Sports broadcasts started with the radio in 1920 when the first professional American football game was broadcast on Thanksgiving Day, between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions. The first baseball game to be broadcast live on TV was between the Preston and Columbia universities, despite the fact that there were only 400 TVs capable of receiving it on May 17, 1939.

As audiences grew, so did the revenue from advertising in sport. Brands were signing up athletes to endorse their products while companies such as Coca Cola were paying to have their brand displayed alongside the Olympics. The first stadium naming rights were sold in the 50s when a baseball stadium renamed itself Busch Park – after the brewery Anheuser Busch.

Today sports marketing encapsulates a world of opportunities, from naming rights, product endorsements and event appearances to image rights and even clothing partners. A football club can at once have an official car partner, official watch partner, official bank partner to even an official fast-food partner. Similarly athletes are in most cases free to sign their own commercial agreements for their image rights to a multitude of companies at once.

Mohammad Salah, an Egyptian forward who plays for Liverpool, is arguably the most sought after footballer not only in the Arab world but also in Europe due to his performances in the red shirt. He currently has contracts with Adidas, DHL, Vodafone, AlexBank, Pepsi, and Model to name a few. He is also the face for the Egyptian Anti-Addiction Treatment Fund, a partnership which has helped increase calls for help to their call centers by a whopping 400%.

Marketing and sponsorship revenue is also a key source of funding for sports entities, allowing improvement in the quality of their athletes, facilities, management and equipment.

Sports And Social Media

When Hutchison’s ‘3’ launched 3g in the UK in March 2003, the ground-breaking feature being promoted was the ability to instantly download and view goals from premiership football matches, seconds after they happened in real time. Today we have apps that broadcast multiple games from different leagues around the world, in full HD format on our smartphone screens.

The evolution of mobile phones into smartphones, and with it the technology that enables streaming HD video has flipped sport consumption behavior on its head. The NBA finals last year were official broadcast around the world on YouTube TV, reaching audiences in over 200 countries on desktop computers, televisions, and mobile devices. The MLB signed exclusive broadcast contract with Facebook to deliver 26 games online for a sum of $30 million. This resulted in over 120 million views on the platform, prompting MLB to seek a similar contract for the next season. Meanwhile Facebook has separately signed an agreement with the Spanish League to livestream La Liga matches to Indian audiences for free for the next three years, giving the league and the teams within it, a boost in viewership and popularity in a country of over 1.2b people.

With smartphones, the fan engagement doesn’t end at the final whistle, unlike on television. Fans interact and share their critique on the game through fan boards, social media, podcasts, fantasy leagues, and many other platforms. Sporting entities and sponsors invest heavily in creating and managing online engagement platforms for fans to remain invested before, during and after sporting contests.

Sports marketers can create tailor made content and then distribute it through wide ranging digital distribution methods, which also provide insight and analytics into how fans are engaging with the content in real time. The primary goal of sports fans using smartphones is to stay up to date and gather knowledge about their preferred team and sport. This enables unprecedent opportunities to for ROI driven impactful brand communication and engagement.

ESports & Games

Games are among the most immersive and engaging marketing platforms available to an advertiser. They’re great for product recall particularly for brands that their audience is already aware of, and are increasingly used as a key component of media planning to reach this particular audience segment.

The eSports audience meanwhile continues to rapidly grow into a mainstream phenomenon globally, at a rate of around 24 percent annually since 2016.

With Covid-19 impacting attendances, the eSports market is set to benefit from increased eyeballs and engagement rates. Even before Covid-19, the trends indicate the eSports phenomenon to be a long-term and consistent success story worldwide.

Sports clubs and entities have their own sponsored leagues and tournaments watched by thousands of dedicated fans around the world. This provides another great opportunity for marketers to engage with audiences in an environment that is charged with high emotion.

Spanish footballing giants Real Madrid have recently stepped into the eSports industry, announcing plans to include a high tech eSports arena in their new home stadium. This arena will hold large eSports tournaments comprising of fans from around the world, similar to what the English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur announced. Real Madrid have priced the revenue potential from non-footballing activities at around five million dollars, due to its 60,000 seating capacity and online sales.

With eSports and sport video games being multi-billion dollar industries, more attention from brands as well as marketers can benefit the advertisers grab eyeballs and influence behaviors in favorable ways. This also has a significant impact on the sales of sports merchandise, content viewership, and also sport event attendance.

Content Marketing Partnerships

Content creation and distribution now is an integral part of any sporting club’s marketing and distribution model. Clubs hire professionals either as part of their own production unit, or contract independent production companies and creative agencies to assist with content creation.

Many clubs have their own digital TV and cable TV channels, such as Barca TV+, LFCTV, MUTV, Chelsea TV and so on. These channels broadcast specially curated content for different audience groups, including phone-ins and competitions to encourage customer engagement and participation. Many of these activities are partnered by different sponsors or carry advertising messages.

For some of the larger clubs with fans around the world, it is extremely beneficial to have multi-lingual content created and aimed at different regions of the world. Many football clubs for example have entire content hubs in Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese. A lot of content is produced and dubbed in different languages, while the club’s main social media accounts branch into multiple regional accounts in different languages. Liverpool Football Club for example, puts out Eid greetings to the Middle East in Arabic, Independence Day messages to audiences in Pakistan in Urdu, and wishes the Chinese a happy new year in Mandarin.

Clubs are increasingly working in a much more integrated way with the marketing teams of their long-term sponsors. Brands view these partnerships in the long-term and set their objectives on engagement with the fans – comments, likes, shares and completed views – rather than on impressions alone. Brands also work on gauging sentiment and emotion through algorithms available with many ad-tech platforms, such as Unruly which also allows brands to target users based on their current emotion. Given the choice, a restaurant chain would gladly pay to advertise to potential customers immediately after their team wins, for example. A VOD service such as Netflix however, can ensure their marketing message is displayed in front of fans during a particularly boring game or after an unfavorable result.

Talking of Netflix, many football clubs are partnering with global video giants such as Netflix or Amazon’s Prime, to produce feature length documentaries and movies. Manchester City has invested £10m into a documentary series titled ‘All or Nothing: Manchester City’. Liverpool has its own movie on Prime titled ‘Make Us Dream | Steven Gerrard’ centered around its incredible 2005 Champions League victory.

Clubs now have official YouTube channels and social media accounts where such content is hosted, promoted and engaged-with. Due to the data and analytical capabilities accessible with digital advertising, clubs now know more about their customers and their preferences than ever before.

In addition to ‘free’ content, clubs have special fan zones for paid subscribers, giving them early access to content as well as distributing exclusive content only visible to paid subscribers. This provides further segmentation benefits as clubs and their partners can target their communication to these fans based on their spending data.

Football clubs are increasingly seeking partnerships with content producers such as Netflix and Prime even though these markets were previously neglected. Clubs have clear objectives to amass as many viewers and subscribers as they can, which in turn leads to more fans followed by brand domination.

Sponsorships are no longer a one-way street, but more of a collaboration between two partners. The signs had been evident of the market evolving in this manner, however today most successful relationships are genuine partnerships between two fully engaged entities.

The key skill set required to succeed in the marketplace today include:

•            Aligning sponsorship offer with the brand’s overall marketing plan.

•            Deep knowledge on their fanbase driven by data.

•            Flexibility on available sponsorship assets based on the brand’s requirements.

•            Collaborate to produce engaging content that stands out.

No other medium comes close to the emotional intensity of sport. When we discuss relationship marketing, storytelling, and content marketing, what determines success across all these is the creation of emotional engagement with one’s audience. A 2016 study found that campaigns which evoked emotion performed around 10x higher than rational campaigns, and marketers today know the value of ’emotion’ in the marketing landscape.

For the full research report into Sports Marketing and the opportunity for Middle East brands to reach key audiences internationally through sport, please drop me a note at dan.qayyum[at]themediavantage.com