DICK’S Media Guides Brands to Victory with Unique Insights into the Athlete Journey

The Challenge

DICK’S Sporting Goods, the largest sporting goods retailer in the US, has a clear mission of changing lives through sports. For DICK’S, customers aren’t just shoppers – they’re athletes at every level, from youth sports participants and weekend warriors to seasoned competitors. Each interaction represents an opportunity to support these athletes throughout their journey, beyond the point of purchase.

DICK’S recognized 2022 as an inflection point in retail media. With rich first-party data spanning in-store and online purchases, they had what David Young, VP of DICK’S Media, calls “the best dataset in sports.” This data gave them unprecedented visibility into athletes’ shopping patterns, performance metrics, and aspirations across sporting categories. The DICK’S-owned GameChanger app – a popular youth sports platform that broadcasts more baseball innings annually than the MLB does in its entire season – added another valuable dimension to this data.

Despite this wealth of data – an addressable audience of 45 million athletes, sports fans, and families spanning more than 600 attributes and 2 billion touchpoints a year – DICK’S wasn’t fully leveraging its assets to reach athletes wherever and however they engage. In addition to delivering more personalized experiences and generating incremental revenue, they recognized an opportunity to accelerate DICK’S Sporting Good’s strategic evolution from a traditional retailer into a full-fledged sports company.

By launching their retail media arm, DICK’S Media, the company aimed to bridge critical gaps in the athlete journey. Success meant creating meaningful connections between brands and athletes across multiple touchpoints, from inspiration through on-field performance, delivering more relevant experiences and turning dedicated fans into brand champions while driving growth.

The Solution

To realize this vision, DICK’S Media needed a trusted partner with proven expertise in data collaboration and media networks. DICK’S Sporting Goods had worked with LiveRamp since 2016 for customer data onboarding, and this strong foundation of trust and success made the extension of the partnership a natural evolution.

With the LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform, DICK’S Media can unlock the full potential of its first-party data assets and help its brand partners showcase their stories in the moments that matter most. LiveRamp’s identity resolution capabilities help DICK’S Media connect athletes’ journeys across multiple touchpoints, from online browsing to in-store purchases to GameChanger app usage. This unified view enables DICK’S Media to activate its athlete data for targeted advertising with unprecedented precision.

With LiveRamp’s robust cross-screen measurement capabilities, DICK’S Media can track campaign effectiveness, providing clear attribution from offsite media investments to onsite conversions and in-store sales. The platform enables controlled data sharing, unlocking valuable insights for both DICK’S Media and its partners while maintaining appropriate privacy controls.

The Results 

By tapping into LiveRamp’s powerful data collaboration network, DICK’S Media quickly began demonstrating measurable value. By connecting previously siloed data sources – from e-commerce and in-store purchases to GameChanger app usage – DICK’S Media created a dramatically richer understanding of athlete behavior and preferences.

This enhanced visibility allowed DICK’S Media to develop more precise audience segments and deliver more relevant advertising for brand partners, driving significantly improved campaign performance metrics across a wide range of channels including retail stores, website, GameChanger, paid social, video and CTV, search, and influencer marketing. 

“It’s a whole new galaxy of opportunity,” explains David Young. “It’s almost like bringing analytics into sports like Moneyball, but for retail media. My ability to measure things at a deeper level helps me drive more effective returns.” This deeper measurement capability has enabled DICK’S Media to prove their value to brand partners more convincingly, showing how advertising investments translate directly to athlete engagement and sales.

The impact extends beyond traditional retail metrics. By combining the brand’s understanding of their products with DICK’S Media’s unique insights into athlete behavior, both parties can create more meaningful connections that deepen brand loyalty and drive long-term growth. “If somebody’s new to a sport, we can start to tell that from our data set. If someone’s purchasing new clubs and maybe they’re not happy with their scores and they’re trying to level up, we have a lot of that information and signals within our dataset today,” explains Young.

Looking ahead, DICK’S Media is positioned to explore even more innovative applications of data collaboration. With foundational measurement capabilities now in place, they’re leveraging LiveRamp’s data collaboration network – which includes connections to hundreds of media partners, technology platforms, and data providers – to create new partnership opportunities spanning the entire athlete journey.

By tapping into LiveRamp’s extensive network, DICK’S Media gains incomparable scale and reach, enabling connections with athletes across more touchpoints than would be possible through direct partnerships alone. “We know the athlete the best, the brand knows their identity. Bringing those identities together is really what we’re able to accelerate with our partnership with LiveRamp.”