FanAI, one of the leading platforms in esports sponsorship data, is adding two technology and startup executives to its growing team of industry experts.
Randy Stude is joining FanAI as the new vice president of sales and marketing, while Karim Varela comes on as vice president of technology. Both men bring high-level experience from different technology backgrounds that will help FanAi as it continues to expand.
FanAI is a platform that provides brands looking to expand into both esports and traditional sports with the necessary information to make informed partnership decisions. Using its access to social, demographic, ethnographic, and payment data, FanAI can give clients the ability to specifically pinpoint their target audience and create more accurate profiles.
This targeted information helps brands see where they best fit into the ecosystem of esports and sports, while accurately letting them track data that can assist in predicting the return on investment from their partnerships.
Stude is a former marketing director at Intel Corporation and director of strategy at AMD, which shows he has a lot of experience marketing products to gamers and learning from the technology side of the business. His success as both a marketing expert and startup founder will help FanAI closely connect with rising trends in the esports and technological spheres of influence.
“Answering how sponsors can benefit the multi-million dollar investments they make sponsoring teams is like the holy grail of questions,” Stude said. “My role is marketing and sales for the company, so selling and managing a sales team is something I have a great deal of experience with, like working at Intel and selling to the most discerning purchasers of PC products, the gamers.”
Varela, on the other hand, comes from an area of marketing more focused on demographics fit for entertainment, dating, and travel. He helped manage and analyze data while pushing products to market for companies like Fandango, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Tinder. Because of his background in behind-the-scenes metrics, Varela will enable FanAI to better help companies grow along with their understanding of data output.
“This is more than just esports, it is all sports,” Varela said. “We have the opportunity to essentially save sports and really do something that no one else is doing. One of our major initiatives here is to build a beautiful product that is usable by both esports teams and brands to make their sponsorships more effective.”
Both of these additions show that FanAI is positioning itself to make a big push in the coming months to work with brands and organizations to find good, mutually-beneficial matches. Data collection like this is a key factor in how deals get done, so if the FanAI team can simplify it, this could potentially change how brand deals are worked out in esports.
“FanAI delivers actionable social and ethnographic data, the likes of which many companies have never seen before,” FanAI founder and CEO Johannes Waldstein said. “As we expand our model to reach new markets, our in-house talent needs to grow alongside our strategic business objectives. Both Karim and Randy will be integral to our continued growth, as they truly represent the next evolution of FanAI, both on the backend as well as consumer-facing fronts.”
