I don’t want to go into the whole Bloomberg article I’m linking here. If their priority was for all of the information within it to be shared with whatever context they prefer, then they shouldn’t have a paywall. I will be picking which bits of this article to share here. Specifically, starting from this one:
“Over the team’s final decade there, according to data from analytics site Team Rankings, the Clippers finished 24th out of 30, on average, in home court advantage, while the Lakers, playing in the same building, averaged 6th. In their final season at Crypto.com, the Clippers finished 27th in the ranking. This past season, they were No. 1.”
Cool. They have a home court advantage now. Part of that is there thing called “The Wall” which is thousands of dedicated Clippers fans distracting opponents on second-half free-throws. That’s pretty cool, and then you read this: “the Clippers required customers to pass a brief online test to demonstrate their fandom before they could buy tickets in the Wall.”
That necessity has since been reduced to a simple checkbox, but “there are also signs reminding fans of the rules and ushers checking for forbidden gear. Still, Zucker says, Intuit’s staff have to remove about a dozen fans of other teams from the Wall per game and seat them elsewhere in the arena.”
That is a little bit weird to me, but people tell me I’m weird, so I might be the problem. However, the mandatory reassignment of seats instead of being like “oops, I guess a Lakers fan snuck in,” is a bit much for me. I mean, it’s just sports, right? Fans are paying to enjoy the experience of watching a basketball game. Maybe to some, cheering loudly and thinking you got in the opposing players’ heads is part of the draw, but for the most part people do not buy tickets to competitive events in order to be a competitive factor. If that’s the case, then these fans should be paid.
Instead, the Clippers make it weird
“A big part of that success is Intuit’s ticketing and payment system. The Clippers insist that every fan use the arena’s proprietary app to gain entrance. If you attend a game with three friends, for instance, you can’t scan four tickets from one phone; everyone except young kids needs to download the app and create an ID.”
Sick. To even attend the game, you have to divulge your personal data to the proprietary Clippers app. If that doesn’t give you pause, really take a second and think about it. It probably should.
The advantage of this is that the Clippers’ know everything about you so that it’s easier for you to give them your money. Why is it so easy? “Thanks to an elaborate camera system in the arena, [that] allows for grab-and-go purchases.”
Mat, you’re being mean. What if there are actual positive ramifications?
Facial recognition has been used to “incentivize [fans] to get behind the team.” How do they do that? “Intuit has decibel readers in the rafters that make it possible to measure volume levels down to the individual fan.” That’s right! Not only is your face being tracked, so are your voice and volume! Some people like the idea of going to games to be part of a grand community pulling for a similar outcome from a sport we love. Now, you can be personally tracked as the guy who yells the “D-FENSE” chant the loudest. Also, they have all your personal details.
It’s okay though because “when the team reached a must-win Game 6 in the first round of the playoffs against the Denver Nuggets, Zucker’s staff checked the database of its noisiest fans against those who had a ticket for the game and offered complimentary seats to about 12 who weren’t already planning to attend. This raucous dozen (who each had a plus-one) were then sprinkled throughout the arena to prime the crowd for maximal volume.”
After the Clippers won that game, the super mega winners of most-frequent game attendees/loudest vocal cords/earliest arrival were deemed important enough to get a free trip to Denver to cheer the Clippers on for Game 7. They lost. But neat, I guess.
Where does that leave us going forward?
Well… “next season the plan is to do more with fan scores and incentive programs. Ballmer dreams of using Intuit’s 44,000-square-foot, halo-shaped LED board, for example, to offer in-game rewards.” “Literally” Steve Ballmer wants to put a message on the big halo screen surrounding the inside of the Intuit Dome saying “loudest fan right now gets prize [x]” (or something), and with enough surveillance, tracking, and personal access to each individual fan “it’s just credited to their account right then.”
I can’t help it. It’s difficult to think of any private organization who has said “Give us as much of your identity that we can legally ask for. We will only do things you will like with it,” and has kept up their end of the bargain long-term. That level of attention for just wanting to go watch Kris Dunn seems absurd to me. Absurd, and upsetting.
But who knows. Maybe you’ll be the lucky fan that gets a $15 gift card to Chipotle for yelling “brick” the loudest during an opponent’s free throw one day. One can only dream.