When Chi Ogbuehi, vp of marketing technology and consumer products, joined the NFL in 2022, she was tasked with building its marketing technology team from the ground up.
“I was a one-person team,” she told ADWEEK. Now her team consists of over 50 people who work closely with the league’s marketing and data teams to deepen its relationship with its fans.
The NFL’s martech strategy centers on driving and increasing fan engagement through digital channels like push notifications, SMS, email, and social media. Ogbuehi’s team also houses an innovation hub comprised of technologists, data specialists, and marketers who use AI to scale content production for global audiences.
Ogbuehi and her team have spent the past few years testing different uses of AI. As interest in the league expands beyond the U.S. with international games being played in countries like the U.K., Germany, and Brazil, they’ve used generative AI to combat language barriers and tailor content according to varying player interests.
According to Reuters, this year’s Super Bowl garnered 3.7 million viewers, an 18% increase year-over-year. Germany saw a 13% increase with 3.8 million viewers. More recently, the league’s debut in São Paulo, Brazil in September amassed 2.6 billion viewing minutes per Nielsen.
ADWEEK sat down with Ogbuehi to learn more about the NFL’s innovation hub and how it uses AI to fuel fan engagement in the U.S. and beyond.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
ADWEEK: Tell us about your role at the NFL? How do your two remits overlap?
Chi Ogbuehi: I’m the vp for marketing technology and consumer products. Those are basically two teams. The marketing technology aspect of my role is responsible for how we leverage innovative emerging technologies and other types of technologies to merge that with our marketing strategy and our organizational goals and use that to enhance our fan experience. A lot of the things I do on the martech side is fan-facing. The consumer products and enterprise solutions aspect has a lot to do with revenue-generating solutions: rights management, brand protection, those types of solutions that we use to either generate revenue or [that] play a role in that process.
