SBJ Power Up: The ATP Tour’s new digital collectibles program

Happy Monday morning! Let’s dive straight into the ATP Tour’s new digital collectibles program, which will run across multiple events in 2025. — Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• ATP Tour, Trace collab on digital collectibles program
• Athlete’s Voice: Former Olympian talks entry into health tech space
• MLS and Amazon agree to content partnership

Building on their NFT-focused collaboration around the 2024 ATP Finals, the ATP Tour and digital memorabilia vendor Trace are launching a new fan engagement program called “Collect,” which will run across multiple tournaments through the end of the 2025 tennis season.

Collect will allow fans to claim digital “credentials” for events (which look like virtual press passes) and pieces of digital artwork that commemorate individual matches within those events, including the scoreline and participants.

The program launches in time for the quarterfinals of the ongoing National Bank Open in Canada and will be available from the quarterfinals on for the upcoming Cincinnati Open and Rolex Shanghai Masters, as well as the entire year-end ATP Finals in Turin.

Continuing a successful collaboration

Last ATP Finals, the ATP and Trace piloted a different program, branded “Momentum,” which featured 24-hour windows for fans to collect NFTs designed using data from 15 matches. The program recorded 75K fan registrants, who collected digital tokens of 770K matches in eight days (averaging more than 10 per user).

ATP Director/Comms & Web3 Mark Epps said those new registrants increased the tour’s “directly known audience” (i.e., fans subscribed to the tour’s marketing correspondence) by 25%, marking enormous successes in fan acquisition and engagement.

“That laid the foundation for, ‘What do we do next?’” Epps said. “The answer for us was, let’s see if we can serialize this thing over multiple tournaments and prove that what we achieved in Turin [in 2024] is repeatable.”

Similar to Momentum, fans who participate in Collect will be able to claim collectibles during the day matches take place, local time. The assets are then distributed the following day and stored in individualized digital “vaults.”

New features, fan-centric touches

The ATP and Trace have also made conceptual adjustments, some based on feedback collected through fan feedback forums, surveys and Zoom calls. One is addition of physical giveaways of items such as tournament-specific hats, towels and signed memorabilia.

“We have been very deliberate in not putting [the giveaways] front and center, because we don’t believe that this is the reason a fan is going to want to join the experience -- and it almost shouldn’t be,” Epps said. “We view these [giveaways] as little surprise-and-delight moments. A way of saying thank you.”

Collect’s event-level digital credentials and match-level artwork will also have a different feel than Momentum, leaning on the marketing colors of each tournament and match-specific wrinkles (e.g., Epps said a hypothetical piece on Carlos Alcaraz’s quarterfinal win over Alexander Zverev in 2024 could have included bees, given a swarm of them interrupted that match).

And for the combined ATP/WTA National Bank Open and Cincinnati Open, the ATP has partnered with the WTA to promote and provide collectibles for women’s matches as well. The tours will co-market the Collect initiative across their apps, email lists, social media channels and websites.

“It was actually one of the key pieces of feedback,” Epps said. “We had fans at the [ATP Finals] saying, ‘Where are the WTA matches?’ despite it being an ATP-only event. Point taken. Fans want both.”

The ATP and Trace’s ongoing partnership speaks to the tour’s emphasis on fan acquisition and engagement, which Epps noted is underscored further by the fact that Collect is also being used as a platform to begin rolling out a single sign-on product called “Tennis ID.” At first, fans will only be able to use this login to participate in Collect, but it could eventually facilitate access to future digital initiatives.

Collect is also a means for the tour to better learn fans’ tournament, match or player preferences, and potentially treat them to long-term rewards such as gated commerce or real-life experiences (although no plans are finalized there as of now). Eventually, it could serve as a platform to integrate corporate partners in as well.

And, importantly, the hope is it keeps fans coming back to tennis-related content.

“There’s an underlying thesis here, that Trace is built on, that it’s worth knowing your true fans are and giving them an identity artifact that they carry,” said Trace co-founder and CEO Tareq Nazlawy. “If fandom is so central to identity, for us as people, then there should be a digital artifact which is reflecting that.”

Andrew Steele, a 400-meter runner for Team GB, was initially part of a fourth-place finishing 4x400 relay team in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games — only to eventually receive a bronze medal after a member of the Russian team was later disqualified. “I ended up winning an Olympic medal, even though I didn’t know it at the time,” he said.

Steele, 41, later began a career in genetics and how that science affects fitness, nutrition and performance. He led product at DNAfit and then Prenetics (which had acquired DNAfit) before starting his own digital health firm, Stride, in 2023, which this summer made strong inroads in North America through a partnership with Unity Fitness Canada. It provides multiomic testing: wide-ranging diagnostics on genomics, the microbiome, protein profile and more.

On his vision for Stride . . .

Previously, we’d had a lot of products which are point solutions: Here’s a DNA test for this, here’s a blood test for this. With Stride, I’m trying to bring it all together. So we’ve got a range of multiomic lab testing. We do a DNA test, a microbiome test, a blood draw, a biological age test, and an oral health test will be in the future too.

We knit all that together to see a holistic picture of your internal biology in a way which is pleasant to see and understandable — not a bunch of PDFs to download from the lab, but actually a really engaging digital dashboard. Your DNA doesn’t change, but you test everything else every six months and see how that’s tracking. And then we make a tailored supplement based off those results for you.

On the cold outreach that changed his life . . .

I’m actually glad I didn’t get [my medal] at the time because it forced me to be very open to opportunities about what came next in my life.

There was one email that came into my inbox one day from a guy who was working with a genetic scientist and looking to commercialize this test and looking for research subjects to help them understand how genetics affected exercise response. And if my [running] career been going better, I would have just forwarded it onto my agent and said, ‘Hey, see if there’s some deals to be done here.’ I was, at this juncture in my life, when I was 27, I had zero higher education. I had zero work experience, and I certainly had not even zero money. I had minus money.

So I engaged proactively on this, and thank God I did because, long story short, [I joined] a health tech business called DNAfit in 2013. That business went well, I learned a bunch, and I became a co-founder there. Five years later, we sold the business for $10 million as bootstrap founders. Then I went into the next thing [Prenetics] as chief product officer, eventually being part of the leadership team that led to a billion dollar NASDAQ IPO. So it changed the path of my life, not winning that medal — but probably for the better. And, along the way, they awarded me the medal anyway.

On his current business life . . .

I still sit pretty close to sport. I founded a business called Stride, which is in the similar space of diagnostics and preventative health. But I also have one other thing, which is a big passion of mine. Sport First is a venture studio, which helps people that come from a sports background navigate the transition into becoming a founder and entrepreneur.

On his science and tech interest as an athlete . . .

If you’d asked my teammates, I was probably always known as the guy that was [following] the latest nutrition science or supplements. It was always a passion of mine — and tech. I was always super interested in startups.

On what he learned about his genetics . . .

DNA is just one of the things in the picture, right? There’s a genetic variable called ACTN3, and there’s a version of this gene which is basically the C version of this gene. So with every gene, you have two copies of it — you have one that you got from your mother and another that you got from your father. And then basically there’s a version of this gene that is often colloquially called the Olympic gene, or the sprint gene, and it’s basically extraordinarily over-represented in elite-level power.

Everyone who’s generally an Olympic level power athlete has either one copy or two copies of the C variant of this gene. This is me completely oversimplifying the science, but that’s basically the lay of the land. And I found out, fascinatingly enough, I didn’t have even one copy of this. I was an absolute outlier from an Olympic-level sprint athlete who just didn’t have this gene, which was considered almost table stakes to be a sprint athlete.

MLS and Amazon have agreed to a content partnership that will see Amazon Fire TV and Alexa devices named content partners of the league. As part of the collaboration, MLS highlights and archival footage will be available to fans on Fire TV and Alexa-enabled devices. On Fire TV, MLS highlights will be featured in a dedicated row on the Fire TV home screen and landing pages, as well as the sports section, while fans using Alexa devices can request the latest MLS highlights and news using voice commands. MLS is the first soccer property to establish a highlights partnership with both Amazon Fire TV and Alexa devices (MLS).

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