How Comcast Business redefined golf experience with a tech-driven game

Our sponsorship of THE PLAYERS® Championship (and larger partnership with the PGA TOUR) provided an opportunity to demonstrate our tech leadership on a massive stage. And not just to the general public but to our target, as no audience over-indexes on golf like our business elite. With the C-suite watching globally, and valuable prospects on-site, we needed to make the most of this prime opportunity.

The Strategy:

Golf isn’t just a pastime; it’s a global business. Every putt, chip, and drive at THE PLAYERS® Championship is backed by corporate sponsors, broadcasters, data companies, and technology providers. Comcast Business’s audience, IT decision-makers, and CIOs, don’t simply watch golf; they see themselves in it. They see the parallels between running a high-pressure enterprise and competing in a high-stakes sport: Both demand precision, strategy, and the right tools to elevate their game.

We recognized a powerful strategic overlap: Both Comcast Business and the game of golf were wrestling with perception. Comcast Business struggled to be seen as a partner for enterprise transformation. Similarly, golf has often been viewed as slow, traditional, and even outdated.

Our strategy was simple:

• Reposition golf as a modern, interactive sport for today’s fan through demonstrating that Comcast Business is the modern enterprise-ready tech player capable of unlocking new possibilities.

The way to do that wasn’t adding another logo to the leaderboard or a hospitality tent. It had to be something that shifted our role from passive sponsor to active player.

Our guiding principle: If other providers were talking about technology prowess, Comcast Business would prove it. And we would do so in the most visible, high-pressure moment of THE PLAYERS® Championship tournament: the iconic 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass.

The Idea:

Sports fans long to get closer to the action. Football has fantasy leagues. Baseball has sabermetrics. Basketball has advanced stats and live betting integrations. But golf, particularly live, on-course golf, was lagging behind. Spectators could watch, but they couldn’t engage further.

What if Comcast Business could change that?

Enter 'Game the Green,' the world’s first live, predictive golf game that allowed fans to guess the final lie of each player’s shot at 17.

We transformed one of golf’s most iconic holes into a playable digital experience. Fans were no longer just watching players aim for the island green at 17. They were predicting each swing in real time: Would it land on the green, in the water, in the rough, or stick it tight?

Instead of simply saying “We power businesses,” we proved that the same Comcast Business technology that fuels enterprises could also reinvent how fans engage with their favorite sport.

This was more than a sponsorship. This was Comcast Business actively powering a new, first-of-its-kind way to experience golf.

The Effort:

Creating 'Game the Green' wasn’t a simple activation. It was a collective, cross-disciplinary effort that combined the complexity of live sports broadcasting, the immediacy of gaming, and the reliability of enterprise technology. We built the experience using the on-course technology already powered by Comcast Business, as a provider for the PGA TOUR.

Behind the scenes, the agency’s director of creative technology, along with a team of producers and creatives, worked shoulder to shoulder with the PGA TOUR and Comcast Business engineers, translating vast amounts of data and technical capabilities into a fan-friendly prediction game.

We had to build:

• A real-time data engine, made possible by Comcast Business’s IoT sensors and network, that could process live player performance, changing weather conditions, and real-time course conditions to shape fan predictions.
• A prediction model, powered by AI and machine learning, that incorporated the real-time data, along with 20 years of PGA TOUR historical data, to output helpful prediction aids for thousands of concurrent guesses.
• Topographic course modeling to aid participants in visualizing the 17th green.
• Real-time result reporting that followed the live data of every player’s shot and used radar to pinpoint where the ball landed on the green in comparison to fans’ predictions.
• This was harnessed in a custom playable app built from the ground up and designed, tested, and deployed in time for one of the world’s most visible sporting events.

The technical challenge was immense. Golf is unpredictable, as no two shots are the same. That meant that our system had to account for countless scenarios, ensuring that the game updated flawlessly in real time. A delay of even a few seconds would destroy the experience.

The result: a seamless, intuitive experience where on-course fans could play while standing just steps from the 17th tee box, and off-course fans could engage with their favorite players like never before.

Remote fans could log in from afar, bridging the gap between physical presence and digital participation.

Broadcasters and the golf media picked up the story, spreading the idea far beyond Ponte Vedra Beach.

For THE PLAYERS® Championship and the PGA TOUR, 'Game the Green' didn’t just engage fans—it added measurable business value. For Comcast Business, it was a living case study of the brand’s enterprise capabilities, broadcast not through words but through action.

The Results:

'Game the Green' made Comcast Business impossible to ignore and helped the company use the stage of THE PLAYERS® to drive business. ComcastBusiness.com saw a 5x lift in traffic, and leads from THE PLAYERS® enterprise site grew 3.2x YoY.

• 7,200+ predictions made during the tournament
• 128+ hours of gameplay, proving deep engagement
• Average session length of 16 minutes, longer than the average amount of time a Candy Crush player spends in one sitting
• 69,000,000+ earned-media impressions from both golf outlets and the tech press, highlighting Comcast Business as the partner redefining fan experiences

But the impact went deeper than numbers:

• For the fans: We redefined what it means to watch golf, turning passive viewing into active participation.
• For THE PLAYERS® and the PGA TOUR: We delivered new value to their partnership, innovation they could point to as proof of golf’s modernization.
• For Comcast Business: We shifted perception with the exact audience we needed most. CIOs and ITDMs saw not just a sponsor, but a modern tech partner capable of building enterprise-grade digital experiences in real time, under the most scrutinized conditions.
• Most importantly, we took the invisible and made it visible. Connectivity is usually taken for granted, but when you turn golf’s most iconic hole into an engaging game, powered by real-time enterprise networking, the technology is impossible to overlook.

In the words of one CIO who experienced 'Game the Green': “I came here expecting to see golf. I left seeing what Comcast Business can really do.”

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