ATP Tour’s Web3 Playbook

[upbeat music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights podcast, today with Mark Epps.

He's the Director Communications and Web3 at ATP Tour. Mark, welcome to the show. Cheers, Marc. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on. Pleasure to join you. Yeah. Likewise. Thanks for being here.

It's a pleasure to have you on, and I'm super excited to talk today all about fan engagement in relation to tennis at ATP Tour, but also about your most recent activation that you did with Trace at the ATP finals.

So super excited to unpack all of that. But before we jump in, I'd like to ask you, Mark, who are you and what led you to what you're doing today? [chuckles] I like the way you framed that question.

So I'm Mark Epps, as you mentioned at the top of the show. I lead Web3 for the ATP Tour. It's an interesting journey.

I mean, we started down this path as a company two years ago, exploring in Web3, and I always say that I got the best possible mandate from our leadership, which is,

we see an opportunity, we think there's something interesting. We don't know anything about Web3, but go out, explore the space and see what you learn.

That fell on my shoulders because I was personally interested and invested in the space. I was a joiner of the 2020 class, so I'm not an OG, but I'm not totally fresh.

And at a high level, we see a massive opportunity to use this technology as a medium to connect directly with fans to better understand who they are, what they like, and to make their experience of consuming the sport better.

So over the last three years, we've done now three drops. Each of them has been around our year-end finals event in Turin.

Each one of those drops has taken a different approach and has helped us learn something different.

Um, but in general, like I'm very lucky to be working for a brand that is, um, willing to take risks, but also a brand that has this platform. I mean, tennis has a billion fans.

We are either the third or fourth most watched sport in the world, depending on who you ask. And we're also a sport, I think, that has, um, a lot of opportunity to reinvent the fan experience.

There's a lot of opportunities for modernization, use of new tech. So I have a great setup and we have a great, uh, great platform to, to explore. Yeah.

So you, you mentioned your journey over the last two or three years. I remember two or three years ago, the space and most consumer brands were focused on NFTs and everyone was releasing NFT collections.

Again, at 51 Insights, we looked at over 200 releases and, and most of them- Wow... didn't really work. Today, a lot of talk is about Web3 and fan engagement. Just- Mm-hmm...

a very quick question befo- before we jump into the details, Web3 for fan engagement, is this overhyped or undervalued, and why?

I mean, I would t- I would say it's tough, tough to say it's overhyped given that we haven't had, to your point, that many examples of sticky and genuinely sustainable use cases in my view.

It's very different talking about the space two years ago as it, as it is now. You know, for us, I, I would say that we have a very focused approach.

We, we have a very clear understanding of exactly what business problem we're trying to solve, and we look at it, this technology as an enabler of that. We take a very pragmatic approach.

W- We're not in the space to drop random NFT collections and extract value from our audiences. I would also say that,

you know, not to sound sort of big-headed in any way, but we say no to 95% of things that come across our desk simply because we don't see a business rationale for it.

In terms of the big problem that we're trying to solve, and it's, it's really simple, and it's not, it's not a problem that we are alone in. We don't know who our fans are, and I don't say this flippantly.

So if you look at the ecosystem of tennis, right, we have a billion fans who love the sport to some degree.

5 million of those fans physically come and they pay the ticket and they come to our events every season, so less than 1%.

99% of that audience is, for us, intermediated by either a social media company or by a broadcaster, which have both been obviously viable sources of revenue for our sport and viable ways to grow the audience.

But what sport is discovering is that there is a cost to not owning that relationship.

You know, you can talk about social media when they change their algorithms and all of a sudden your 25 million audience isn't really 25 million 'cause you're reaching 3% of them, and you can start to understand both the risks involved with having dependency on a middleman, but also the opportunity cost.

And for us, the opportunity cost is being able to truly understand who our fans are. But also from a direct monetization point of view, what we can offer our sponsors.

You know, sports sponsorship, if you take away obviously the prestige of sports and the association to an IP, sports sponsorship at its core is a brand wanting to reach a consumer, and it's a problem if a sports rights holder can't address its own fans, doesn't know who they are, and doesn't know their preferences.

So if you ask me like what is the big vision of where we're going with all this, it's fan ID. It's fan ID on, on the blockchain.

We can delve more into the weeds of, of what that means, but I think we're starting to recognize that this technology is enabling each one of us as an individual or a consumer of a brand or a consumer of a sport to have a persistent ID that travels with you no matter where you go, whether it's to our domains, Wimbledon's domains, whether it's the Super Bowl, whether it's your favorite sports brand.

That's the big idea for us, and it, it is so important because we start from a place of really not knowing our fans.

We have really a fractional understanding of who our fans are, and we have a very fragmented universe even within tennis.

So I'm throwing a lot at you, and of course, we could talk for hours about the intricacies of tennis and the politics and all that stuff.

But At its core, we have a business problem that we wanna solve, and we see a technology stack that can help us achieve it. Mm-hmm. And that's why we're bullish on Web3. So- Mm-hmm... is it overhyped? Not at all.

I think we're just getting started. Yeah, and you said that perfectly, and I would love to unpack this a little bit and just look at everything we talk about from that perspective.

What's that business problem you're trying to solve? And maybe we start two or three years ago when you dropped your first collection.

Can you take our listeners on a journey of what were your thoughts there given the pris- business problem you were trying to solve at that time, and how did that evolve over the last two years now? Okay, sure.

So the, in 2022 was our first drop. I actually have a, a print of one of the NFTs from that collection. It was called Love.

This was a generative art drop that we did in collaboration with Art Blocks and an artist called Martin Grasser, incredibly talented guy. That drop, it was 300 piece collection, Dutch auction.

It was art created from match data. On that particular drop, this was really us finding our footing in Web3. This was our first leap. If I could typify it in one sentence, it was an innovation play.

We wanted to go out there, see what we learn, and see what the reaction would be from the community. What that helped us achieve, um, one, you know, we, we sold the collection out in 20 minutes.

We had a really strong positive reaction from the, you know, Web3 art community. We had the first experience of speaking to that crowd that was very new to us.

And it was also important for us because internally it got a lot of people to pay attention. You did, you did $600,000 in primary revenues from one drop. Okay, tell us more [chuckles]. You know?

It was a really good catalyst for setting the scene, putting up, you know, dipping our toes in the water, and getting that buy-in internally.

When you fast-forward 24 months, uh, sorry, 12 months, we launched our second drop, which was called Posters.

Now, Posters was also based around our finals event in Turin, but it was fundamentally different in that we were not targeting crypto Web3 enthusiasts. We were instead targeting true tennis fans.

And we had this vision of creating almost a semi-ubiquitous NFT that would be accessible to really true core tennis fans at scale. It was also an art drop. There was co-creation involved.

There was a phygital element to it. I, I've been very honest when I speak about Posters, like we did not hit the goals and the KPIs that we wanted to on that drop. And you know, there's several reasons for it.

There's several reasons why I don't think we had the success that we hoped. But more than anything, we learnt a lot. We learnt a lot about how not to overcomplicate a, a c- a proposition.

We learnt a lot about keeping things simple, which I always knew was important, but actually screwing things up on that drop reminded me of that.

But it also for me was a great signal because, you know, internally we'd had this real amazing success in 2022.

We had a bit of pressure to deliver again in '23, and when we didn't, there was a, a real sort of sense of, you know, this is an innovation internally.

You know, I had our c- our CEO sat down with me in Turin, and he's like, "Just keep going. Like, you're not always gonna kick a goal," which, which was really reassuring for me and, um, a great outlook.

So then coming into this year, I really wanted to achieve what we set out to achieve in '23 but didn't, which is creating something truly for the fans.

Could we create a proposition that fans would resonate with and engage with? Could we get NFTs into their hands without them even knowing it? We succeeded on that front.

I'm, I'm glad to say that we smashed our targets this year, and we can talk more about that particular project. But all of these are kind of like, especially the, the momentum drop from, from this year,

it's, it's the fan ID idea played out on a very micro scale. The idea of fan ID and a persistent identity which you take around the internet is a big thing, and it's a big thing to tick it off.

This activation in 2024 was that on the simplest possible terms, the simplest possible execution, and, um, the results have been really promising so far, I have to say.

Like, it gives us a lot of confidence going into next year thinking, "How do we scale this? How do we expand it?" And from a business like KPI point of view, I think we kicked some serious goals, if I do say so.

That's great. And, and at the beginning you mentioned your goal with that is getting a better understanding of your fans.

And looking at that from this perspective, how did that momentum drop, for example, help you get a better understanding of your fans? Yeah.

So, you know, I always say that, that tennis has some extremely passionate fans, right?

You have fans all over the world who we know stay up till 2:00 in the morning to watch Federer play every match of his career for 20 years. You've got fans that never miss a match- Yeah...

some of them that are lucky enough to go to tournaments. You've got fans that walk in Manhattan during the US Open wearing tennis gear from Fila or from their favorite brand.

And to date, all of those actions have been invisible to us. We know it's out there- Yeah...

because you see the commentary on Twitter and Reddit, and if you, if you really look for it, you can find these kind of pockets of subculture, and you know there are incredible fans out there.

I actually tell you, if you're in London during Wimbledon, go and see the queue. Do you know what the queue is, where people camp for tickets? Yeah.

That is like the purest collection of tennis fans that you'll ever meet. [chuckles] Yeah.

So you have all this fandom, and you have all this passion out there, but today you-- to date, you have no way of credentialing that.

You know, you can be a fan for 20 years, you know, watching a stream at home, and you have nothing to show for that engagement. That's exactly what we wanted to change with the momentum drop. So in summary,

Momentum, it was an eight-day experience, and every day of our year-end finals, fans could come in and claim a piece of artwork from the matches that day So eight days, 15 matches, 15 pieces of artwork.

The key thing here was that each piece was time-gated, so each was available for a 24-hour window. And so in essence, if you're a fan and you're paying attention, you can claim one totally free.

But if you miss it, you miss it. And thanks to the scarcity that's enabled by blockchains, you know, you can provably un- know that like only a certain finite number of these things were, were created.

So what that allowed us to, to give fans, I guess, for the first time ever, is literally a token that says, "I was there and I was paying attention."

Okay, they weren't physically there, but they were engaging with us enough that they came in and claimed one of these things.

And what we saw, which actually blew our mind, is that our fans are massively, massively engaged. So over the course of the eight days, we had 75,000 fans join, which blew our expectations out the water.

We did not expect that number of fans to come. But the more impressive statistic was the stickiness. The average number of claims -- remember, there were 15 in total. The average number of claims per fan was 10,

which is wild. Wow. Which tells us that fan, on average, came back five different days and a third of them, so 25,000 fans, didn't miss a single one.

Now, I, I don't know, I'm, I'm not really sort of in the app space and the tech space, but like I'm pretty sure those retention numbers are, you know, phenomenal.

And I don't think you have many digital experiences that can prove that day on day retention. So for us, it was a signal that we think there's really passionate fans out there, and this was proof.

There is a cohort of fans that are interested in engaging and having their fandom credentialized, if you will. But it also allowed us to start telling some fun stories.

So for example, we could say the Alcaraz versus Rublev match on the Tuesday was the most collected one. Or we can say to an individual fan, "Hey, you didn't miss a Jannik Sinner match."

You can start to like tease data out of the fan sort of engagement with you that we've never done before, and it sounds really simple, but it's, it's quite powerful.

And at the end of the experience, the kind of Easter egg that we revealed was called the tournament trace. Each of these collectibles is called a trace.

And the tournament trace was a bonus piece of artwork that was created from the data of all the fans that took part. So you had a kind of a, it almost looked like a universe.

It had a, a tennis court in the middle, but it was abstracted, and you had all this constellation of the 75,000 fans that joined. Wow.

And again, this was just a special moment, and I say this as a tennis fan because I am a fan of the sport. It was the first time that we'd really been able to say like, "Hey, we see you. Thank you for being there.

Thank you for being a passionate fan, and like here's a little gift from us to you." So we learned a lot. Oh my God, eight days, you know, 15 collectibles. We already collected so much information and told great stories.

But then you start thinking about what this could look like over the course of a season.

What if every time you came to a tournament, you engaged with the player, you followed us on social, you went to lacoste.com to buy a polo?

Like each of these engagements tells us something valuable about you, and if it's in the fan's interests to give you that information because it means something to them, like that's a win-win-win for all.

And that's the vision that we're, we're building towards. So I've spoken a lot and I appreciate there's a lot to unpack there, but, um, fire away with, uh, with anything you'd like to hear more about. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I would love to unpack that a little bit more. And I also, I can fully relate to what you just described about the ATP World Tour Finals. I'm Swiss by nationality.

I was a, a big Roger Federer fan, so I, I probably didn't miss any match that he did in semifinals in major tournaments throughout his career.

I was at that ATP finals, and I can imagine like how that is as a fan if you're, if you're there and if you see your favorite players play, and the whole atmosphere within the stadium is just like incredible.

And then enriching that with, with such an experience makes, makes total sense. So I, I would love to, to, to dive deeper into that. Yeah. How did you, did you execute that? What, what, what were the mechanics?

Uh, what were some specific learnings also you take away from that experience? Or some building blocks you take away that you wanna, uh, build on and, and, and take it further to the next level for, uh, the future?

How long have we got? We've, um- Enough, enough... we, we, we actually, we, we did a full debrief this week with the team. You know, what went right? What, what could we have done better? What are the key learnings?

And the list on, on both sides is really long. So I'll, I'll try and sort of summarize what I think the key things were. Uh, you asked me about mechanics, so this was a completely free-to-play experience.

We built the experience on Sui, which we chose because you need a cost-effective and very fast blockchain to enable the free-to-claim model to work, and Sui were, were amazing. So fans would come into this experience.

It was very Web2 in many ways, so they had ZK login. You would log in with your email or your Gmail. And claiming was a really simple experience.

Fans would come in during the time window on each day, click claim, and then after the match has happened each day, we would go and create the art. So we would take a data feed from our data provider.

We would kind of half machine, half human, we would use the data to create the canvas, and then a, a designer or team of artists would, would create the artwork.

And then the morning after, fans would come back into the, into the experience. They would reveal the art from the previous day, and then they would also claim that day's matches.

As fans were claiming this thing, we built in certain feedback loops, right? So there was a kind of level meter, so fans would level up as they progressed through the experience.

And the level that you reached would alter the tournament trace, this sort of bonus piece of artwork that you would get at the end. So level one through to level five.

And the final kicker at the end of the experience was a gated e-commerce store.

We had this hypothesis that like if we can bring fans in and we can engage them for eight days and give them beautiful pieces of art, we think they're beautiful, for free, would they be willing to then convert?

Would they be willing to then purchase, in this case, a poster print of the artworks that they collected? So that was really the kind of the user flow from end to end. What did we find?

Probably the single most, um, important driver of fan engagement, which surprised us, was compulsion to collect. We saw that-- I mean, even anecdotally, I had people coming to me saying, "Oh, God, I missed one.

How do I get back in?"

We would sit there every night at midnight when the clock, you know, turned over and the new window opened, and you'd just see thousands of fans, like, literally waiting for the clock to turn to claim these things.

And that, that shows in the numbers, right, with, you know, ten being the average number of claims.

So it surprised us that actually, like, just coming in and, and almost like trying to complete the set was one of the key, key drivers for us.

Something that we know we over-indexed on, we invested a little bit too much energy, I think, into the artwork. That took a huge amount of resource and time, coders, artists, creative sessions.

And actually what we found is, is the reveal rate of some of these artworks was quite low.

So fans were coming in, they were pressing the buttons, they were claiming the, the collectibles, but they actually weren't that fussed to look at the art, which was interesting. So it's a good signal for going forward.

What else should I share with you? I think, I think one of the things that we would do, we would, um, emphasize a lot more next time around is some of the game loops.

So we know that fans have this compulsion to come in and collect and complete the set. How many more fun game loops could we experiment with next time?

Could you, instead of claiming your matches, you could pick a winner, or you could, um, choose one match over the other? There's so many ways to make this more fun and more gamified.

And then the last thing we learnt actually is, uh, is around the e-commerce experience. And I, and I will preface this by saying that we from start to finish, this was a sixteen-week sprint.

You know, we sh- we shook hands with Trace in, uh, I think it was end of July, and we launched the project in November, so it was super, super tight.

And in that time, you know, you had to fund the project, find the right blockchain partner, find tech partners, artists, and e-commerce, and everything.

So we know that we made some mistakes, I guess, on the e-commerce side of things.

But probably one thing that we realized is there's probably an opportunity to decouple the thing that you collect with the thing that you buy.

You know, fans in our experience were collecting artworks, and then they could buy the print of the artwork. But actually, you don't necessarily need those things.

What's probably more interesting is just token-gating access to something. Let's say it was a, you know, one-of-one collectible hat from Lacoste.

And okay, you're collecting artworks, but it gives you access to buy the thing. That's probably the direction of travel we will go.

Um, but like I said, you know, like eight days and we learned so much about what works, what doesn't. We had some hypotheses confirmed, and we had some hypotheses that were proved to be untrue.

And all I can say is if we end up doing something next year, we will learn over the course of a season, we'll learn just an exponential amount about our fans and their behaviors. Yeah.

And what, what was the success metric that you looked at? So for us, we had three. So really, uh, I can break it down into acquire, engage, and convert. So acquisition was number of fans signing up to this thing.

You know, ev- even having direct contact with them, having an email address is valuable to us. And for us to expand our distribution by seventy-five thousand fans in a week was a huge win. Second was engagement.

Like, can we prove repeat claims? Like, can we pr-prove that fans come back and, and, um, claim these things day on day?

And I'll tell you, we had a target or an estimation, I would say, of a quarter of a million NFTs claimed, and we ended up tripling it. We got to seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand.

So blew, blew our minds that it was so high. Wow. And the last one was, was conversion. You know, could we prove that fans, you know, would, would go on and, and purchase a product?

On that one, we did not hit our targets, I will say, but there are some fundamental reasons for that, that we understand.

But even with the first two, you know, we, we proved a massive win, I think, for the tech and for the concept. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean, um, this activation is just the start of establishing this customer connection.

You probably- Exactly... have an email address now. You can start retargeting those fans and just market, market them down the road. Yeah. And, and actually that, that reminds me of one of the most impressive statistics.

So obviously, when you would, when you would sign up to the experience, you would agree to our terms of service, which is mandatory. And then there was a marketing opt-in, which is optional.

And the team asked me actually, like at the end of the experience, "How many fans do you think ticked the box to say, 'I'm happy to receive marketing materials?'"

And I thought about that question from my own, you know, experiences on the internet. I never tick the box unless it's a brand I really, really love. Like, so I said, "Okay, seventy-five thousand fans, maybe fifteen.

Maybe fifteen." It was sixty-five. Sixty-five thousand- Wow... of seventy-five thousand fans opted in. Wow. And like, again, that, that really surprised me.

And that's, um, as you say, that's a, that's a substantial audience base to retarget, and you can bet your bottom dollar those are the core fans. Mm-hmm.

So we've, we've been successful in identifying them and building a bridge. Yeah.

If you look at all of this, and if you now based on what you've learned and, and everything you know and all the, the learnings you've got from this, where do you see this going in one, two, three, four years down the road?

What do you think is possible with Web3-enabled fan experiences and fan engagement? Yeah. So I'll start with the, with the immediate term because that's easiest. You know, we- Mm-hmm...

we're evaluating at the moment, um, what a continuation of what we've just done looks like. The beauty of the drop that we just did is that it's really scalable.

This can work across multiple events, and we have a tour that runs from December to November each year. So we have a, a platform that's year-round.

So in the immediate term for twenty twenty-five, I really want to explore, like, what does it look like after a year? You know, how many fans can we bring into something like this?

Can we, can we prove re- you know, repeat engagement over a longer timeframe? Can we tackle the conversion question? That's I guess the most immediate priority for me. But when you, when you talk big picture,

you know, tennis, I, I'll describe it like a, an onion, if you will. Like, at the center of the onion is the ATP Tour universe, and, you know, we have 60 events.

We have hundreds of players who have, you know, their own social media, their own platforms, their own merchandise. So even within the ATP ecosystem, there's a lot of fragmentation.

And you, for example, you mentioned you're a tennis fan. When you want to buy a ticket to one of our events, that is not a centralized experience.

You have to go to each tournament's website, possibly create an account to buy a ticket. The same actually with broadcast rights at the moment.

If you want to follow tennis year-round and you live, for example, in the UK, I think you currently need three or four subscriptions if you wanna get the whole pie.

So within the ATP Tour ecosystem, there's a bit of fragmentation, and then when you look at tennis, we're not the only body here, right? You've got the WTA Tour, you've got the four majors, you've got the ITF.

So when you expand it out to the wider tennis ecosystem, the opportunity to, like, recognize a true tennis fan and credentialize them and have them show up at Wimbledon's platforms or the Australian Open's platforms is huge for unifying the fan experience.

And then you go one rung out, and you start talking about commercial partners.

Like, I would love if, you know, our year-round global partners, whether it's Rolex, Lacoste, brands like this, I mean, these guys work with us in part because they wanna speak to tennis fans, and

I'm sure these brands would love to be able to recognize a true engaged tennis fan when they show up at their door, their digital door. So that's the sort of next rung of the onion.

And then if you really wanna go one thing, you know, one level out, it's sport wide, you know.

I want to know that you, Marc, you're a tennis fan, but you're also an F1 fan, and you love Lacoste and, you know, pick something else. Like, I think that's powerful.

And so we're gonna s- kinda take each of these rungs as we go and try and prove a hypothesis and a concept as quickly as we can with as low risk as we can, as fast as we can, and then scale. Mm-hmm.

And that's really how we, um, how we think about things. Yeah. Yeah, so i-i-if you hear about that concept, it really makes a lot of sense.

So, uh, and, and that's, that not only applies to tennis, it's across most of the sports, soccer as well. You have those huge football, soccer clubs.

They have millions, hundreds of millions of fans around the world, and they can only monetize a tiny, tiny little part of it. They, they probably don't know most of their fans, and they have exactly the same problem.

And now you're coming along, and you're saying, "Hey, look, we can solve this. We can work with partners like Trace. We can do activations like we just did on a much bigger scale. That was a proof of concept.

Now we can take this to the next level, and we can solve that problem." So this, this pitch sounds to me very compelling for clubs, for associations, but also for, for fans and for, for partners and sponsors.

Where do you think lies the challenge in- Mm... making this mainstream? Gosh.

I mean, I, I've just been through a, a 16-week sprint, and we had enough challenges launching an eight-day experience, so gosh, na-name it when you zoom out a bit.

Look, u-user experience is, is obviously something that's getting a lot better and will continue to do so, and I'm very, I'm very confident that

Web3 rails and technology will be as ubiquitous as, you know, paying for things online now. You know, 15, 20 years ago, people didn't wanna use their credit cards to make online purchases. It was radical.

Now it is commonplace. Technology has that way of starting out looking quite risky and quite technical and very quickly becoming sort of part of the, part of the fabric of how you operate on the internet.

There are so many apps these days, by the way, that like it's like once a week that I see a sort of crypto-backed app that comes along, and I'm like mind blown.

Check out, check out an app called Sling Money if you haven't already. I just used it this week and just an incredible way that crypto solves an actual problem in a very sophisticated way.

So user experience is, is a challenge. I, I guess for us, um, you know, you mentioned that the sort of theory at least sounds very compelling.

I think the challenge for us in the next 12 to 24 months will be proving a really sustainable business model behind one of these things.

And for us, I think that relies on having the backing of, uh, one of our commercial partners and probably is tied to the conversion part.

So I think that's gonna be one of our priorities is, like, proving, 'cause, you know, we, we found value from this as a, as a rights holder. We get to know our fans.

Clearly, our fans are seeing value on this because it's a kind of fun gamified experience where they feel seen and recognized. But the third leg of that triangle is like, is this truly valuable for a brand?

Is it truly valuable for a sponsor of a sport? Does it lead to higher conversion?

We have a hypothesis that, that it does, but we need to prove that out, and I think if you have the three wins in place, then you have a really strong foundation for, for scaling this up. Um, so watch this space.

We're gonna try bloody hard to, to make it happen. Yeah. That's, that's great to hear, Marc. And before we jump over to a quick, uh, lightning round, I wanted to ask you as well. Okay.

We have a lot of executives, marketing leaders listening to this podcast. What would you share with them?

What are some best practices that you learned over those two or three years in terms of leadership, team building, how you execute those things?

How do you get the internal buy-in or anything else that you would like to share? Uh, good one. My, my mantra and the, the Trace guys, um, I think they got kinda tired of me saying it. My mantra is keep things simple.

I probably said it on every single call we had for 16 weeks. But you can't stress that enough. It-- keep it simple in terms of concept, delivery, execution, comms. You think it's overly simplistic, and it's not simple.

It's not simple enough. I have never once been failed by making something simpler and stripping out complexity. It has always served me.

And so like I use that in terms of execution, I use that sort of philosophy a lot, particularly in this space where you're working with emerging tech. In terms of, um, internal buy-in,

I mean, I got lucky because we have leadership that's very forward-thinking. But I can categorically say that without their support, this would be really hard.

You know, I mentioned that drop twelve months ago that didn't go well, and like- Mm-hmm... you know, our CEO was saying like, "Don't worry about it," like, "Just keep going."

Without that kind of support from the top, and I don't know how you manufacture that, um, it can be tricky, so it's definitely worth investing some, some time to make sure your leadership understand this thing, understand the opportunity.

The thing that I learnt or the thing that I saw in practice on this, um, on this most recent drop was the power of having a goal that unifies everybody.

So, you know, we would, we would have-- And by the way, there was probably a team of fifteen or twenty people at the ATP who came together to make this happen across IT, digital, social, marketing, legal, business.

In each one of those conversations, it starts with, "Hey, guys, we, we're, we're launching this project so we can better know our fans." That single KPI serves each of those functions.

And so I guess as a by-product, we had so much like energy internally to support this thing, and I can only imagine that that conversation would have been different if I'd said, "Hey, guys, like we're going for another innovation play.

We're gonna launch a drop." Like I don't know if we would have been able to motivate all those people to take time out of their schedules at probably the busiest part of our season

to commit their energy to, to make this project a success. So-- And that goes back to like having a business goal that's truly fundamental to you. Like knowing our fan is the foundation of everything.

It's the foundation of our business model. So like

I would, um, I would encourage you to think long and hard about like what that goal is and what's gonna give you the best chance of unifying your team to, to get behind it. That's just my personal experience.

I'm sure there's many other ways to, to crack it. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Mark, uh, this was extremely helpful. Uh, I'm glad you came to the show.

With every guest before we end, we do a short lightning round, which means short questions, short answers. Yeah. Very juicy. And the, the first one is NFTs or physical collect-collectibles, what do you prefer? Both. No.

Um, I'm gonna say physicals. If I, if I'm truly honest, it's physicals. The physicals make the NFT really meaningful for me. That's just my view. Did you ever think maybe we should skip blockchain entirely? Some days.

No. [both chuckle] I wouldn't be working in this industry if I believed that. Is Trace or your recent activations at ATP Finals ATP's breakout Web3 moment? Yes. Absolutely, yes.

And the last question-- Oh, no, I, I have, I have another one. Um- Okay. Playing backhand, two-handed or one-handed? Ooh, I'm gonna go one-ie. One-hander. Just you can't, you can't beat it for flair.

Grass or sand? Grass or clay? Uh, grass. Grass for me. And last one, the, the most important question in tennis, who's the GOAT: Federer, Nadal, or Djokovic?

I'm gonna take a hard pass on that one. I'm not answering that question. [laughs] Okay. [laughs] All right. But thanks for, thanks for- Yeah. I had to ask this. Yeah, but that, that's okay.

Uh, Mark, thanks a lot for joining the show. This, this was great and very informative, and congratulations to that activations. Thank you.

It's, i- it's great to see projects like this succeeding and delivering on the numbers. That's also a reason why we spoke because I think it's important that those things get attention.

They couldn't get attention enough, especially when we hear a lot about Web3 not working as it, as it should work, and, and numbers aren't as they should be, and, and brands don't achieve the ROI they should.

So it's great to have those examples in the wild, and I wish you the best of success in building out this project even further. Mark, where can people find more about you and ATP Tour?

You can find me on LinkedIn at Mark Epps, and, uh, the same on, on X, @_markepps. That's great, and thanks everyone for joining. If you like this, please subscribe and share with your friends.

This helps us keep it going. And Mark, thanks again, all the best, and talk soon. Thank you, Marc. Much appreciated. Speak soon.

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