Poster
Client Context
The Atlanta Braves are a professional Major League Baseball organization based in Cumberland, Georgia at Truist Park. The Marketing and Promotions department plans and executes game-day promotions, including giveaways and ticket packages, across an 81-game home season to drive attendance and revenue.
Historically, promotional planning relied on cross-functional data gathering and team intuition to determine when to place promotions. While a prior senior design team developed a forecasting, optimization, and dashboard pipeline, their deliverables were not adopted into the Braves' planning process. The system under study is a fully redesigned promotional planning workflow — including a rebuilt data pipeline, new forecasting and optimization models targeting total game-day revenue across multiple streams, and Tableau dashboards — built for usability and integration within the Braves' existing digital environment.
Executive Summary
The Atlanta Braves' Marketing and Promotions department partnered with this team to redesign an existing promotional planning system into a fully integrated, data-driven platform. The objective was to simplify data preparation, improve revenue visibility, and establish a reliable method for evaluating promotional performance.
To address these needs, the team built a fully automated pipeline integrated into the Braves' BigQuery environment, eliminating manual data preparation and improving reliability. New forecasting and optimization models were developed to capture total game-day revenue including concessions and merchandise. The forecasting model uses a two-stage approach validated by demeaned residual analysis and 80/20 holdout testing. These forecasts feed a binary integer optimization model that recommends promotional placements while honoring budget, frequency, and clustering constraints.
Results are delivered through three Tableau dashboards covering historical trends and future projections, recommended promotional placements, and side-by-side promotion performance comparisons. Retrospective analysis estimates a 20% improvement in promotional impact had the system been used in 2024 and 2025, equating to approximately $11.2 million in additional revenue. Following a Live Demo Day, the Braves indicated the system is "highly likely" to be adopted for planning the 2027 season.
Project Information
Student Team
Nadia Bozeman, Joshua Canlas, John Cellitti, Vivian Chung, Sarah Copeland, Katie Hamfeldt, Avinash Haritsa, and Curran Mitra
Faculty Advisor
Faculty Evaluator
