On Tuesday 25th, together with Euroleague Basketball, Roca, Kamleon, iSportconnect, La Salle, and N3XT Sports, we hosted the Future of Sports Summit. Right after the Startup competition, we curated and moderated two panels entitled 1) Disruptive Innovation in Sports and 2) The Fan of the Future. Read on some of the takeaways
DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION IN SPORTS
Big corporations are increasingly exploring new ways of collaboration by partnering with external constituents of their ecosystem. A recent example is Roca wanting to create a new business model by entering into the sports industry. ¨In five years, we would like to be able to set up a platform that – through data collected in the bathroom – can help sports teams, clubs and leagues better understand the health and physical conditions of their players. In turn, this will enable them to make smarter decisions¨. – Miguel Ángel Heras, Head of Marketing at Roca.
There is a trend for big organizations to look for new value, and high levels of expertise in startups. We heard it from Miguel Ángel: ¨if we try to immerse ourselves in the sports industry with no help, we know we will fail. That’s why we decided to partner with a startup, as they bring a lot of value and expertise that we cannot find in-house¨.
It is not always that easy for a startup to convince a big corporation to work with it. Here are some pointers: ¨1) sharing the same vision on what both parties need to reach, but also when and how to start, 2) providing a value proposition with tangible results in the short-term¨– Jordi Ferré, CEO at Kamleon.
For an organization to remain competitive it must continuously improve its innovation capabilities. To foster a culture of innovation within an organization, an environment of collaboration, agility and experimentation must be generated. This will help sustain innovation efforts over time. ¨EuroLeague Basketball was founded in a very disruptive way and the entrepreneurial spirit has been within the EuroLeague since day 1¨– Alex Ferrer, Head of Marketing and Communication at Euroleague Basketball.
In our Football Innovation report, we identified 10 different innovation mechanisms that sports organizations can implement to contribute to the achievement of their overarching strategic objectives. A recent example of this is the Startup competition launched by Euroleague Basketball back in December 2019 with the aim to find a disruptive and innovative solution to enhance the fan experience. This is becoming more popular, however some organizations needlessly rush to start their innovation journey without a strategy in place.
¨The landscape over the past years has changed quite a lot, and now both parties – the startup and the corporation – have to really think why they are doing this, what is the reason behind it, and what value it brings to their stakeholders¨- Stina Lundgren, Stockholm School of Economics.
The undisputed leaders in sports innovation and technology are certainly the major leagues in the US: the NBA, and the NFL, for example. The US sports industry is certainly ahead of the game in terms of innovation. This gives other stakeholders in the sports industry a wealth of knowledge and experience to learn from, but replicating what has worked elsewhere is a limited view. Strategies must be properly contextualized and personalized to each organization’s objectives.
THE FAN OF THE FUTURE
Because of the ever-changing landscape, many sports organizations have the necessity to get to know their fans better, to collect data from them, in order to offer them personalized content and to increase their lifetime economic value. At N3XT Sports, we trust in the importance of digital foundations to propel sports organizations forward. With our clients, we call this process digital transformation, and we start it with a holistic digital readiness exercise that looks at processes, tools, assets, data architecture, content and people. Once these objective parameters are collated, it becomes straightforward to develop and prioritize a digital strategy.
If we look back ten years ago, the fan experience was unidirectional, so everybody would get the same content with no interaction nor engagement. Now, the fan experience has changed and has become bidirectional, where fans are sharing behavioral and transactional data that allows sports organizations to personalize content, take calculated incremental risk, and change the fan experience altogether.
There is always a back and forth conversation about the audiences of live sport events. ¨Our data is telling us that live stream still remains fundamentally important. There is still, of course, consumption of the full event by the older generations. But what we’re having a lot of success is on creating different products – shoulder content – around the full event¨– Luis Vicente, CEO at Eleven Sports
The key word when we talk about content consumption and news ways of broadcasting is ´tailor made suit´. ¨Give them what they want, whatever device they have, wherever they are located, whatever age group they are¨ – Luis Vicente
A recent study done by DAZN shows that consumers only really want to subscribe to maybe three to four paid services. ¨So I think that will impact how important it is to aggregate content and trying to create an offering that delivers what fans want¨– Laura Louisy, VP Rights Acquisition at DAZN
New stakeholders are entering the ecosystem, and the sports industry is not competing against itself anymore, it is competing with other industries. A clear example is how OTTs like DAZN are not competing only against other sports platforms like 11 Sports but also against other OTTs like Netflix, and Amazon, amongst others.
Can you imagine a football club working by itself? No, right? Rights holders have to work closely with stakeholders from the ecosystem in order to generate new value.
Looking to address the fragmented sports media space, right holders need to take advantage of this by partnering with platforms like Twitter as they can monetize their content and they can reach out to new audiences. ¨25% of what we call Millennials are unreachable by traditional media¨ – Simone Tomassetti, Head of Sports Partnerships at Twitter.
Talking about reaching to the new generations and new business opportunities, there are regions like Africa that have a massive opportunity in sports that nobody has taken a chance in yet. In 5-6 years it is going to be more advanced in terms of connectivity and infrastructure as they will have the chance to build up new ones from scratch rather than having to live with legacy systems. ¨I think it is a massive audience. Let me give you some data from the continent, Africa is actually the continent that proportionately spends more money per capita in football consumption. This is because the younger population is spending almost all their income to actually try to consume football content¨ – Luis Vicente
To wrap up the discussion about the fan of the future and where the future of broadcasting headed, we should highlight that the use of data is key to make better decisions; to get to know your fan better, to be able to offer them personalized content, and to build new small products around one big product. Finding the right balance between live-content and non-live content is key to get more subscribers and to make your consumers engage even more with the content.