With the men’s Sweet 16 returning to San Jose tonight and six World Cup matches scheduled for Santa Clara this summer, the San Jose Sports Authority (SJSA) is approaching fan engagement broadly.
Along with technology partner Monterosa, the SJSA has created what’s believed to be the first city-wide digital sports loyalty program. The app is called Game On, SJ26 and is sponsored by Adobe.
It launched in advance of the NCAA men’s basketball games with a second-chance Bracket Challenge — urging users to predict the tournament beginning with the Sweet 16 — and will feature other gamification and trivia. Participants can accrue points for rewards and community activation. The app will also share video highlights from local pro sports clubs.
“It’s really important now to have a direct connection with your audience,” said Tommy O’Hare, San Jose’s sports and special events director. “It’s not just enough to have these big sports events and put up a logo, so in the long run, this really allows the sports authority to build up an asset in terms of local customer information that it can go use this as an asset when it’s selling sponsorships.”
The SJSA raised nearly $6 million to fund not only these digital efforts but also a wide range of local events, including watch parties in San Pedro Square for the college basketball games and for all 104 World Cup matches. For the most recent Super Bowl, which was also at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, the commission staged concerts and the NFL’s media day event in San Jose.
“This was a genuinely distinctive project for us,” said Jason McGilloway, Monterosa’s head of fan engagement. “Most fan engagement programs are built around a single team, league or competition, whereas this initiative was about serving a broader sports ecosystem and representing a city’s sporting identity.”
The goal is to look beyond ticket sales and hotel bookings as KPIs for local sports events by creating more connectivity within the community.
O’Hare has deep sports technology and media experience — he previously was GM of Clippers Vision and head of digital strategy at the IOC along with positions at Outside, Discovery, YouTube and the USOC — and described the SJ26 app and activations “as a launching pad to really propel San Jose forward for the next iteration of itself. A lot of that is around solidifying San Jose as the capital of AI but also building on a sports and entertainment district and things like that, getting that groundswell momentum from this year.”
The impetus for this project was San Jose’s experience at the prior Super Bowl in Santa Clara 10 years ago, when the city didn’t think it fully capitalized on the opportunity.
“There was a feeling in 2016 when the Super Bowl was [at Levi’s Stadium] that basically everybody flew into San Francisco, stayed there, partied there, and just came down for the game,” O’Hare said. “And so it wasn’t great economically for the city and it wasn’t great for the residents of the city.”
McGilloway added that the scope of SJ26 should help the city have a better experience this year
“Rather than treating engagement as a one-off campaign,” he said, “the project was designed to create an ongoing destination where fans can participate, earn recognition, and feel part of something bigger across the San Jose sports community.”