By Mounir Zok
How are digitalization and sustainability connected? And how can the sports industry act as a lever for ecological change? These were topics I was recently invited to discuss alongside our industry partners and peers at The SPOT 2023, ThinkSport’s annual business event held in Lausanne, Switzerland. There are several key takeaways I would like to bring to our readers.
From a technological perspective, digital transformation is already helping rights holders reduce the environmental impact of sports events. This might include how remote-broadcast technologies reduce the production footprint at sporting venues, as well as the opportunity for digitizing the in-stadia fan experience through, for example, the adoption of mobile ticketing.
At the center of this movement, the sports fan is playing a supporting role in the industry’s sustainability drive. Cited in our Digital Roadmap 2030 report, a study carried out by Global Web Index (GWI) shows that more than two thirds of fans, aged between 16 and 24, advocate efforts to support environmental change within the teams and brands they follow. Meanwhile, 70 percent of fans in the same age category say they would pay more for eco-friendly products.
Fan engagement and direct-to-consumer (D2C) media can play important roles in the reduction of sport’s environmental impact and bring new eco-friendly technologies to mass audiences. Nevertheless, to meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives, there’s also scope for sports organizations to make tangible changes to their internal infrastructure and business processes by addressing their digital practices.
One of the biggest opportunities lies within an entity’s data transformation and how its digital framework simplifies dataflow and cuts out surplus, resource-heavy operations that may come at a cost both to the organization’s bottom-line and, you’ve guessed it, the entity’s carbon footprint. This plays into other areas of the environmental movement too, including: (1) the trial of new business models that support the circular economy; (2) the development of sustainable supply chains; and (3) the promotion of those eco-friendly brands and products the modern sports fan is demanding.
KEY TAKEAWAYS | WHAT THE SPOT 2023 TAUGHT US
In many ways, sport’s sustainability drive is still in its infancy. However, the industry is well-placed to make a serious contribution to the planet’s pursuit for carbon neutrality. Here, I’d like to share some of the lessons the sports industry can take on board at all levels of the pyramid and the values drawn from digital transformation, discussed at The SPOT 2023.
1. Collaboration and not competition is key to bringing about change. As the sports industry continues to connect and share learnings gleaned from their processes and experiences, forums such as The SPOT can give these conversations a platform and nurture opportunities for positive collaboration; to bring about ideas and digital solutions that promote sustainable ecosystems, in-house, and connect sustainable brands, media, and stakeholders with fans via digital, data-driven content. The fourth edition of The SPOT, ThinkSport’s international sport and innovation event, attracted 600 delegates, speakers, and exhibitors from the sports industry, business community, startups, academia, non-governmental organizations (NGO) and public entities, giving a space to speak freely about how to tackle the challenges the climate crisis poses the industry.
2. Mass-participation events are benchmarking sustainability practices. Speaking at The SPOT, it was interesting to hear the thoughts of Stephane Ruault, Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s Head of Partnerships, about the role of brands in developing sustainable sporting events. For example, the Paris Marathon is among the world’s fully carbon neutral sporting events, having set a goal alongside its title sponsor, Schneider Electric, to become a net-zero race event by 2019. As rights holders seek to maximize their brand partnership through data-driven, segmented marketing, tapping into mass events can help stakeholders drive tangible changes as part of their customer-facing sustainability strategy.
3. Identify indicators that best measure your ESG efforts. In order to establish key metrics for monitoring the progress of an organization, data governance is a fundamental process for keeping track of your sustainability initiatives. This might involve optimizing your operations to meet business objectives in a sustainable way, while also striving to understand what drives fan behavior and areas where your brand can help reduce the user’s carbon footprint. In order to achieve sustainable transformation, the general consensus from The SPOT is for organizations to take a “human-centric” approach to innovation and greater ownership of their business processes and measurements.
4. Get on with it. Despite the importance for clean data management, over-analysis can lead to paralysis when it comes to implementing sustainability initiatives. While fan and business intelligence are key to making decisions, information should support an organization’s ESG efforts, not validate them. During his keynote speech, Tom Waller, Senior Vice President of Innovation for the Adidas sportswear brand, posed three key questions sports executives should be asking themselves: (1) what does the world need most?; (2) what are you most qualified to do?; and (3) what is humanly possible? While sports entities and their objectives widely vary, assessing an entity’s digital acumen is a useful step towards understanding how digital transformation can help a company meet its sustainability goals.
WHAT’S N3XT?
Digital transformation plays an important role in many different ways. Among them, fan engagement and the monetization of new digital experiences are common drivers for rights holders and event organizers. Meanwhile, the integration of technologies and a robust customer relationship management (CRM) capability is dependent on how well an organization’s existing digital ecosystem supports the collection and extraction of data.
One of the benefits of this transition is the sports industry’s ability to connect stakeholders with the consumer and, in many cases, bring about innovations based on fan intelligence. As the industry continues to evolve, one thing the digital transformation of the sports industry has taught me is that agility opens the door to new opportunities to innovate and a platform for introducing novel ideas to mainstream audiences.
With the ability to scale operations to meet customer needs and urgent industry demands, digitizing the way in which the industry engages the fan, communicates with stakeholders, and leverages data will have a dramatic impact on the sector’s ability to drive meaningful societal change and meet environmental challenges. This, in turn, is setting a benchmark for sport bodies and their partners to make changes to their own processes and provide the fans and stakeholders which sport touches with the tools and technologies they need to become more sustainable.
To learn more about sport’s digital transformation and our mission to propel the sports industry forward, please fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. I’d be delighted to discuss your organization’s needs and how we can help you meet your business objectives.