UK Pro League

Pragmatic approach to data & digital strategy to enable UKPL to scale at the right pace

UK Pro League (UKPL) was launched by River Media Partners in 2020, providing many of Britain’s top male and female tennis players with not only invaluable playing time and experience but much needed income during the COVID lockdown period. Despite only being in its formative years, UKPL can point to many successes already, the most notable being the transition of its inaugural women’s champion Emma Raducanu only twelve months later going on to win the US Open.

Since early 2021, PTI have been working closely with UKPL to put its data and digital structure in place and ensuring that its growth is capitalized upon in a way that is commensurate with UKPL’s development. Our approach has been never to over-engineer the approach but to provide cost-effective solutions that can scale with UKPL’s own growth trajectory.

Critical to that has been to build a strategic approach to building UKPL’s addressable audience. In 2021 no crowds were possible, so optimizing UKPL’s digital estate has been critical. The first step was sourcing the right database solution before moving onto create the RFP for website partner, ensuring that it was optimized to funnel users into the data environment. Key was transitioning UKPL’s streaming service away from YouTube and into a new partnership where UKPL controlled the user experience, commercial environment and data collection.

All of these solutions were designed to fit with UKPL’s budget requirements and will be able to scale with the ongoing growth of the tournament..

Photo credit: Ian Hall.

PTI Digital have advanced our data & digital capabilities and provided a strategy to work towards as the UK Pro League grows over the coming years. We were able to do this with them on a risk/reward model that means we have a mutual interest in the success of the tournament.

Dominic HayesManaging Director, River Media Partners