TVB Stuttgart Uses AI Agents for Sponsor Acquisition

Leinfelden-Echterdingen/Stuttgart, July 30, 2026 – TVB Stuttgart, a Handball Bundesliga club, is using the AI-based sponsor agent from Capaneo’s data intelligence platform, udo. The agent analyzes potential sponsor companies, develops probabilistic target audience profiles based on this analysis, and compares them with TVB’s consolidated club data. This provides the sponsorship sales team with concrete insights into how many fans and contacts align with a company’s target audience. Instead of generic reach promises, the club can now base its sponsorship offers on reliable target audience information.

BACKGROUND

TVB Stuttgart has begun consolidating and cleaning its data in udo. Fan, ticketing, membership, and reach data—which were previously scattered across various systems and lists—have been consolidated into a clean, unified database in udo. This gives the club, for the first time, a reliable overall picture of its reach—the foundation for everything that follows.

CHALLENGE

In sponsorship sales, the traditional selling points have been visibility, emotion, and gut feeling: perimeter advertising, jersey branding, and arena atmosphere. What companies expect today, however, are solid answers to a simple question: Am I actually reaching my target audience through the club—and if so, to what extent? Until now, very few clubs have been able to provide exactly that answer.

THE SOLUTION: THE SPONSORSHIP AGENT IN UDO

The sponsorship agent supports TVB’s sales team in three steps:

1 Company Research. The agent researches the potential sponsor company: industry, products, positioning, regional presence, and typical customer base.

2 Probabilistic target group. Based on this information, the agent creates a probabilistic target audience profile—a probability model that identifies which people are relevant to the company as customers. The probabilistic approach is not a detour, but rather a prerequisite: Neither TVB nor udo has access to the sponsor’s customer data—nor do they need it. The AI derives the target audience profile solely from company research. This makes the approach immediately applicable for any company, without any data exchange whatsoever. At this stage, the profile is a well-founded hypothesis.

3 Mapping to the TVB data. Now comes the crucial step: The agent maps the probabilistic profile to the consolidated, real-world club data in udo. The probabilistic assumption becomes a verifiable statement—namely, how many of TVB’s fans and contacts actually match the company’s target audience.

The result: The sales team no longer approaches prospects with a generic sponsorship brochure, but rather with a deterministic line of reasoning — by mapping to real data, a probabilistic approach becomes a data-driven, robust statement tailored to the specific company and backed by concrete reach figures for the club’s sponsored products.

SUCCESS

The level of preparation and depth of argumentation fundamentally change the nature of the discussions. A traditional sponsorship pitch becomes a business discussion among equals: The TVB can demonstrate the target audience reach associated with each sponsored product.

“The feedback from sponsors has been overwhelming. Companies have rarely seen such a strong case and level of preparation from other clubs.”
Martin Jux, B2B Sales and Partner Management, TVB 1898 Handball GmbH & Co.KG

CONCLUSION

The TVB Stuttgart case study demonstrates what’s possible when a club consolidates its data and makes it usable in a smart way: With udo, scattered data sets are transformed into a clean database—and with the Sponsor Agent, a sales tool that turns reach into measurable metrics. Sponsorship thus shifts from gut instinct to data-driven decision-making.

udo is Capaneo’s data intelligence platform. It consolidates, cleans, and refines corporate data, making it directly usable in day-to-day operations via AI agents.