How the Big 10 uses data to drive personalized experiences and revenue

As one of the premier collegiate athletic conferences, the Big 10 was navigating a rapidly evolving landscape in fan engagement and data usage. With a broad fanbase and increased reliance on digital channels, they saw an opportunity to capitalize on their wealth of data. However, despite adopting modern technologies like Snowflake for data centralization, they needed to ensure non-technical teams could access and act on this data. With marketing and business users eager to leverage insights for more personalized fan interactions, the Big 10 needed a solution to make this possible without overwhelming their data team.

With its vast and diverse fan database, The Big 10 faced a significant challenge: how to centralize this data and make it useful for teams across the organization. Nate Schnader, Big 10’s CIO, took the first step by implementing the Snowflake Data Cloud, aiming to create a unified “fan 360”. 

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Once the data was in Snowflake, another challenge emerged: How would the organization empower non-technical teams to access and use that data without overburdening their data science resources? To truly capitalize on the investment in Snowflake, they needed a seamless way to segment fans and activate campaigns across paid media and email, all while avoiding the creation of additional data silos.

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Nate and the Big 10 team needed a solution allowing immediate data activation within their existing Snowflake infrastructure. GrowthLoop provided the ideal platform with its self-serve data activation that integrates directly with the data cloud, eliminating the need for separate silos. 

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Using the GrowthLoop composable customer data platform (CDP) on top of the Snowflake Data Cloud, the Big 10 could access and activate their data from Snowflake for marketing tools like Facebook Ads and avoided the need for a separate CDP.