SAS CMO Jennifer Chase has urged marketers to be brave when it comes to brand partnerships, as the company deepens its multi-year collaboration with Liverpool FC.
Speaking to B&T at SAS Innovate in Dallas, Chase highlighted stepping outside traditional marketing channels is “critical to long-term growth”.
Her comments come as SAS and Liverpool FC revealed new details of their partnership, which will see the club use AI and advanced analytics to deliver “more personalised, real-time digital fan experiences”.
Chase said by using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and SAS Viya, the football club is ultimately using AI agents to help boost engagement at scale.
“We started having discussions with Liverpool about 18 months ago, and it was very clear that they would be able to offer us exposure to such a scale of their fans,” Chase said. “They are in the European Premier League, which has the highest audience of any sport globally. This was a massive positive for us.”
She said SAS “dove deep into who the audience is”.
“We asked ourselves how they index on technology decision makers and business decision makers? And Liverpool was really high in that mix.”
Chase said the scale of the opportunity ultimately helped secure internal buy-in.
“So if their fans were a nation, they’d be the third most populous nation. Isn’t that fascinating?”
The partnership marks SAS’s largest-ever marketing collaboration and reflects a shift away from traditional advertising toward embedded, product-led partnerships.
“This is the most significant partnership we’ve done on a sports marketing or marketing partnership period,” she said.
“They’re going to use our software, and then we are going to promote ourselves as a member of the club.”
That model allows SAS to turn the partnership into a live demonstration of its technology.
“We’re going to be able to tell stories that are about how they better engage with their fans because of SAS.”
Chase said the deal is being measured against both brand and commercial outcomes.
“When it comes to how we measure it and what success looks like for us, it is brand awareness absolutely. We will be tracking the perception of SAS before and after intervals of the partnership and brand salience.”
“The second is around demand generation, we know that we’ll be able to tell those stories that has people thinking, I could use that type of application in my business.”
“We want to be able to track that revenue.”
Beyond reaching Liverpool’s global fanbase, Chase said the partnership is already creating new opportunities across the wider sports industry.
“Liverpool is such a widely revered club,” she said. “What we do realise is that other sports organisations will begin to look at that and say that that’s something I’m interested in, too.”
She added that sport provides “a powerful and relatable entry point for complex marketing use cases”.
“What’s more, why we chose sports is it’s so relatable for anybody,” she said. “The stories we can tell about engaging with fans, somebody who’s leading a financial services organisation at a bank can easily say ‘I want to engage with my customers in that same personalised way’.”
Chase also shared advice to marketers considering similar partnerships.
“My advice is you have to have the data to back it up. This is an entirely data driven decision,” she said.
“Bring your executive team along. I had my CFO, the chief sales officer and the CTO involved.”
“It’s going to take all of their organisations to act on this for it to be successful.”
She also emphasised the importance of long-term commitment.
“The value doesn’t happen on day one, it is part of a long term partnership,” she said.
“Our values were so aligned in how we think about how we want to show up in our communities and how we want to engage with our customers and our employees.”
B&T travelled to Dallas as a guest of SAS.
