. Right? And so you get a ton of that engagement on social at. Formula One also has the youngest average fan in the world at age 36, which is incredibly young for any major sport. 44% are women. So you have now a younger audience who, I mean, look, and some of these races are on it in the middle of the night. It's like in Bahrain or whatever, right?

29:02

Jay Prasad

So it's not the easiest sport to watch live in the world of replay and dvr, but it is going to be on your streaming home screen at some point if you do want to watch it. But that might be after the race like during the race and things like that, and like the race day weekend, people are engaging on social media with it.

29:18

Dave Almy

They've done a really effective job at. I mean everybody talks about drive to survive and sort of the inflection point that was for the sport. But it does speak to this idea that you bring up around lifestyle and influencers.

29:30

Jay Prasad

There's F1 influencers all over TikTok and Instagram and you know, they are attracting audience themselves, building fandom for the.

29:38

Dave Almy

And I think a lot of sports properties, a lot of rights holders are looking at that and saying, boy, you know, we focus so much on the game and the broadcast when really their brands exist. And you know, I think European soccer teams have done a particularly good job at this in making sure that they understand that they are global properties that exist and engage with people 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, no matter where people are. And the challenge has always been how do you understand the monetization of that? Which is where Relo comes in.

30:15

Jay Prasad

Exactly. Monetization, engagement. What type of content gets more engagement versus others. Maybe it's hugely engaging content, but it doesn't have a ton of brand value because your brands aren't that visible. So there's all these different variations that you have to consider.

30:31

Dave Almy

So I'm going to ask you to look a little bit in the crystal ball, right? And this is coming from someone. And Relo Metrics has incorporated AI since its inception. Right. That was sort of part of the power of the thing to be able to recognize logos and see them being engaged with and do the measurement that way. But maybe the meaning of artificial intelligence has changed dramatically in the last year, two years. And the capabilities of AI have changed dramatically in the last couple years. So considering the growth and capabilities and how does Relo adopt to those changes, what are you excited about? Where, what holds in the future for the company as this continues to grow?

31:14

Jay Prasad

Yeah, I mean if you think about computer vision, which is what were rooted in and there's a lot of computer vision applications of the world. Right. Like self driving is computer vision, facial recognition is computer vision. That is all a form of labeling data at scale. We're teaching the computer how to see because your human eye sees that logo, you know, that Gatorade waterer jug. We have to teach the computer that is a water jug. It is college football, it is for Indiana University and all that data around that water bottle that we have to generate that. Right. But then you move towards machine learning, which Is how do you take all that data and start to get insights? So you're basically using data to get statistical inference from one data set to another to know what that is actually telling you.

32:03

Jay Prasad

Then now you have the generative world where like the chatbot revolution, right? And that means like hey, now I can just interact with data by talking to it. And I don't have to be a SQL person that knows how to use a data warehouse. I can just say I am looking for this insight. Well now you're also getting curation, right? Based on who you are, here are things that you should probably dive into. It's curating it for you. We're about to enter the, you know, the agentic phase, which is like not a, not just an agent. You say, hey, go out and book me a dinner reservation. That's cool too. But what agentic does is it works in the background and it coordinates with other systems and other agents and that's what is going to be coming next.

32:45

Jay Prasad

So the sports world, the entertainment world, all these worlds are going to basically have more capabilities to scale and automate and use data in a way, in a more real time way that's going to build business value. And that is like what I'm really excited about is how do we take our computer vision work, Augment that now with video language models. So that's how we get context and then get to well, what's important here. And then ultimately, well now how does these new agentic workflows just basically do stuff on your behalf? I mean, I don't have any clients who have enough business intelligence people or corporate partnership salespeople. Everybody is short staffed, right? You know, and you hear, oh, AI is going to take all the jobs. They're not, right?

33:28

Jay Prasad

If anything, I think having these kinds of massive amounts of data and agentic will still need more people to orchestrate the agents, right? And that means that the cheaper you make something, the more use cases come out of it, right? Like when we got more scale for oil, we didn't have fewer oil jobs. The oil industry grew and increased the job. So I think that's the same thing that's going to happen in sports and.

33:54

Dave Almy

Created a variety of new jobs to go along with it too, right. So, but what it does speak to, I mean, I think what 10 years ago were telling everybody you need to learn how to code. Now I think it's natural, right? If you, if you want to get hired in sports, you have to have a facility with using. You have to facility with data interpretation and using AI to assist you in data interpretation. If you. If you have those capabilities, you will. And to be able to sell, right?

34:23

Jay Prasad

Yeah. Well, you get freed up to build more relationships. Right. If you have stuff that's automating routine tasks, for example, our system will automatically create you a formatted PowerPoint with all the logos, the tables, and. And the images, video clips right there. Think of like, you are a team that has 150 sponsors, and you owe them three reports a year. That's 550 PowerPoints. How long does it take per PowerPoint? Well, you can hit a button and Rellos will output it. So now how do you spend your time? So that starts to compound, and then, yes, people will have more time to be working on creative projects. People will build more relationships. People have more time to do brainstorming for new ideas. That sounds like a better quality job than formatting PowerPoint, cranking those decks out. Right. Investment banking and consulting. Right.

35:11

Jay Prasad

Like that work is automated now. So what's next?

35:15

Dave Almy

Jay Prasad. He is the CEO of Relo Metrics. Jay, thanks for spending the time. It's a brave new world in sports, and a lot of it has to do with many of the issues that we talk today. But before I let you go, Jay, I'm gonna put you in the lightning round, ask you a series of questions, and I'm gonna ask you to just give your first response that comes to your mind. Are you ready?

35:35

Jay Prasad

I'm ready.

35:36

Dave Almy

Ooh. That is confident, Jay. We'll see what you say in a couple minutes. All right, here we go. You were born in Queens, but you grew up in Milwaukee, so Metzar. Brewers.

35:48

Jay Prasad

Brewers.

35:49

Dave Almy

That was a, A, the correct answer, and B, an immediate response.

35:55

Jay Prasad

I'm going to make an amendment to that. Okay. Right. All right. My dad worked for Miller Beer, so. Okay. Yeah, you know, he was an engineer at Miller, so I got to go to as many brewers games as I wanted and Bucs games and went to when the packers played half their games at County Stadium in Milwaukee. So, like, growing up as a sports kid, like, brew crew. Yeah, it's. It sticks with you.

36:15

Dave Almy

Oh, yeah. One of the best logos in the history of sports. You've suggested in the past that your favorite movie is Moneyball. No surprise, given the analytical background. Brad Pitt famously played A's GM Billy Bean in the movie Moneyball. So who will play Jay Prasad in the inevitable Relo Metrics movie?

36:36

Jay Prasad

That is a great question.

36:38

Dave Almy

Thank you.

36:38

Jay Prasad

You have to find someone you know, that's slightly a handsome devil comedic loves data or can at least pretend that.

36:46

Dave Almy

They do, I guess. Who's going to be the great actor who can pull that is the question.

36:51

Jay Prasad

Well, I mean there's the next version of the Social Network is coming out.

36:55

Dave Almy

There you go. That'll be good.

36:58

Jay Prasad

Technology and sports stories that are coming.

37:00

Dave Almy

All right, very good. So we'll come back. Now, you've also mentioned in the past that your favorite athletes are Roger Federer and Kobe Bryant. What's more likely to have happened in the past? Would you have been able to return a serve from Roger Federer or shoot a three pointer over Kobe Bryant?

37:18

Jay Prasad

Since I was a tennis player, Since I was 5, I would say the odds of getting a racket on a.

37:23

Dave Almy

Federal server at least get a racket on it.

37:26

Jay Prasad

Versus a 6 foot 7 Kobe who would put that ball right on my nose the second I tried to do anything with it.

37:31

Dave Almy

100 times out of 100.

37:34

Jay Prasad

Especially Kobe.

37:35

Dave Almy

Especially Kobe. He wouldn't. He's not gonna let you any daylight.

37:40

Jay Prasad

Yeah.

37:40

Dave Almy

38:01

Jay Prasad

My hope is that the coaching and GM situation gets solidified for the long term. And then look, we've got an incredible young base of players and there was a lot of injuries this year. There was definitely moments throughout the season where they looked like the most complete team. Not even close. But then they would get injured and since they're young, you know, things can start to come apart. Obviously giving up that lead on the road was painful.

38:26

Dave Almy

I wasn't going to bring that up,

38:27

Jay Prasad

You know, but hopefully we're, you know, learning from it. You know, it was windy, missed three picks. That was also probably the difference in the game. But yeah, I'm very hopeful for the future. It is an amazingly young, talented team. Youngest team in the NFL, I think. Great coaching. So let's bring it back. Let's get people healthy and next year's our year.

38:46

Dave Almy

Go Pack, go. Jay Prasad of Relo Metrics, thanks very much for the time.

38:50

Jay Prasad

Thanks, David.