MIAMI: The Miami Heat, the basketball team, have driven consumer engagement and revenue by providing fans with true personalisation capabilities on mobile.

Kim Stone, EVP/The Heat Group and General Manager of the AmericanAirlines Arena, discussed this topic at the 4A's (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2016 conference.

"We're on track to have more corporate dollars spent with us on mobile app revenue than the rest of the 29 other NBA teams combined," she said. (For more, including further details of the brand's strategy, read Warc's exclusive report: The Miami Heat redefine (and enhance) mobile engagement.)

So detailed is the Heat's knowledge of its audience that it can even determine in-depth spending habits among fans who are attending games.

"We also know if you're using your mobile phone to pay [that] you see a 20% increase in your purchase versus using cash," Stone said.

A key contributor to generating this kind of insight is the brand's efforts to deliver a mobile app which truly meets the needs of individual users.

Joey Wilson, VP/Business Lead of the Miami office of SapientNitro, an agency that worked with the Heat on its mobile app, told the 4A's crowd that it offered 27 "experience streams" for consumers.

"We start talking about being able to do something for an actual individual as opposed to a psyche, as opposed to a profile, or 'like-minded consumers'," he said.

"We wanted to get to a point where we have a conversation with an individual fan and we let them show us what they like and do not like."

And providing hundreds of engagement points with the brand on mobile offers relevance to users wherever they are located, and reflects their preferences in areas like seeing all the latest stats or quickly viewing the freshest content.

"Location is important because there are in-market fans and there are out-of-market – even international – fans. So there's always criss-crossing streaming and broadcasting," Wilson said.

"And when you break it down, somebody outside of the market needs to see things that are different than somebody inside of the market."

Data sourced from Warc