Cleveland Indians Appoint ThinkVine to Provide Advertising Return

MLB’s Cleveland Indians have selected ThinkVine, a marketing mix optimization software company, to achieve a greater return on promotional and media spend.

The specialized version of ThinkVine’s software for baseball is a new approach to optimizing marketing effectiveness in the sports industry and other event-driven businesses.

“Sports marketers need a high level of flexibility to adjust their plans during the season based on league standings or other factors that are specific to their business,” said Mark Battaglia , CEO of ThinkVine. “With ThinkVine, it’s now possible for sports marketers to forecast how varying marketing plans, along with variable factors such as team performance, influence targeted sports fans to purchase game tickets. This enables the Cleveland Indians to respond quickly and more accurately to maximize their budgets and keep revenue up.”

According to Battaglia, ThinkVine will provide the Cleveland Indians with the ability to easily run “what if” scenarios throughout the season to determine and forecast the effectiveness of marketing campaigns for the consumers they target.

“There is a lot of complexity when it comes to analyzing your marketing mix in the sports industry,” said Alex King , vice president of Marketing and Brand Management for Cleveland Indians. “We have to account for a multitude of factors like macroeconomics, weather, and, most importantly, team performance. We selected ThinkVine for its consumer-centric approach to developing marketing strategies; the ability to assess marketing mix performance across different team performance scenarios; and the flexibility to quickly forecast results of potential shifts in marketing mix reallocations to maximize revenue.”

King stated that the Cleveland Indians are forecasting meaningful improvements in ROI across both in game promotional and media spend as a direct result of ThinkVine’s marketing mix optimization software.