Kayo Sports leverages AI to create 1:1 messaging at scale, driving customer loyalty and lifetime value

Launched as part of the Foxtel Group (now a DAZN company), Kayo Sports is Australia's largest and fastest-growing sports streaming service. Kayo provides fans with instant access to over 50 sports streamed Live and On Demand, offering more than 30,000 hours of the best sports content, documentaries, and entertainment shows, including content from FOX SPORTS Australia and ESPN.

Kayo Sports champions a commitment to providing a cutting-edge streaming experience and cultivating a customer-driven culture. In the competitive streaming landscape, Kayo Sports understands that personalization is critical to customer satisfaction and retention. The company has widely embraced personalization across the entire customer journey, starting with tailored landing pages during sign-up and flowing through to content curation based on favorite sports and teams within the app. Customer engagement is where Kayo Sports truly changes the game and differentiates itself from competitors.

1:1 personalization for sports fans using agentic AI

The team at Kayo Sports is empowered to innovate and improve the customer experience, which is vital in a digital, fast-paced environment. One of the ways they did this was to build a personalization engine using sophisticated AI agents, fueled by millions of gigabytes of data, to engage customers and maximize the value a subscriber will get from Kayo Sports. The resulting "Customer Cortex" is an operational brain that sits at the center of their trading engine, revolutionizing how they achieve a true 1:1 relationship with their subscribers at scale.

But how did they get there? The challenge was to build a system that could analyze individual user behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns to deliver truly personalized communications that would drive deeper engagement with the platform. Kayo Sports needed a solution that could integrate with their existing tech stack while providing the flexibility to deliver personalized messaging across multiple channels, including TV, mobile, and web applications.

They partnered with Braze partner OfferFit for its pioneering AI and integration with Braze. They then trained the AI, powered by reinforcement learning, on Kayo Sports’ rich first and third-party data to create sophisticated models designed to hone in on the needs of every subscriber.

Their personalization engine runs on three key pillars in an automated daily cycle:

1. Data: Transforming customer data with ten purpose-built reinforcement learning models to gain a deeper understanding of individual customers.
2. Decisioning: Partnering with OfferFit to build and run their AI engine, which analyzes individual subscriber behavior and recommends optimal actions and personalizing engagement across messaging, creative, channels, timing, frequency, and promotions.
3. Delivery: Once OfferFit generates recommendations for Journey, content and offer, Ingesting AI-driven recommendations into Braze and delivering 1.2 million variations, personalized for each individual (up from 300) of communications, promotions, and reminders across multiple channels with automated monitoring and reporting.

Key components of their strategy included:

• Real-time personalization based on individual user behavior
• Multiple channel orchestration across in-app messages, push notifications, email, and SMS
• AI decisioning for message content, timing, and channel selection
• Seamless integration between OfferFit and the Braze platform

On the data side, Kayo Sports brings information into Braze through several methods:

• Redshift connector for first-party data passed through Braze Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI)
• Web and app SDKs
• Platform APIs

Data flows back out of Braze through:

• Currents into Redshift
• Message archiving into S3

To execute this strategy, Kayo set up four channel-specific API-triggered customer journeys in Braze Canvas. These Canvases were created for each channel they use per OfferFit campaign: Email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages.

OfferFit established a direct API to Braze to trigger the Canvas for each use case, and supply their recommendations for the messages. This integration allows OfferFit to assess multiple criteria for each customer interaction—the best message copy, the best offer, the best channel, and the best time to send for each individual customer.

For example, when OfferFit predicts that Customer A would engage with an SMS at 9:37am with specific copy and offer versions, this all gets populated into the API Payload and sent to the Canvas in Braze for the SMS channel. The message is personalized using the payload properties from OfferFit, inserted into the message using Liquid in Braze.

Similarly, if OfferFit predicts that Customer B would engage with an email at 5:12pm with different copy and offer versions, the payload is adapted, referencing the correct Canvas ID so that it's sent to the email Canvas in Braze. All copy in the email is personalized based on the payload from OfferFit.

This setup provides tremendous flexibility, as the Canvases can be easily created in Braze. The Canvas ID is all that’s needed as a reference point within the OfferFit system to supply all the relevant copy, time of send, and channel required.

"Customer Cortex is the result of four years of dedicated development and represents our commitment to being at the forefront of technology and data science in media. It’s a mature, incredibly powerful capability at the center of our trading engine that understands and anticipates customer needs, driving engagement, loyalty, and maximizing customer lifetime value. With its native integration to OfferFit and best-in-class in-app messaging capabilities, Braze has supercharged our 1:1 relationship with customers by increasing the number of potential actions from 300 to 1.2 million.”

Anthony O'Byrne

Executive Director of Customer & Revenue, Kayo Sports, Kayo Sports

Results: Game-changing retention, occupancy, and cross-selling

The implementation of this sophisticated AI-powered personalization system has delivered success for Kayo Sports. In the last two years, they've seen a 14% increase in customers reactivating within 12 months of churning, an 8% increase in average annual occupancy, and a 105% increase in cross-selling to BINGE, another streaming service in the Foxtel portfolio.

It’s also important to know that these results were achieved while the average subscription price increased by 20%, demonstrating the power of personalized engagement in building customer loyalty and value perception.

The Customer Cortex is a mature, powerful capability that understands and anticipates customer needs. Braze supercharges this capability, allowing all of these vast quantities of messages to be delivered as part of a real-time, cross-channel, and multi-step journey—driving engagement, loyalty, and maximizing customer lifetime value.

Key takeaways

1. Harness the power of AI for true 1:1 personalization. Kayo Sports created a system that understands individual customer preferences and behaviors, and delivers the right message through the right channel at the right time.
2. Think beyond content personalization. Kayo Sports’ approach shows that personalization should extend to all aspects of customer communication—beyond the words and images, personalization extends to the timing and frequency of communications.
3. Build a data foundation. Kayo Sports’ success is built on transforming customer data with purpose-built ML models, providing the foundation for meaningful personalization.
4. Integrate systems for seamless execution. The powerful combination of channel flexibility through Braze and OfferFit's AI decisioning capabilities created a system greater than the sum of its parts, driving meaningful business results through improved customer engagement.

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