Interview: Alexandra Willis, director of digital media and audience development, The Premier League
The Premier League is all about exciting experiences on the pitch. For Alexandra Willis, director of digital media and audience development at the organisation that runs top-level club football in England, the priority is to establish data-enabled experiences that keep fans just as engaged and entertained off the pitch. She recognises the scale of the challenge.
“The Premier League is one of the most compelling sporting products there is,” she says. “We’re so privileged to stage this amazing quality of football on a week-in, week-out basis. What’s fascinating is that the product continues to grow in its appeal to fans around the world.”
Estimates suggest there are 1.8 billion Premier League fans globally. In her role with the organisation, Willis, who has accumulated significant experience in sports digital marketing during her career, is using data and artificial intelligence (AI) models to deliver personalised experiences to this worldwide audience.
Formerly a journalist, Willis moved into sports marketing in 2012 when she took a role at Wimbledon. She worked for The All England Lawn Tennis Club for over a decade, becoming communications and marketing director in August 2021. In September 2022, she moved to The Premier League and was attracted by the potential to deliver data-enabled experiences to football supporters.
“As well as the core fans that are the lifeblood of The Premier League, the new supporters around the globe are increasingly varied in what they need and want. Part of the reason for taking this job – and it’s the subject of our digital transformation strategy – is that our work is all about how we can better serve those fans,” she says.
“We can provide an experience that’s genuinely meaningful and relevant, whichever part of the world you live in, however much you know about football and The Premier League, and whatever element it is that is driving that interest. And to have the opportunity to do that with arguably the biggest sports property in the world was a fascinating challenge.”
Building strong and effective partnerships
After two and a half years in the role, Willis reflects on the progress she’s made. She suggests that delivering great digital experiences to a broad fanbase requires a careful balancing act. The aim is to ensure that her organisation, as well as broadcasters and the football clubs, benefit from digital transformation.
“We’re continuing to service our growing global fan base, but in a way that is genuinely additive and complementary to our media partners and the clubs,” she says. “We’re helping provide something for the more casual fan base, and we want to nurture them and educate them, and ultimately convert them into becoming lifelong fans.”
Willis says that building strong digital foundations requires a mix of expertise. During the past two and a half years at The Premier League, she’s built a pool of in-house talent that helps the organisation continue to transform.
She recognises it’s easier to attract talented digital professionals to work for one of the world’s most prestigious sporting brands. Just as she saw the potential opportunity that comes with driving technological change at The Premier League, so do other staff members see the benefits.
However, while the organisation’s internal expertise is strong, she recognises no digital leader in any business can afford to rest on their laurels: “We’ve been very lucky to build a great team, but making sure the skills we have are keeping pace with the rapid pace of technology change is something that we all need to continue to think about.”
More generally, Willis says it’s critical for digital leaders to ensure that in-house staff work alongside external experts to deliver clear objectives that are articulated as part of an overarching business strategy. To this end, she blends in-house skills with trusted vendor expertise from big-name technology firms, such as Adobe and Microsoft.
“Part of any change programme is about making sure you have the right capabilities to operate internally as well as externally. We’ve been very mindful about how we can ensure we have the right expertise here in the building, as well as by working with the right partners,” says Willis.
“We want our digital transformation partners to have the specific and dedicated expertise to help us deliver on what we need, but we also want to ensure that, internally, we’re governing the overall architecture and infrastructure and making sure that it’s supporting our broader business goals and objectives.”
Developing personalised experiences for fans
Willis says the organisation’s digital transformation programme is centred on helping employees access insights to allow them to engage with supporters effectively. As the most-followed football league in the world, The Premier League is watched in 900 million homes across 189 countries.
“If you think about the end-to-end lifecycle of a football fan, success, first and foremost, is about understanding who our fans are and enabling us to better meet their needs based on all of the things that they’re interested in,” she says, before outlining the type of digital capability the organisation needs to meet these business objectives.
“We’ve not been in the position of having a customer data platform before. We’ve not been in the position of having access to proper customer journey analytics. So, understanding supporters, and then being able to react to how they behave and to deliver personalisation, was crucial for us.”
“We’ve been very lucky to build a great team, but making sure the skills we have are keeping pace with the rapid pace of technology change is something that we all need to continue to think about”
Alexandra Willis, Premier League
Willis says it’s here that technology specialist Adobe plays a significant role in enabling digital transformation. At Adobe Summit in London, the technology giant announced the details of a multi-year partnership with The Premier League to bring AI-powered and personalised experiences to fans around the world.
“We want to create the foundations, with technologies such as Adobe Express and Firefly, for fans to be creative and to express how they feel about The Premier League,” she says. “This relationship has been in the making for a while, and we’re now relaunching our digital platform.”
Willis says a new website and app are crucial elements of this platform. At a deeper level, The Premier League is using Adobe’s analytics technology to gain an in-depth understanding of fan preferences across digital channels. The business will also use the tech company’s AI models to deliver personalised marketing experiences to fans.
When it comes to allowing supporters to be more creative, The Premier League is using Adobe’s AI-powered features, such as Generate Video and Clip Maker, to help fans create videos from text-based prompts. The organisation is also giving fans new ways to create content in its online Fantasy Premier League game, powered by Adobe Firefly’s commercially safe generative AI (GenAI) technologies.
“The cherry on the top is this ability for fans to shape their own output,” she says. “No football fan is exactly the same. They may have interests in common, such as following the same clubs or players, but everyone’s expression of how they feel as a fan is unique and personal. This technology is all about allowing fans to express what being a Premier League fan means to them.”
Navigating a fast-changing environment
The Premier League’s digital technology stack also includes Microsoft products. Willis says the tech giant provides the organisation’s underlying cloud foundations. The business is also exploring how GenAI, via Microsoft Copilot services, can be used to boost internal productivity.
These technologies, as well as The Premier League’s partnership with Adobe, are crucial elements in the organisation’s long-term transformation journey. Willis encourages other digital leaders to keep a watchful eye on new innovations that bubble up from big-name providers and to ensure their systems and services are a good match with business objectives.
“Technology companies provide these extraordinary tools, and they are changing faster than we can change. A good way to think about this pace of transformation is to continue to stick to your business objectives and what it is that you’re trying to achieve,” she says.
“Then work with the tools to adapt them to help deliver to your requirements, rather than saying, ‘I’m just going to slot this thing here exactly as it comes entirely off the shelf.’ This approach does mean that, ultimately, things take time. But fundamentally, taking the time to get your strategy right will always outweigh going in too quickly.”
With many years of experience leading digital transformation at two major sporting organisations, Willis is ready to work with her colleagues to help The Premier League deliver fresh customer experiences in an era of almost constant change. She reflects on lessons learnt from her time at Wimbledon and in football.
“What we all have in common at these organisations is that we have these unbelievable sporting products that we’re passionate about, that we really care about, and we want to make sure they continue to thrive. That focus means navigating the changing environment that we operate in,” she says.
“And so everything that we’re doing at The Premier League, and everything that Wimbledon continues to focus on, is all about improvement and change. But that approach is also about staying true to who you are as an organisation and staying true to what makes you what you are, and what makes you great.”
Willis recognises there’s still a lot to achieve at The Premier League. As her team continues to develop engaging content for football fans around the globe, she reflects on the kind of data-centred digital organisation that she will be running for the business 24 months from now.
“If we can continue to demonstrate how we can be more efficient in creating content for fans, then we can help our colleagues understand how we can all be more efficient in how we look at data, and how we look at monitoring, performance and analytics,” she says.
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