Consumer habits are changing constantly. The way they consume sports content is different than it was a few years ago. The entrance of big tech into the content and entertainment space has hastened these changes. With Netflix’s annual content spend exceeding $15 billion, and Disney expecting 350 million subscribers across its Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu streaming services by 2024, the gauntlet has most certainly been thrown down. In comparison, Deloitte’s annual football money league 2020 announced that the top 20 clubs in Europe had a revenue of $8.2 billion.
The sports industry is competing against, and sometimes partnering with, this new environment of stakeholders while rethinking the way audiences want to engage with, share and consume sports content. New generations of fans are drastically different in their behaviors and preferences around content.
These changes have put immense pressure on sports properties to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. Whereas organizations were previously questioning the right time to embark on this journey, 78% of sports decision-makers are now prioritizing it and carving out their digital & data rights (read more on digital transformation here).
So what does it take to know and grow your audience in this new landscape?
This was the backdrop of an engaging discussion that our CEO, Mounir Zok, moderated at this year’s Global Sports Week 2021. Entitled ‘Innovation in Football: Case studies in audience growth”, the panel brought together:
Leaning on their collective expertise as some of the top minds in audience development in sports, we light the path ahead for those seeking to answer the question. These insights are brought to you in a 3-part series to help you crack the code of knowing and growing your audiences.
Part 1 discusses the insights around how digital & data form the backbone of any strategy to know and grow your audience. Read on, share it and get in touch if you’re embarking on your audience development journey.
DIGITAL & DATA FOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT
Whereas there’s consensus that data is the currency of the future, understanding the data flow around an organization and maximizing the value that data can generate are nascent topics within the sports industry. Now, many decision-makers are grasping the enormity of the transformation needed to tap into the limitless possibilities that lie ahead of them.
Two sports properties that are not foreign to data and its significant importance are UEFA and Bundesliga. While several properties were hindered by the pandemic over the last months, these two organizations were capable of increasing their reach and engagement metrics thanks to their innovative leadership and tech-driven thinking.
¨We have developed a digital ecosystem around UEFA properties that is focused on growing the audience for European football. Because of the evolution of the media landscape, we took a holistic approach to digital and together with our partner, Endeavor Streaming, we have developed a streaming platform where we have grown our digital audience quite significantly. ¨ – Guy-Laurent Epstein
UEFA, together with its media partner Endeavor Streaming explored new ways to exploit their digital assets and one way was doing it through UEFA’s OTT platform, UEFA TV. It leveraged the decades of archived games it has access to on its OTT platform and overlaid much of this content with new data points and statistics, thus producing a different product for fans. It promoted these new digital media assets through its social media channels and was able to continue entertaining its fans and growing its audience. UEFA TV reached the 1 million subscribers milestone quickly during the pandemic and proved that rights holders who invest in their digital and data capabilities can strengthen their offering to partners and to the audiences they wish to engage with.
To achieve this milestone, UEFA responded quickly as the pandemic started. It reviewed the type of content and the way they were distributing it across their platforms, and decided to focus on the archive content and its delivery and distribution to fans. UEFA utilized data to understand the behaviors of audiences across different territories and develop bespoke experiences for their international fans. The data included macro behaviors such as time watched and type of content consumed.
What UEFA did is an excellent example of utilizing data to understand their clients and consequently to measure their behaviour. This is step number 1 in audience growth. From here, organizations can grow their audience and market share by using this data to develop and distribute the most relevant content, services, products and experiences.
Amassing data from different digital platforms is not a question of how, but a question of what to do with it when it is generated. Deriving value from the touchpoints that create this data is the next step to knowing and growing an organization’s audience. Another organization that knows the value of holistic data collection and analysis is Bundesliga, which recognized that there was inherent value in data from every single game. To exploit it commercially and develop new experiences and services for fans, the league tapped into the data & cloud capabilities of AWS, which it struck a partnership with in 2020.
¨We started our partnership with AWS in January 2020, with the launch of a new product: Bundesliga Match Facts. Thanks to technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and computing power, we are able to analyze 3.6 millions data points in milliseconds, and at the same time analyze 10,000 historical matches for similar situations. Offering this type of match data to the fan enhances their viewing experience and creates a conversation among their community and ecosystem, which increases the engagement of our fans.¨ – Robert Klein
More concretely, the Bundesliga’s work with AWS helped turn data into streams that can be fed into the live feeds of match broadcasts. This enabled the Bundesliga’s media partners to increase the attractiveness of their broadcasts thereby enhancing the quality of their overall product offering to fans. This led to new levels of fan engagement that proved commercially fruitful for the Bundesliga’s media operations.
COVID pushed sports rights holders outside of the traditional media assets to look at digital & data assets more attentively. The absence of live sports and the continued haphazard schedule that many sports rights holders face due to COVID has underlined the importance of non-live.
The importance of data and digital became clear during COVID, when partners across the sports ecosystem were looking for ways to engage audiences and continue to deliver value to them. Faced with the void of live sports, non-live sports content such as documentaries proved valuable to ensure ‘stickiness’ of platforms. One of the star performers during the early days of the pandemic was the Michael Jordan series ‘The Last Dance’, produced by ESPN Films, Netflix, NBA Entertainment and others. The rising importance of shoulder programming around live sports such as game highlights are especially attractive to different generations of fans.
As we have seen throughout this article, digital and data are key to audience development. Stay tuned as part 2 and 3 of a 3-part series are coming up.
Get in touch with us if your organization is exploring new ways to grow its audience.