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Conversations with the smartest people in the golf business to get the inside stories and strategies driving the business of golf forward. Hosted by former PGA Tour player Roberto Castro.
Rob Smith
GM, PGA Digital
[00:00:00] Roberto: I'm Roberto Castro, and this is the Course Record Show: the trends, technology, and strategy driving the business of golf.
[00:00:13] Roberto: Welcome back to the Course Record Show. Today, kicking off a special series, Field Report from the PGA Championship, presented by CapTech. I'll be on-site at the PGA Championship all week and have three or four short episodes talking about the technology powering one of golf's major championships.
Joining me to set the stage, the perfect person, Rob Smith, General Manager of Digital at the PGA of America. Rob, thanks a lot for being here.
[00:00:36] Rob Smith: Yeah, thanks for having me. Uh, big week ahead. I'm excited to be chatting with you. We have a lot of cool stuff we're rolling out this week. Some has already hit market. A few days until, uh, balls are in the air. But yeah, another great year for the PGA Championship, coming to Philadelphia, my stomping ground, so it's a little bit of a homecoming for me, and just really excited to be here.
[00:00:55] Roberto: Yeah, I've seen you in an Eagles T-shirt now and again, so maybe I believe that. All right, PGA Championship, massive event, which, you know, is not unusual for a city like Philadelphia. World Cup's coming to the U.S. this summer. Couple things to call out: those venues, they're used to hosting big events, and they're permanent structures, right? Whether it's Mercedes-Benz Stadium or AT&T Stadium in Dallas. Aronimink is a private golf club. They haven't hosted a big event in 10 years. Uh, you know, your focus is digital, but you have a great story of how digital crashed into the foundation, the data foundation, to build a great fan experience at a portable venue. Huge event, one of golf's four major championships. Tell us how that all works compared to some of the other stuff in sports.
[00:01:38] Rob Smith: Yeah. I mean, there's an interesting history here for the PGA, but I think at the onset you can acknowledge immediately that we're on a temporary infrastructure. You know, we're going to a couple hundred acres of sometimes 100-year-old venues that haven't invested in laying cable, burying cable, putting up cell infrastructure, and, you know, these venues aren't even used every year for these types of events. So, like, they're temporary in the sense it's one week a year, but they're temporary in the sense they only have these events, you know, once every five or 10 years. So, you know, in our world where connectivity is king, and just being able to access the internet and download content and get content pushed to you, that just presents a tremendous challenge you know, when we go to these spots.
It's no secret that when you walk into a stadium, especially the newer ones, you know, immediately when you get there, you're scanning your digital ticket. Sometimes you're not even showing a ticket. You're immediately tied into the Wi-Fi. You're getting push alerts and videos the entire time, and connectivity is seamless. And that's just an enormous undertaking for these golf events.
[00:02:38] Roberto: Let's backtrack a little bit. 2024 PGA Championship, you rolled out a totally new app. It was a big success for a number of reasons, but coming out of that there was a bit of an aha moment, right? The app served the fan great, worked for ticketing great, but it also created a bunch of powerful data that could be used going forward to upgrade the on-site experience.
So I think that bridge between, like, "Hey, we invested in digital," but it gave us data that we could take out into the real world to better serve the fan. Like, what, how did that come to be coming out of 2024?
[00:03:09] Rob Smith: Well, yeah, it's, it started long ago, and that's where I was gonna go with the history. You know, I've, I've been covering PGA Championships, this'll be my 14th year.
[00:03:18] Rob Smith: In the 2010s, the PGA made a lot of investments to, you know, bring connectivity to devices, just to let people use their phones and, you know, download scores. I mean, that was the first use case. And when connectivity became more ubiquitous, and 4G and 5G, and being able to watch live video through all these great apps, you know, the, the challenge for us became real. It wasn't, you know, a premium feature for us to offer at these events, to get people connected and have these experiences, but it was a requirement.
But really, you know, the aha moment, like you said, was going into Louisville in '24, and that occurred to us about eight months before at the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome, where our buddies at Ryder Cup Europe invested in a, a small mapping partner out of Germany that was amazing. And it just wasn't a map that we were able to bring to life, it was all the back-end data collection that this map was able to do.
Working really closely with them on the Ryder Cup, we were able to parlay this into our fan experience in 2024. And then, Roberto, as you were saying, working directly with you guys, we unlocked this amazing set of data that we were able to collect and able to see visually across the venue. And that not only solved a handful of features we had that week planned to, like, just let people know about congestion areas and bathrooms out of service, but it unlocked all these new ideas that we had that we were able to roll into 2025.
So that, that moment was, you know, almost 12 years in the making, and while we were in Rome and in the months after, we were like, "We gotta do this and go all in." We had all the capabilities at our fingertips, and then, you know, '24 we rolled it out.
[00:04:50] Roberto: That's awesome. So last year, Quail Hollow, rolling out what we called data-driven fan experience, and I think there were some cool moments. And, and really, I put them into three buckets, three outcomes, right? Operational efficiency, better fan experience, and then partner activation. Maybe give us an example of, A, what's the impact, right? Why does a fan care about what you've discovered, what you built in '25, and maybe where it goes from here?
[00:05:13] Rob Smith: Yeah. Well, one of the things that, you know, working with the great mapping vendor was able to show us was that we were able to see general fan movement around the course. When the group was coming in, it was not Xander in Louisville. I think who was chasing him, it was, uh, Bryson. We were able to, like, visually see, you know, the dispersion of people between those two groups, and that unlocked all these efficiency opportunities you're talking about.
So if you're able to look at the crowds and going around, you can anticipate when they're gonna hit certain beverage areas and bathroom areas. And you can anticipate when they're going to the buses to make sure the bus people are there to get people off the venue. When weather's coming in, you're able to understand what your risk tolerance is in terms of how many people are on-site or how many people already bugged out for the weather.
So yeah, all these little things. We have all these teams doing this stuff, and then we show them a few graphs, give them a few links to dashboards, and they're like, "Holy smokes."
I, I'll go ahead and add, like, another category to that, which is not just, you know, running the event, but the ideas that are, you know, then coming out of not only our team, like our product team, but the people that are using the products. They're coming back and saying, "Hey, it'd be really cool if I'm able to do X, Y, and Z," and we're able to bring that to light, and that might be something that we're not even thinking about.
[00:06:26] Roberto: Yeah. Yeah, some of the coolest stuff we do at CapTech starts with that exact conversation: Wouldn't it be cool if... And, you know, one of the stories from Quail Hollow last year, bringing that data into a central platform and starting to personalize around what the fan wants to do. And, you know, the fan gives you some indication.
You can kind of tell if a person's going with their two young kids or if they're going with their college buddies or they're hosting clients. It could be where their ticket is. Could be how they get to the golf course. You know, using that data, last year one of the outcomes, you know, serving a notification to fans saying, "Hey, looks like you may want to avoid this crowd. Pass through the Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch pouring station. It'll get you over near the merchandise tent where you maybe haven't been yet."
Yeah. The open rate was high. The conversion rate was high. Like, that's something that makes someone's day better, as opposed to just, "Do you want X percent off your insurance," right? Like, that's not really that helpful when I'm at the PGA Championship. But hey, know a little bit about me and serve me something that adds value to my day.
[00:07:23] Rob Smith: Absolutely. You know, we're, we have an entire commercial program built around these events that, that my team oversees digitally, and the goal we have is to bring these activations to life. And there's really simple ways to do that. Like, if you get within 100 yards of a place that's open to the public, um, like the merchandise tent-
[00:07:42] Roberto: Yep.
[00:07:43] Rob Smith: Um, we're able to put a fence around that and say, "Hey, you know, make sure you come in the tent." On Saturday, we change that to, "Hey, all mugs are 10% off," right? And we're able to customize that throughout the week, so we immediately have a commercial impact, you know, that we can put in place.
The example you said is right, around, our partners. Our partners are buying into this event for the crowds and the, and the media and the platform. But just building a tent on the 13th hole isn't good enough nowadays, so we're able to use the app to navigate people there. You know, we've, we've tinkered with this idea and we tried it at the Ryder Cup and we got to perfect it, but being able to use, you know, the digital experience and the mapping and the data to use to create a scavenger hunt where fans can go around throughout the course, move people throughout the venue to see all these different programs, hit them with various geofences to show them history of a certain shot that was hit on that hole, go into a commercial partner's activation.
Or remind them, "Hey, this is the last bathroom for five holes. You might wanna stop." So yeah, it all unlocks things that we didn't really see a couple years ago, but now that we're there and we're stable with these features, we're able to spend a little more time internally thinking about what the next chapter is gonna be.
[00:08:52] Roberto: Yeah, that's really cool. So talking about the next chapter, heading to Aronimink. You know, we're here. See, the week is getting started. Uh, I'm excited. CapTech, more data sources, get smarter about what's happening, better serve the customer. Grandstand concession cameras, I think, will be an upgrade.
There's some, uh, you know, plan-your-day functionality. It's amazing how many people go to a golf tournament, they're excited, they were invited, they bought a ticket. Not really sure what the day's gonna hold, right? Yeah. Yeah. Not really sure how to navigate it. And one of the features I think is cool this year is, you know, being able to say, "I wanna see these players. I wanna make sure I hit the merchandise tent. I wanna make sure I see the famous view off 11 or 15 or whatever it is," and, and serving that to them. What are you excited about?
[00:09:33] Rob Smith: The camera enhancement's been a big one, and, you know, no one knows there's cameras there, but we were able to deploy a set of cameras at Quail last year to do some testing. Went all in it, all in at Ryder Cup, and we're going even more in it this year. Where basically these cameras have AI frameworks that are able to count people anonymously. Yeah. And then we can use very simple things without overthinking it: red, yellow, green statuses on what's busy. Yeah.
So, like, having that go into the user experience is a big one. Congestion. I, I'd been to this venue for a tour event. I went there for the women's, but, you know, notably when they had a tour event there, one thing I remember is that it was packed.
[00:10:14] Roberto: Yeah.
[00:10:14] Rob Smith: And it was hard to move around the course. it was hilly, and, you know, the topography of these venues really plays into the fan experience and how we can get people informed to where to go. So we're, we're excited about that. Just, it was just like Louisville, where there was very, very hilly and people were congesting around certain areas to avoid the hills and the heat. Heat won't be an issue, but the hills will, and we're looking forward to people using that feature to find the right places to go.
[00:10:37] Roberto: Yeah, and that's one of the fun things about CapTech, we get to work across a few sports, take the things we learned, and, college football or all these things are trying to be more like events and festivals, right? Where it's not just go to the stadium and leave, it's a whole experience. And I think, you know, it has my wheels turning on what's possible when you, let's say, come to Atlanta for a big college football game, right? There's some great places to see. How do we keep people out of the same three streets when there's so many great options? Uh, and I think these tools are gonna be really valuable, and, and those conversations have been really interesting.
[00:11:09] Rob Smith: Yeah...
[00:11:09] Roberto: on our side.
[00:11:10] Rob Smith: Yeah, we absolutely have more work to do. We try to think about this experience for an attending fan from the time they leave their house, wherever they are, whether they're going to a plane or driving in, to the time they return and the Monday after. We've programmed content and user experience around that. Um, what it looks like on Thursday is not the same what it looks like on Monday before the event or the Monday after the event. And, like, that's the one big chapter that we're really excited about, that we're chasing after we get, you know, all this tech in place.
It's a buzzword, but personalization and getting people to create an account and log in, and giving them an incentive to continue to add data to personalize their experience, and that's, that's another feature we have a handful of things in mind for that we wanna put in to develop a, an experience. But once we get it in, we know it's gonna open a whole nother door of, "Well, can we do this? What if you did this?"
Uh, some of the things I'm excited for are, being able to order merchandise through your phone and pick it up at the merchandise tent, and being able to have a logged-in experience to handle all that, or even personalizing your food. So, I, I don't think it's ever gonna be like a Starbucks where you place an order and they have your name on it, but being able to anticipate you going to get food and placing what you want and then them knowing that you're coming to some degree and having it ready. There's just too many people to do the Starbucks way. But those are two areas that, that we feel that could really, with the right technology, we can start to improve.
[00:12:31] Roberto: That's awesome. Yeah, I, uh, I'm confident in you guys and our teams to continuing to improve exactly that. I think, you know, 10, 20 years from now we'll be sitting in the stands and saying, "You used to have to miss an entire big-time group to go get a beer or to go to the restroom," right? Like, can you imagine, like, here comes Spieth, here comes Rory, here comes Scheffler, and you used to miss an entire 20 minutes to go get, you know, a hot dog and a beer. And I think all of these tools will ultimately improve that experience and make that a thing of the past.
So Rob, excited to be here, PGA 2026, Aronimink. I will be, you know, following closely what you and the CapTech team are doing. I think it's gonna be a great week, great championship. It always is. Yeah. Thanks a lot for chatting with us.
[00:13:12] Rob Smith: Yeah, thank you. We, we appreciate your partnership, Roberto, and just having these opportunities to chat bigger picture, and we're excited where this is going.
[00:13:19] Roberto: Awesome. Well, check back in throughout the week. I'll have more field reports from Aronimink, talk to some of the folks on the CapTech side, and, and maybe get a little under the hood on how it's all coming together. And honestly, hear how it's going, right? Like, what are, what are the things they've learned early in the week? And, and what are the tweaks to tune it up for when balls fly, championship starts Thursday morning.
[00:13:41] Rob Smith: You got it.
[00:13:42] Roberto: This episode is presented by CapTech. At CapTech, we're building what's next in sports, focused on modernizing and monetizing your data, building new sports experiences, and deploying sports AI agents that have real impact. Reach out to me or our sports practice lead, Jon Bradway, anytime to talk about the future of sports.