The attraction of a sports property’s social media offering is becoming an increasingly important element in partnerships with brands – but maximising this relationship in editorial terms to the satisfaction of both parties requires a delicate balance, with engagement at its heart.
You always felt that Alex Ferguson’s oft used adage that “no one player is bigger than the club” was a wrestling attempt to subvert the rising power of his stars beneath the machinery of his powerhouse team. Seven years after his retirement at Manchester United, it is difficult to imagine a manager feeling they have the leverage to say the same thing with such confidence in front of the television cameras.
The world has changed. This is the age of star power in all walks of life including sport. Celebrity influence conquers all and if sports stars are able to harness their image rights and their brand adequately, their employers are required to pay homage to the new religion. Marcus Rashford’s recent achievement in almost single-handedly forcing the UK ministers to change its policy regarding the extension of free school meals for children during the summer holidays shows that even governments have to follow.
Is there a way that this changing landscape of power could benefit the clubs? Until the Bosman ruling in 1990, even if a European football player was out of contract with a club, the club could have prevented the player from moving on to another for as long as they felt like it. That ruling started the shift towards player power which was accelerated by the money flooding into football, funded by the PayTV revolution.
In 1990, Italy’s Roberto Baggio was the world’s most expensive soccer player having been bought for the equivalent of €11.6 million by Juventus; compare this to the €222 million paid by PSG for Neymar 27 years later. That neatly gives us a twenty-fold increase and the CIES Observatory tells us you would need to pay well over €250m for Mbappe in 2020. The graph below shows UK-only median figures over a 20 year period, showing a nine-fold increase for Pl transfer free (adjusted for inflation), set against UK house prices’ stellar growth for comparison:
On a side note it is interesting, and rather extraordinary, to note that this stellar growth would actually be dwarfed by the growth in salaries in the same time period.
In European sports it is not just the influx of revenues that have driven player prices up. The competition for talent between clubs and leagues means that it is very difficult to get a grip on escalating transfer fees and transfer prices.
Unlike in US sports where governance is centralised and there is relatively little or no international competition for talent, European sports have no governance framework at an international level to enable an effective salary capping system or collective agreement with players. This also extends to the murky world of player agents and transfer fees which further tips the balance away from the clubs.
This escalating financial muscle started the shift in balance between players and clubs that Ferguson was trying to contain. However, what really cemented this shift beyond a doubt was the arrival of social media platforms in the late 00’s and the subsequent effect it had on increasing celebrity and star power. This dwarfs any other factor at the elite level. Sports stars have long been considered as icons and pin-ups (let’s not forget David Beckham pre-dated the social storm) but social media has provided them with a platform to showcase themselves directly to their fans.
Players have become skilled content creators and have amassed huge followings, which in turn drives their personal brand.
This table shows a sample of the social media following of the top teams and athletes alongside stars of entertainment and social media influencers. Of the top ten, six are from sports including Ronaldo, Neymar, Messi, FC Barcelona and Lebron James:
Plenty. First of all, managerial tenures are getting shorter as the likelihood increases of losing the players’ confidence, and just to complete the volte-face, players can now hold the club to ransom if they feel like it, as Griezmann and Neymar did last Summer. Although Paul Pogba would probably dispute this, clubs have to do as they are told by their stars.
Secondly, as the Deloitte Football Money League 2020 report shows, ‘Generation Z’ fans (aged 16-24) have more of an allegiance to individual players than a club, and their club support is transient.
Finally, it shows in the finances. Another Deloitte report, the Annual Review of Football Finance 2020 highlights that Premier League clubs’ spending on playing talent created a negative swing of almost £600m in 2018/19 compared to 2017/18, with clubs recording an aggregate loss of £165m.
Almost half of the Premier League’s clubs recorded losses for the first time since 2015/16 when the clubs knew they were in for a bumper rise in broadcast values the following season. That will not be so on this occasion. These losses are despite each club receiving a minimum of £100m in distributions each year.
According to an Esportif report, the story in rugby is not too dissimilar with combined Premiership Rugby club revenues of £208m in 2018/19 and a combined operating loss of £36m, despite a salary cap supposedly having been in place. The league has recently announced a reduction in the cap to help the clubs combat the pandemic’s impact on matchday revenues, which represent 24% of the average club’s total income vs 19% in Premier League football.
As a postscript, whilst star power has not been great for the club profits to date, sometimes celebrity transcends normal metrics. The CR7 brand had a quite extraordinary impact on the Juventus share price when Ronaldo signed for the club in July 2018:
So how can clubs harness star power into an asset that benefits their businesses and brands as well as the brands of the individual players? By demonstrating that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. As described above, clubs have lost their contractual leverage with players post-Bosman and their financial leverage through competition between leagues and a lack of international governance structures. They need to find an alternative way of re-balancing.
I offer two suggestions for collaborating to grow the value of intellectual property rights for the benefit of all.
Commercialise
Firstly, star power represents an enormous commercial opportunity for clubs if used correctly. The social reach offers clubs a chance to broaden their fanbase and attract new types of supporters that might be more interested in a particular player.
This is both passive and active. The CR7 example above resulted in a fourfold increase in the club’s Instagram followings for the club (passive) but it’s also a question of contractually agreeing the right commercial controls for image rights and commercial obligations to benefit your commercial partners (active). Technology is available to help clubs deliver content to players and improve the content on their channels which is of mutual benefit.
Build Value
Secondly, clubs should be building the value of their own digital assets by leveraging their own unique IP in the way that the players have done so successfully via social media, and create brands and platforms that prove worthy of the players’ involvement beyond the pitch. At the moment this is a dream rather than a reality for most clubs, but a goal that can be achieved with the right investment. Technology is available to help clubs get to know their existing audiences and grow them by creating content and products that appeal to typically social media savvy generations as well as all those that were born before them.
The venue or stadium is a unique opportunity to deliver great experiences to fans and this is ultimately where players need to perform in order to drive their brands. This is the home of the club as well as the player and that is something to leverage with fans, who will be disenfranchised if you don’t make their experiences memorable and worth sharing with their friends and networks.
Collaborating with players to collectively grow brands is a no-brainer. If Harvard University can develop a lifestyle brand then so can a sports league or team.
Anyone that has spent lockdown relishing Netflix’s “Last Dance” will have seen first hand the power that the stars of the 80’s and 90’s had in propelling the NBA and its clubs beyond the sport itself and into an urban culture phenomenon. Clearly the rise of Michael Jordan from a player to a worldwide icon was made possible via mass media, but the learnings from this period has made the NBA acutely aware of how the personalities within its league can be leveraged via new digital media channels.
Compared to the NFL for example, the NBA benefits from small team sizes that allows for greater player fan interaction, but this is further enhanced by the fact that the NBA does its part to ensure that individual player personalities are never hidden from fans. A report by MVPindex showed the impact of this approach commercially. The NBA and team accounts collectively generated more than $1.1B of value for brand partners in 2019, compared to $343M in brand value attributed to the NFL social ecosystem.
This is not a case of deciding to adopt a new approach or sticking to previous methods. This is an essential development that teams and leagues need to embrace to move forward. There is no reversing star power and its impact on clubs but there is an opportunity to re-balance by harnessing it for the greater good. This requires a change in thinking from clubs alongside investment in technology and content creation that delivers a platform that is deserving of players lending their own brands for the collective benefit of all parties.
For the foreseeable future, sport will be played without fans in stands; but that doesn’t mean they can’t be part of the game. InCrowd Cast Front Row allows the user to moderate live video feeds of fans from their homes and display the footage around the venue on any available LED perimeters and big screen equipment.
The use of LED perimeters is the key. Whilst numerous closed-door crowd noise and virtual attendance solutions have presented themselves in reaction to the Covid-19 crisis, Front Row is one of the only solutions on the market that allows the user to transmit video to the LED perimeters. Fans will be pitchside, their live video feeds displayed in close view of the players they are supporting. Importantly, Front Row offers real-time fan engagement which avoids difficult situations in which fan reaction doesn’t match on-pitch action, a problem often encountered in pre-recorded fan video feeds.
Front Row is a fan engagement solution with longevity; it does not start and finish with closed-door sport. Front Row allows fans unable to attend matches to be part of the action and to contribute to the stadium atmosphere. Create deeper connections with your international audience and massively improve accessibility for every fan, by putting them in the front row. There are also numerous new sponsorship opportunities for partners’ brands across the perimeter and big-screen displays whilst also driving direct revenue through ticket and merchandise promotions.
Front Row gives rights holders the opportunity to create a brand new digital fan experience and bring stadiums back to life.
Front Row can transmit live fan video to in-stadia display in just a few simple steps:
A laptop/PC
Front Row works with 3×3 or a 4×4 grids of fan segments on a single Zoom call, giving 9 or 16 fans the opportunity to be shown live across the stadium displays. (If you would like to show more than 16 fans on the in-stadia displays, that is possible! Get in touch and we can explain the logistics).
An InCrowd Cast licence
This is the control software that will be plugged in and operating the boards.
An Operator
An individual that can manage the Zoom call, so they can closely watch the call and preempt any misbehaviour or dismiss/add fans from the call.
Front Row operators have the ability to fully moderate and control what is displayed in the stadium:
Adapt the grid size and number of grids to ensure a full display on the big screen.
Control the number of segments in perimeters to fit with advertising commitments.
Full moderation; operators can swiftly remove and replace video feeds as necessary.
Set fail-safe imagery; immediate activation if a fan drops off feed or is removed.
Dropped video detection; the system can detect a missing fan, auto-fills with fail-safe.
Sponsorship; the system can dynamically switch between fan & sponsor content
For more information on Front Row contact ollie.clements@incrowdsports.com
how can technology be used to drive positive change? By using technology to develop relationships with fanbases, sports organisations can hold themselves to higher standards of inclusivity and try to effect positive behavioural change amongst their devoted supporters. Technology could also help surface and deter the problems by making the process of reporting incidents far easier and perhaps more significantly, enable the ability to pinpoint and deal with the problem more efficiently and effectively.
I have read with interest various interpretations of how the Covid Pandemic will impact the sports industry. The general consensus is that it will accelerate the already rapid changes taking place as a result of consumption (how we follow, watch and attend sports events) driven by the smartphone and the rise of web 2.0 which will, in turn, accelerate the gaps between the richest and poorest sports federations, leagues and clubs, affirming a new world order.
There is no question that changes in consumption have been driving a greater gap between rich and poor in the last few years and this has shown in the numbers.
The biggest events increasingly command a greater share of fan attention, resulting in the bigger sports growing at the expense of smaller sports where audiences are falling.
There are lots of reasons for this including social followings increasing the importance of celebrity, meaning the biggest stars with the biggest followings drive interest in the team they play for and this drives the overall following and viewing of the league and sport overall. Witness the impact of Cristiano Ronaldo’s signing on the Juventus share price. However, whilst the Pandemic has certainly accelerated some consumer trends, I actually think that it will shake things up rather than simply follow the same path.
First of all bigger doesn’t necessarily mean less vulnerable. Larger event organisers, venues and clubs have larger balance sheets, but also far greater operational expenses which leave them exposed when there is no income coming in from live matches. It is well documented that Premier League clubs lose money when times are good. As a result of the Pandemic, the Premier League is having to offer rebates to its broadcast partners and 20% of the average club income is from matchday, which may not return for several months.
Secondly, bigger businesses are often less nimble or adaptable to change and this could be a problem. As McKinsey research shows, organisations with an agile operating model are far more likely to show improvements in both execution pace and productivity. The break in the sports calendar has offered them a chance to focus on adapting products and business models to the new norm and the price for not doing so may be very high.
Many sports in Europe are not centrally organised, which creates a fractured decision-making structure that can be an additional barrier to adapting to the current situation.
By contrast, smaller leagues and federations may be forced to work together to invest and adapt and this could be a big factor in growth, particularly in digital audiences and resulting revenue mixes. More McKinsey research shows that as much as five years of consumer and business digital adoption has happened in the last eight weeks.
However, this accelerated change does not necessarily mean that change has followed the same path that it would have without the Pandemic. Covid has changed the way we think about hygiene, the way we interact and the way we work and this will have a lasting impact.
The accepted norm in sport that the big will get bigger and the smaller will struggle to survive is hugely over-simplifying matters.
Many smaller sports have been dealing with the reality of not being one of the chosen ones scheduled on linear broadcasters for some time and have adapted their business models accordingly. The Americas Cup and the World Surf League have pioneered this approach over a number of years and it has actually led to more broadcast deals as a result of the success of its digital-first strategies, exponentially growing global audiences in the process.
We may well see a change in the world order as a result of the Pandemic but not necessarily as we might have expected. Strong leadership that is prepared to adopt change thinking combined with investment in the right areas will be the key differentiator, regardless of whether your organisation is large or small.
In times of crisis, sport has always been a reliable and constant presence, providing its fans with a much needed emotional distraction. When sports closed their doors in March for the first time since WW2, showing the world that they too were not immune to this disease, it seemed to bring home to many people how serious this situation was.
InCrowd is a business that has spent the last five years championing the importance of engaging fans digitally as audience consumption changes dramatically. However, we could never have predicted that it would take a pandemic such as this to highlight the importance of a retained and engaged digital audience, now more than ever. Without live sport, clubs and leagues have been burdened with the tasks of keeping their audiences engaged and continuing to service commercial agreements whilst planning for a world without matchday income in which digital channels become a vital centrepiece.
In this paper, we look at how InCrowd clients are successfully navigating a situation that no one was fully prepared for, implementing new strategies and uses for their digital engagement tools whilst battling major digital media outlets to maintain fans’ attention. In addition we gather valuable insight from sports marketing experts on what we can expect for sports on “the other side” and present InCrowd’s four-step approach for rights holders, guiding them towards creating their own positive outcome to the COVID-19 crisis and placing them in better stead for when sport makes its triumphant return.
Many weeks have now passed since sport effectively went into hibernation and as the green shoots of hope emerge with the German Bundesliga having started behind closed doors and the English Premier League setting a provisional date for a similar resumption in a few weeks time. At the time of writing, rumours began circulating of other sports around the world putting together proposals to find a way back into action.
This situation is unprecedented, inescapable, very real and it won’t ‘just go away’. As ever, there are those that are better equipped to adapt and through this there will be clubs, leagues and NGBs that will be able to come out of this crisis in a stronger position than others.
One trend that emerged early in the UK lockdown period was that clubs are better able to retain fan engagement than Leagues and NGBs, with some exceptions of course.
Perhaps this is no surprise due to the allegiance and draw towards the club brands, however, after analysis of the content themes doing well, the majority of the high performing categories could just as easily be published by leagues and NGBs, such as iconic moments, classic matches, legends content and retrospective voting i.e. “team of the decade”.
One organisation that has performed particularly well is Crystal Palace Football Club. Taking a look at mobile app engagement only, Crystal Palace have dropped just 14% of digital engagement comparing pre and post lockdown. This compares very favourably against a club average of 28%, and with two other significant football clubs that have reduced engagement by 39% and 45% during this time.
“The lack of football really has reminded us all just how much the game is loved and the huge role that it plays in many supporter’s lives.”
James Woodroof, Head of Content & Production at Crystal Palace FC explained the strategy behind their success:
“Two months of no football has been unquestionably challenging for all club editorial teams. Of course, in the grand scheme of things – these challenges and indeed the corresponding digital metrics are inconsequential, but nevertheless, the lack of football really has reminded us all just how much the game is loved and the huge role that it plays in many supporter’s lives. Therefore, one could argue that our role in providing engaging editorial content to give people an escape matters more than ever before.
As a club, we have been even more focused on the importance of our role within the community, and specifically on supporting those who are most vulnerable. Extremely early on in the crisis, we were sharing health and wellbeing advice from our club doctor for supporters self-isolating, as well as offering support to all 1,200 of our season ticket holders over the age of 70.
Our Chairman to his credit has been immensely proactive with statements regarding the club’s position on matters related to the pandemic, and also offering insightful thought leadership in terms of the various scenarios at a league level. Our manager penned a wonderful open letter to supporters, and these two articles have been our most read of all time. Our open lines of communication with our fans throughout this period about everything we are doing will undoubtedly have had an impact on our relatively healthy digital engagement levels.
We are extremely lucky to have a team of exceptionally gifted writers, photographers, social media experts, and production unit – and with the amount of time granted to us by the pandemic, that has helped us diversify our content in many ways. We have shown several classic matches in their entirety that have lay dormant for many years, supported by video interviews with the stars of those games as bonus content for our free members.
There have been regular Instagram Live interviews with first team players, even interactive pub quizzes. We also dusted off old Season Review DVDs, which were pay-per-view to raise money for our Foundation.
There have been countless phone conversations with former players that have been made into long-form reads, and we’ve engaged directly with supporters by asking them to share examples of their favourite club memorabilia that they’ve acquired, which has been illuminating for us – with several spin-off stories in the pipeline.
Finally, for several months, our video team have been working on a project where we shared our claim to be the oldest football club in the world through a fantastic short film, having been informed about new evidence clearly showing our lineage to the original Crystal Palace FC of 1861. This story has stimulated fierce debate around the world, and we have seen huge interest in our historical content since that launch.”
Whilst in general clubs seem to be out-performing Leagues and NGBs, one governing body that continues to excel digitally, even during this period, is UEFA. In fact UEFA Champions League Facebook and IGTV platforms generated the highest number of interactions per video across all major global leagues and federations last month.
For our content team at InCrowd, which manages UEFA’s social content, there has recently been significant focus on converting digital audiences through to UEFA.tv subscriptions. Rather than letting the lack of live events scupper their targets, the team, along with their colleagues at UEFA HQ, have been innovative in their strategy to continue the positive trend of sign-ups by, like many right owners, turning to archive content. UEFA decided to create an entirely new brand utilising this archive footage and the result was the UEFA Classics campaign.
“In a planned two-month campaign, the KPI for UEFA.tv registrations was hit within ten days, with organic UEFA social media accounts being the primary source of new subscribers.”
Sam Adams, who heads up the content division at InCrowd, explained:
“The centrepiece of the Classics campaign was legendary UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League & EURO matches, replayed in full as live on UEFA.tv (UEFA’s OTT platform). The games went out every weekday at 17CET, the sweet spot time to hit all the key global markets. Vital to its success has been a fully integrated cross-platform collaboration plan in which UEFA’s other owned and operated channels switched focus to become referral drivers to UEFA.tv.
Our social media strategy concentrated on using Twitter cards, which have proved to be the biggest referrer, and Instagram Stories to drive fans to UEFA.tv. These posts were built upon by shoulder content tapping into fan nostalgia, while UEFA ambassadors who played in those games were also utilised (e.g. in Instagram Q&As). Classics-related video accounted for 12.5m views on Instagram the week of 4 May or 22% of all video views, demonstrating that the content was holding its own as a standalone strand.
The native platforms –– UEFA.com & competition apps –– published supporting content (video, text and still imagery) such as best moments from corresponding seasons, related match highlights, scene-setters and historical colour pieces. Following the initial success, corresponding ‘throwback seasons’ were added to each week’s content plan to enable existing competition sponsors to reignite branded partner posts on official channels.
It was then important for us to dial back the Classics referral posting frequency after its early surge, redressing the balance between our short-term campaign promotion priority and our long-term strategy to retain high engagement across our operated channels.”
Both Crystal Palace and UEFA have shown the power of utilising cross-platform marketing strategies to amplify their content and objectives; social as volume driver and converter, with owned channels hosting and converting audiences through to action like OTT subscription. But even owned channels are showing variation during this period with apps and websites performing very differently.
The relationship we’ve traditionally observed between our clients’ App & Web audiences has been consistent across sports & types of rights holders. Web audiences can often be up to 10x the size of their counterparts, but Apps make up for this with much higher user-level engagements; the likes of Sessions per User, Page Views, Pages per Session, and Duration per Session are significantly higher in App communities. This is unsurprising in relation to their respective positions in the traditional sporting funnel –– Web typically comes into its own at the top end whereas App is stronger towards the bottom at engaging, converting and retaining audiences. But how has this landscape changed as a result of Covid-19? Below, you will find a graph that plots the percentage of digital usage that App represents, where app and website combined for a single rights holder equals 100%.
Across a cross-section of Leagues & Clubs, there is a consistent average of ~10% of digital users use the App. The global pandemic hasn’t hugely shifted this behaviour, Web & App have both seen user volumes drop at fairly similar rates since Covid-19 began. However, we noted during our research that, for 65% of the clients we reviewed in this study, the proportion of App Users has actually increased (i.e. the number of web users saw a steeper decline than app users), but the ultimate average was tempered by 35% of clients who saw particularly significant shifts in app vs web usage behavior, towards web. Notably, as demonstrated in a previous graph, it has been leagues & competitions, more than clubs, that have experienced this greater decline in usage.
Regardless of rights holder type, where we have seen the most significant changes in behaviours during Covid-19 has been in the user engagement-based metrics. Our Apps are designed to create surges of Sessions and subsequent higher Page Views due to an array of content types, fan engagements, and communication triggers. This creates a hive of activity as higher-affinity fans have a larger variety of reasons to continually return. Over the last couple of months, we have seen the high shares of app sessions & page views drop to the ~30% mark where they were previously sitting closer to 40% & 50% of total engagement respectively. One conclusion we can draw traces back to a slowing of App content production – the cornerstone of the channel’s strategy – which has naturally declined while sporting events aren’t happening, as well as the high usage of apps typically seen in-line with matches, where fans utilise the apps for stats, commentary and are often tempted to open via match related push notifications such as line-ups. Less production = less engagement.
Web usage metrics have also dropped since March, but less pronounced. This is an expected outcome, with the majority of fans checking in occasionally from a search to retrieve a specific piece of information related for fixtures, results and live scores. Reductions in content production due to Covid have essentially had less of an impact on the audience & their expectation of the channel. Overall, it’s clear that, even in these unprecedented times, Apps are still performing very well in taking big shares of overall digital engagement behaviours considering their relative audience size.
What has started to become apparent across sports & client types over the last 3 months is that general engagement, regardless of channel, is simply beginning to drop at a sharper rate. While clients have tried to pivot their content strategies to keep capturing fan attention (so far resulting in mixed success across the board), April represented a significant drop across most metrics from the perhaps more novelty period of March. This is an intriguing opportunity to more deeply understand a fan’s relationship with sports, and how a period of inactivity leading to dwindling fan attention could actually be used to better tune marketing automation and audience management moving forward.
Naturally, the recent announcements regarding the resumption of competition for many sports is dramatically reversing this decline, but we shouldn’t forget the lessons this teaches us about how important it is to be able to engage fans with diverse content outside of matches. If this were addressed it would lead to a softening of typical downward engagement trends seen in the off-season or even mini-drops seen between match weekends and competitive events.
Regardless of the impact of this global pandemic, the need for sports rights holders to diversify and upweight content production was already a key theme in the industry, mirrored by the significant appointments of personnel with media backgrounds into organisations such as The Jockey Club, Premiership Rugby and the former shortlist for the Premier League football CEO position. The approach is designed to enable these organisations to successfully capture their fair share of audience attention from their competitors and partners in media.
Too often rights holders are losing out to major digital outlets in this fight, having a significantly detrimental impact on broader commercial revenues due to the intrinsic link between audience volume and engagement levels to the size of direct and indirect (sponsorship) revenues.
This is evidenced to some degree in the graph below which shows engagement with one major rights holders website (blue) and engagement from the league’s fans with league related content on third party websites (red) two weeks before and several weeks after lockdown.
What is clear is despite no matches taking place, the aggregate of third party channels experienced a smaller drop of audience engagement. These channels are typically media organisations therefore more nimble and able to switch gears to produce both COVID related and other general content in order to minimise the negative impact.
Max Jolly, CEO of digital marketing business Arcspire commented:
“The challenge for a rights holder is how to be relevant amongst the major digital media outlets. How do they retain uniqueness that fans can only consume through them?”
“It comes down to rights holder’s providing a reason for fans to go to their own site or app. At what point am I opening a new browser tab and typing in the rights holders web address (or opening the app)? What fan need is the rights holder fulfilling at that point that they can’t fulfil elsewhere more easily? As a fan, I go to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc every day and can get my updates and news there. I may also go to my preferred news channel every day e.g. Sky News, BBC Sport, The Times, The Daily Mail etc and get my news there. I might even go to a specialist sports forum e.g. NewsNow, RugbyPass, LiveScore etc to dive deeper into my passion.
The challenge for rights holders is how to be relevant amongst these options. How do they retain some unique content or element of the relationship that fans can only consume through them? This is a lot harder when live sport isn’t being played. I think a lot comes down to good content and thinking editorially about what content is where and how it is structured and shared. This could mean sign-posting content on social channels but requiring people to come to their site to consume it fully. Once there, how is the site structured to give them the next best piece of content and keep them there, and engaged, and with a reason to come back.”
Max is illustrating a core challenge we focus on at InCrowd; the ability for rights holders to capture and engage fans. Both of which are the first two steps towards successful conversion, where conversion means an outcome which supports the commercial objectives of the rights holders i.e. a fan registration, a direct transaction or engagement with a sponsored asset. We aim to align different technologies to each part of this process and illustrate this in a typical funnel:
Whilst several challenges that might occur for rights holders that aren’t able to digitally maximise their core asset are obvious, Max highlights a slightly less obvious threat of losing this audience to more sophisticated digital players. “The interesting shift that Covid-19 may accelerate is the digital giants winning more broadcast rights. The ‘digital-winners’ of Covid-19 will have their cash reserves enlarged and rights holders may be looking to carve up broadcast deals to get maximum value. This represents both opportunity and threat. The opportunity is clear: to bring in more revenues from new ‘alternative’ broadcasters. The threat is a little more hidden. The likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube etc are using their engagement mechanics to capture audience attention and discussion with little investment required in the content. Every rights holder has to build their audience and connect with fans on these platforms.
Social networks simply have the scale of audience and this is therefore where most fans reside digitally too. Whilst rights holders get to connect with fans, the digital giants get to hoover up data on fans. This enables them to offer these fan audiences to any advertiser that is interested. The digital giants have much better data on fans, capture the conversation as well as the emotion, which is sports secret sauce. So as more and more broadcast rights, highlights, memes etc are shared on these channels the bigger the threat grows.
Who has the ability to turn passions into purchases? The likes of Google and Facebook are able to offer a ‘full-funnel’ solution to brands, totally independent of any official sponsorship. I can watch the highlights on YouTube and then be targeted when I search on Google. I can watch the match on Amazon Prime and then be targeted when I’m shopping on Amazon. In this world, why does a brand need sponsorship at all when the digital giants have the data and gateway to fans that they need?
If any evidence was needed, Google, Facebook and Amazon recently announced their Q1 2020 results; together they grew by almost $7billion in advertising revenues in a quarter. This represents over 3x the annual growth in global sponsorship revenues forecasted by WARC in 2020. Marketing directors are voting with their budgets. They want the accountability and performance that these channels provide.”
“When sport returns, digital is going to be a more prominent focus than ever before, a huge acceleration in a pattern of behaviour.”
The COVID-19 crisis will change the way in which sports rights holders engage with their audiences forever. As the head of marketing a Championship football club said to me during lockdown – “digital is all we have now”. But even beyond the “now”, when sport returns, digital is going to be a more prominent focus than ever before, a huge acceleration in a pattern of behaviour. So what can sports rights holders do to ensure they are one of the organisations that thrive in this new era:
InCrowd is here to help plan & deliver all of the above. To find out about how we can work together to navigate this new world of sports engagement, get in touch!
InCrowd Online:
