Elevating the fan experience with on-demand content.
The PGA TOUR uses Adobe content supply chain solutions to streamline content creation and engage modern fans.
+10%
Increase in content traffic YOY
Objectives
Reduce time needed to launch new websites and digital features
Increase speed and scale of content production
Publish engaging content across channels and platforms more quickly
Results
Cut development timeline from weeks and months to hours and days
Increased content traffic +10% year over year
Increased webpage load speeds by 50%
Keeping up with real-time data
Golf, like any sport, is a numbers game. Scores, rankings, percentages, and advanced metrics are as important to deeply engaged fans as the pros putting on the green. For the PGA TOUR, the world’s premier golf organization, data is the champion. With its proprietary ShotLink technology, the TOUR collects scoring and statistical data on every shot by every player in real-time — a staggering 250,000 data points each week — to update the leaderboards that fans follow so closely. But how do you translate such massive amounts of data to a global audience that craves real-time content?
Faced with an aging content management system (CMS) and a fragmented content creation process, the PGA TOUR turned to Adobe to embark on a digital transformation that would meet the growing demands of modern golf fans.
“When we think about our digital platforms, I think it’s really about providing our fans with the deepest way they can engage with our sport,” says Anne Detlefsen, senior director of digital and emerging content at PGA TOUR. “The biggest thing for us, especially as we went through this last wave of evolution, was speed to production. So, something happens on the course, how quickly can we get that to our fans?”
“The biggest thing for us, especially as we went through this last wave of evolution, was speed to production. So, something happens on the course, how quickly can we get that to our fans?”
Anne Detlefsen
Senior Director, Digital and Emerging Content, PGA TOUR
Stuck in the content sand trap
Detlefsen partnered with Scott Gutterman, PGA TOUR’s senior vice president of digital operations, to update the TOUR’s website and mobile experiences.
In just a few short years, the digital operations and content teams went from creating content for a single website to expanding across social and mobile, hosting influencer content, and developing websites for brand partners. The influx of content types across multiple platforms created lengthy timelines, expensive production, and slow time to publication. And understandably, a bit of frustration.
“Going from one small team putting together stories and photographs for a website to now dealing with all the different content types, video, and engagement pieces like polls and long-form stories is a major shift — everything has a different look and feel,” Gutterman says. “The notion that we could produce a single piece of content and put it in multiple places died. Content workflows must span multiple departments every day. We needed a different way to work.”
Eyes on the horizon
To meet the growing challenge, Detlefsen and Gutterman implemented Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Adobe’s industry-leading CMS that enables brands to create high-performance pages across any digital property — from web to mobile to apps. Edge Delivery Services within Experience Manager Sites delivers record-breaking page load times. The ease of use was critical for PGA TOUR’s marketing teams, which are now able to significantly speed up their workflows by performing all document-based editing and content creation right within the platform.
The results were almost immediate. Content became easier to produce, load speeds increased, collaboration was seamless, and the time saved on projects was the greatest gift of all. Built to simplify site management with drag-and-drop functionality and modular design options, Experience Manager Sites saved Gutterman’s team invaluable time creating sites for major events like THE PLAYERS Championship and Presidents Cup, high-profile PGA TOUR tournaments that bring new viewers and heavy traffic.
“Experience Manager Sites reduced complexity and increased the agility of what those teams are able to do,” Gutterman says. “That became a powerful tool, allowing us to feel comfortable deploying more and more of these sites. The versatility and flexibility make it the best solution for all our work.”
For Detlefsen’s content team, winning the digital content race not only meets her goals but also scratches a competitive itch (this is sports, after all). “With Edge Delivery Services we can be the first ones to tell our fans what’s going on,” she says. “We can be the first ones capturing that search traffic. It’s huge for us on the fan side but also for our team.”
The added speed, flexibility, and ease of use has led to the team’s ability to produce a lot more content. During a recent tournament, Detlefsen’s team published more than 150 articles in just two weeks, compared to the just 20–30 they could publish with their previous CMS.
And these websites are delivering exceptional performance. Page load speeds increased by 50%, and both Detlefsen and Gutterman report an impressive boost in traffic, largely thanks to improvements in search engine scoring. “Our content traffic is up double digits, year over year,” Detlefsen says. “Typically, our traffic spikes are out of our control — like if Tiger Woods is playing. But the way Experience Manager improved our site and SEO rankings gives us reliable measurements of success we can count on. It’s great to see that hard work pay off.”
Along with speed and performance, the team is excited about the ability to create diverse content types, including eye-catching immersive stories that feature video, photos, and text profiling top players, iconic tournaments, and big moments in golf. “We now have different sorts of immersive articles and visual stories in ways that can take our fans through our storytelling in a quick, tappable experience,” Detlefsen says.
“Experience Manager Sites reduced complexity and increased the flexibility of what our teams were able to do. That became a powerful tool, allowing us to feel comfortable deploying more and more of these sites.”
Scott Gutterman
Senior Vice President of Digital Operations, PGA TOUR
Scaling with partners
From broadcast affiliates to brand sponsors and beyond, the PGA TOUR works with numerous partner organizations. On a time-pressured project with the International Golf Federation for the 2024 Olympics, Gutterman’s team launched new websites more quickly by creating templates and frameworks within Experience Manager Sites ahead of time.
In about 12 months, the team launched seven new websites, each taking about a month to go live once the template was built. Detlefsen says that in their old CMS a redesign of just one environment would have taken about six months. “We were able to use our prebuilt templates and then add in the branding and content for each brand site,” Gutterman says. “It took practically no time at all and allowed us to focus on scoring and highlights from the course, which is what the fans are really excited about.”
Underlying the success and agility of the project is the seamless integration between Experience Manager Sites, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which powers the PGA TOUR operations team’s entire tech stack. This close integration ensures that content updates happen in real time – with scores and highlights updated on the PGA TOUR’s apps and websites in seconds rather than minutes, allowing them to deliver faster, more accurate content to their fans.
Boundless creativity
Before the PGA TOUR’s digital transformation with Adobe, Detlefsen feared her team would be so over-stretched that creativity would stagnate, and slow digital experiences would turn fans off. She also had to weigh the ROI of producing fan-favorite content with all the other demands on her team.
For example, a deep-dive editorial series her team produces for the PGA TOUR website called Immersive Stories consistently has high engagement. But it is also the most expensive to produce — just one page of these high-quality digital experiences took her team more than a year to produce and a six-figure budget.
“They looked amazing, and fans loved them,” Detlefsen says. “But we would have to engage with a design firm and a developer, do on-site kickoffs and brainstorms, and the cost was exorbitant. The amount of effort we were putting in was becoming harder and harder to justify.”
With Edge Delivery Services, Detlefsen’s team was able to build a set of templates to work with and cut that turnaround time more than 90% — without sacrificing quality. With a Google Lighthouse score that jumped from 4 to 70, fans could immerse themselves in the experience without waiting for slow-loading pages.
“It’s amazing that when you see this content, it’s something that instantly feels more special and that you want to pay attention to and spend some time with,” Detlefsen says. “And I’m so grateful we can keep creating these with internal resources and without needing the big incremental budget. It really allows our creative team to feel like they have space to design something completely bespoke that dazzles our partners and fans alike.”
Scaling-up content workflow
Adding to their growing efficiencies, Gutterman and Detlefsen recently implemented Adobe Workfront to manage projects and operations with a goal to accelerate content development, streamline review and approval processes, and create content at scale. Taking advantage of Workfront Fusion, the team has plans to connect Workfront to Experience Manager Sites and Creative Cloud to create an end-to-end content creation workflow. As the Workfront deployment expands, Detlefsen anticipates that reporting and data-driven insights will uncover new ways to allocate resources to improve efficiency.
“We switched to the newest versions of Experience Manager Sites and saw so many gains in our speed and efficiency,” Detlefsen says. “Now the second layer for that is understanding what the team is spending their time on and if we’re putting our efforts in the right place, which is what we’re achieving with Workfront. The dream is there.”
To try and keep up with technology and fans’ appetite for instant, engaging content, the TOUR is exploring new opportunities using Adobe Express, an all-in-one AI content creation app, and Adobe Firefly, the technology powering generative AI tools across Creative Cloud. The content team is already using one-click Quick Actions in Express to quickly and easily remove image backgrounds for headshots. Detlefsen says it’s just the beginning.
“We’re trying new things. We’re being innovative and having conversations around the AI opportunities Adobe is rolling out,” she says. “There are some great opportunities for us that just would not have been possible a couple years ago.”
Driving the future of fan engagement
The PGA TOUR digital transformation is not just a technological evolution but a reimagining of how golf content is created and consumed. With Adobe Experience Manager Sites at the forefront, the TOUR has streamlined its operations and elevated its ability to engage fans in real time. From personalized content to immersive storytelling and more, Gutterman, Detlefsen, and their teams are redefining how they create content to better connect with their audience in the world of sports entertainment.
Learn more about the powerful tools PGA TOUR uses to streamline content creation including Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Workfront.
Then, watch how the PGA TOUR built a new multichannel experience for golf fans worldwide in the Adobe Summit session: Making Headless CMS Projects Simple with PGA TOUR.
