NHL brings Adobe AI to its 32 clubs to personalise marketing for 200m fans

The NHL is working with Adobe to bring AI into marketing for its 32 clubs, aiming to personalise content and offers for more than 200m fans around the world.

The partnership gives the league and its teams technology that draws on fan behaviour to inform content, personalise offers and keep communications aligned across digital channels. The harder part, the two organisations say, is keeping personalisation manageable at that scale while protecting each team’s identity.

Adobe chief marketing officer Lara Balazs and David Lehanski, who is the NHL’s executive vice-president of innovation and growth strategy, said the league’s first steps will be modest compared with what the technology can eventually do.

Joining up fan data

The NHL already has several ways to track how fans engage with the sport. It now wants a fuller picture, particularly of fans who follow several teams or individual players across different channels.

Lehanski said the league wants a clearer view of how audiences differ. A committed season ticket holder, for example, may want different things from friends splitting a ticket package, although both are buying access to the same games.

“We’ll look at a variety of engagement signals across our digital platforms, both at the league and club levels to better understand how fans interact,” he said. “Over time, we’ll use those insights to refine our approach and ensure we’re delivering experiences that resonate with different fan segments.”

Adobe Experience Platform will bring the data together, Adobe GenStudio can produce and test content variations based on fans’ interests, and Adobe Journey Optimizer can help decide when and where messages are delivered.

Balazs gave the example of a San Jose Sharks fan who also follows other teams and players. Their activity in the NHL app and elsewhere could shape the content they receive, so the league can respond to interests beyond a single team.

Lehanski named individualised email offers as one commercial use. Fans who engage with several clubs also create an operational problem, as the league must handle those overlapping connections without sending people multiple versions of what is essentially the same message.

“A key objective is to better understand fan preferences and engagement across touchpoints, so we can deliver more relevant communications,” he said. “By taking a more holistic view of fan interactions, we can help reduce redundancy and improve the overall NHL fan experience.”

One league, 32 identities

Personalising content for millions of fans is complicated further by the need to do it for 32 separate clubs, all with distinct identities and local fans.

Balazs said the aim is to set shared brand standards without forcing every club to speak in the same way. GenStudio can provide signed-off guidelines and creative assets for teams to tailor to their own communities, markets and players.

“The goal isn’t to standardize creativity. It’s to create a common foundation that every team can build from,” she said.

That should let the NHL keep its marketing consistent while giving clubs space to create content for their own fans. It also tackles a familiar issue with AI-generated marketing: making more material is fairly easy, but checking every version meets brand standards needs oversight.

GenStudio is also meant to show the league which creative approaches work, with test results feeding into campaign planning.

“Teams will be able to identify which messages, content and creative approaches are driving the intended outcomes and use those insights to optimize current campaigns, improve future ones and build a smarter, more responsive marketing engine,” Balazs said.

Lehanski said Germany is a priority market for growth, with the NHL Global Series heading to Düsseldorf in December, and said the partnership will support more localised content and marketing for German fans. The task is to produce material for different markets and languages without building a separate production operation for each.

Foundations first

The league expects change in its marketing to be gradual, with much of the early work going into the systems needed for more advanced personalisation. “For a lot of our projects, we’re just laying a foundation,” Lehanski said.

Fans may notice some early changes, such as more localised and customised creative encouraging them to watch NHL games. Other ideas, including letting fans make their own NHL-themed content with Adobe Express and generative AI, are still under consideration.

No single success measure has yet been set for the partnership. Lehanski said each campaign will be assessed against its own objectives, drawing on data about engagement and fan interaction.

Balazs cited Adobe research finding that 54% of consumers see immediate personal relevance as a leading factor in staying engaged with a brand’s message. The NHL will still need to establish whether more personalised experiences outperform its current marketing.

Looking further ahead, Balazs sees AI agents helping to coordinate customer experiences. “Agents can handle complexity and execution so people can focus on vision, creativity, judgment and the decisions that matter most,” she said.

The NHL has not confirmed it will deploy agents. Lehanski said the focus for now is on learning how fans engage across the league’s platforms and putting in place the technology to act on it.

No revenue targets, production savings or timetable for the more advanced personalisation work have been disclosed. With two months to go until the Düsseldorf games, German fans are likely to be the first to see a more localised NHL.