MLB is expanding its partnership with Adobe to help the league and all 30 clubs spin up targeted marketing campaigns faster—and at scale. The practical goal: use automation plus fan data to match messaging to how people actually follow baseball now (streaming, social, and yes, AI-powered everything). Rollout starts this season, with clubs tapping into the scattered fan signals they already have—like promo attendance patterns over multiple years—to build more precise campaigns.
The big shift, per Kasia Danilczuk, director of product for MLB’s enterprise Fan Data Platform, is that segmentation isn’t the hard part anymore. “We’ve gotten to a point now where data and the ability to create different [audience] segments is not necessarily the block it had been in the past,” she said. The bottleneck is producing the right creative for all those segments—so MLB is leaning on Adobe’s GenStudio for performance marketing, Firefly Services (plus Custom Models) for creative management and generation, and an “assistive layer” of approved assets and tools to reduce the back-and-forth on creation and approvals. Example outputs are very literal: Grogu-themed email art for repeat “Star Wars Day” attendees, or a text message built around a fan’s demonstrated interest in a visiting star.
MLB is also preparing for the reality that fans don’t just search Google—they ask generative AI where to buy tickets and what to expect at a game. Adobe’s LLM Optimizer is meant to help teams understand (and influence) how they show up inside AI-driven search responses, so outdated or wrong info doesn’t become the default answer. Meanwhile, the league is leaning into social as the primary engagement channel, including a recent TikTok partnership aimed at global discovery and deeper interaction with players and MLB properties—hinting that the next step may be giving fans more official assets to create with, not just consume.
Read more at Marketing Dive.