Owen Laverty is the Chief Innovation Officer of Ear to the Ground, a creative agency that builds culturally powerful brands by co-creating with the new breed of fan, in real time.
Ear to the Ground uses a digital platform called Fan Intelligence, which houses a global network of over 11,000 of the world’s most culturally connected sports fans.
With a background in Behavioural Economics, Owen plays a key role in how the Strategy and Creative team act on the insights that “Fan Intelligence” uncovers.
Ear to the Ground is helping clients to step out of the boardroom and into what is culturally relevant to a global fanbase. Their current client portfolio includes the likes of New Balance, Playstation, STATsports, FIFA and Arsenal FC.
Ear to the Ground began as a music business, but now, more than 80% of their work is in sport.
Owen on Fan Intelligence: “We have had the model in place for about seven years, so it is always evolving, but it underpins all of our work and it’s built on the belief that agencies, brands and rights holders produce better work when they get their brains out of the boardroom and into listening what fans and fanbases around the world think and feel and if they can do that more, then they can get better answers”.
Owen on growth in the market:
“Definitely more people are becoming interested in what we are doing obviously in terms of data for lots of reasons. With the growth we are seeing in AI data, it is becoming such a powerful currency in the market that we are in. Particularly where we sit, and I am from an Insight background and behavioural economics prior to that, where we are getting a lot of interest from brands isn’t so much just on insight, research and intelligence of itself, we are a creative agency…our output is creative campaigns that connect with and move brands and connect with the emotions of audiences.
Owen on working smarter:
My passion has always been how businesses can better weave insight and intelligence with creative, because too often your insight team would be in one corner trying to understand about fanbases and audiences and pull out truths about them, and the creative team would sit in the other corner and there would be a “handing over of the work moment” and that used to frustrate me so much, because a lot of insight work would be wasted, or you would create work that wasn’t useful, or creative would rip-off insight work in a different way and my whole passion and where you get to a better place in the market, is how we try and weave insight, intelligence and creative together more. So we do them almost in tandem and that is what is producing really amazing work for us”.
