No Tickets, No Arenas: How the World Surf League Builds Fan Data

The World Surf League runs its entire audience strategy without a single ticket sale, because its competitions take place at public beaches where general admission is free.

That structural gap forced pro surfing's international governing body to build a fan intelligence operation from other sources. For the past few years, the WSL has run an audience intelligence initiative designed to help executives and marketers understand surfing's existing audience, split it into key segments, and tailor communications and content to each group.

The clock is ticking. The goal is to unlock new fans ahead of LA28, when surfing will serve as an Olympic sport for only the third time.

"With the growth of participation in surfing, the growth of the types of people surfing, the emergence of wave-pool technology that's bringing surfing inland, and surfing being in the Olympics, it's opened up the awareness around surfing and access to it," Travis Tan, former director of global and North America marketing for the WSL, told Marketing Brew. "That is our next great fanbase to build and to reach."

Where does the data come from?

Before building a formal fan database, the WSL relied on instinct. Tan, who recently left the league after about four years, said many WSL employees are surfers or know surfers, and the league has deep ties with the communities where it hosts events.

"We had really good understanding and hypotheses, but we didn't really have [those] fully foundational, data-backed insights around who our audience is, what else are they doing, all of all of those things that build out a profile," Tan said.

The WSL tapped Two Circles, a sports and entertainment marketing agency focused on fan data, to build out its fan intelligence practice. The inputs include:

• brand tracking and fan surveys
• purchase information from the league's merchandise store
• engagement with the league's digital ecosystem, including its app, fantasy game and bracket challenge

Tan compared the project to Major League Soccer's Fan Genome platform, which segments and targets fans using more than 1,000 data points.

How does the WSL segment its fans?

The fan intelligence feeds four audience segments based on level of fandom: superfans, committed fans, lifestyle fans, and younger "next-wave" fans, according to Corey DeLaney, director of marketing and consulting at Two Circles.

Survey work identified the groups. From there, the Two Circles and WSL teams analyzed data from paid media efforts and social listening to identify attributes of each segment, such as which platforms they use and which other sports interest them, DeLaney said.

That intelligence then shapes how the league talks to each fan type.

"If you're a superfan, you know everything about WSL, you don't need to be told what's happening," DeLaney said. "If you're a lifestyle fan, you might need some more hand-holding around how the competitions work, how scoring works, how judging works."

The takeaway: one database, four different conversation strategies.

Why do lifestyle fans matter most?

Lifestyle fans and next-wave fans present the biggest opportunities for the WSL, especially with the Summer Olympics likely to draw fresh attention to the sport. On-demand and social content plays an outsized role in moving those fans deeper into fandom, partly because surf competitions move around the world and are harder to regularly tune in to.

When social media users engage with content like highlight clips, the league can sort those users into segments and determine "the next logical touch point for you to get deeper down the funnel," DeLaney said.

Athletes anchor the content strategy. In solo sports and even team sports, athletes drive modern fandom, and surfing is no different. "They are the product," DeLaney said. The WSL leans into surfers' personalities, produces collab posts with them, and invests in building athletes' individual brands alongside the league's. Surfers' own content can make fan recruitment "feel less marketing-y, more organic," she said.

DeLaney also expects LA28 to lift interest in surfing the way the World Cup helped drive soccer fandom in North America. The question for the WSL is how to capitalize.

"Because we don't have that big, single source of truth, ticket sales piece, it causes us to get a little bit more creative…and look at things a little bit differently, which I think is a blessing and a curse and a challenge, but something that we're getting pretty good at," DeLaney said.

If the Olympics delivers a surge of casual interest, the league's segment-driven playbook will determine how much of it converts into lasting fans.