Digital and Social Media Sports

My mom was blowing up my texts this past week.

There wasn’t some major family event or gossip. It was because the Anaheim Ducks were all over the news after their young star player, Leo Carlsson, signed a pricey offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers, trying to poach him from the Ducks. She was also in constant communication with Julie, a seat neighbor-turned-friend my mom had met in the years since she and my dad became Ducks season ticket holders.

Therein lies the greatest value of sports fandom. I talk to my mom more than I would if we didn’t share an interest in the NHL. My mom’s social circle widened thanks to her and my dad attending dozens of Ducks games over the last decade.

The why and so what for sports marketers has, for years, mostly centered on entertainment, epic narratives, identity, and local pride. Sports fandom applies to all of that, sure, but at its deepest, most human roots, being a sports fan is about connection, community, and catalyzing conversation.

Ben Valenta analyzes sports fandom for a living. Through years of study and surveys, data and anecdotes, observation and experience, he has developed frameworks to distill what it means to be a sports fan and why it matters for individuals and even society at large. To start to understand sports fandom, it helps to define what we mean when we talk about sports fans in the first place. As a cliché reminder, the word ‘fan’ is short for fanatic, but the fan label is thrown around quite liberally and generically these days. For Valenta, the definition and degrees of fandom are simple.

“Fandom is passion plus action. And that’s how we measure it,” said Valenta, who, in addition to his role as EVP of Strategy and Analytics at FOX Sports, also co-authored the book Fans Have More Friends. “And then what we’ve done is very simple: we’ve developed what we call a value score. Really, what it is, is just a spectrum of engagement. A lot of people will preach very detailed consumer segmentations and say, ‘Okay, this type of fan behaves this way, so we’re going to call them some sort of pithy name.’ All we do is separate people by the level of their engagement.

“There are people who are more engaged — we call them high-value fans. There are people who are less engaged — we call them mid-value fans. There are people who are kind of on the periphery — low-value fans. And then people who are not fans. And we just really think about the world in those four buckets.”

In short, Valenta reminded me, the easiest way to spot a sports fan is to see them doing things that sports fans do. They watch and attend games, follow the news, talk about the transactions and storylines, play fantasy, maybe make a wager or two, wear the apparel, put up posters, etc., etc. Think about the evolution of your own sports fandom. Or how you or a friend picked up a newfound fandom of a sport, team, or even something like anime or Game of Thrones. Fandom manifests in behaviors.

This is where the science meets the heart. And it’s why a well-practiced fan of something is more apt to become a fan of something else, too. That’s why, despite all the efforts of sports organizations to make their sport or their team the thing that creates a brand-new sports fan, the more efficient effort is spent on attracting existing fans of other sports or teams to pick up fandom for yours. Valenta explained this concept, characterizing fan development as more often horizontal than vertical.

“Generally, the industry standard is to have a take of fandom as verticalized,” said Valenta, who worked across brands in and out of sports before joining FOX Sports. “So we think of NFL fans, and that’s a distinct group from MLB fans, and that’s a distinct group from WNBA fans, and that’s a distinct group from NBA fans. And the reality is that fandom in this country — it’s much more helpful and accurate to think about as a horizontal thing…

“In fact, the more sports you add to someone’s repertoire as a fan, the more likely they are to be a fan of the next sport. This is true across everything from the World Cup to the WNBA to women’s college basketball to the World Surf League to rugby union.”

Valenta continued, describing fandom as a practiced pastime — one that fans learn, hone, and master over time. Fandom becomes an inextricable part of their existence, essential to their relationships and social circles.

“Think of fandom as a muscle,” he said. “You’ve built this muscle, and you have all these social networks that are activated by this thing that’s part of your identity. And now I’ve introduced a new thing to you, a new game. ‘Oh, people are talking about Caitlin Clark on SportsCenter; she’s taking the world by storm.’ The people who are going to respond to that are the people who are already in this space, gobbling all of this stuff up, because their identity and their social networks are activated by that thing.”

If the next fan is already a fan of something else, the next increment of value is more often found inside your existing fanbase than outside it. Valenta’s employer, FOX Sports, is in the business of sports fandom; its success is in maximizing engaged eyeballs on FOX Sports’ sports content and programming. And while enticing a consumer to check out a game or a race in a given sport for the first time ever is valuable, especially if you can create a new, lasting fan in the process, that’s a hell of a lot more challenging, resource-intensive, and hit-or-miss than increasing the engagement of fans who are already there.

“When you think about how to grow ratings — ratings are comprised of three elements. There’s the reach, the duration, and the frequency,” said Valenta. “The reach is how many people watch. The duration is how long they watch. The frequency is how often they watch. You can grow the rating — the currency of the business, what we transact on — by growing any of those three elements.

“It’s much easier to get someone who’s already in the tent, who’s already got the TV on the NFL game, to watch longer, to watch the first quarter of the next game. That’s a much easier proposition than trying to convince someone who doesn’t engage with the NFL to watch one game. That idea of going from 0 to 1 is really difficult. Going from 3 to 4 is relatively much easier.”

Sports fandom exhibits compound growth, too. There are inherent network effects. Being a sports fan with someone else augments the avidity of each fan. There’s a magical feeling that comes from being a fan surrounded by family and friends in the living room, or hundreds of others in a crowded sports bar, or thousands in a packed stadium — the sociological phenomenon Valenta invokes as ‘collective effervescence’.

Beyond the inexplicable desire to high-five strangers, it’s the way that sports fandom stimulates one’s social network that makes it so sticky and impactful. Watching or attending the game together is a recurring chance to spend time with friends or family, and talking about the latest news keeps the group chat humming. Knowing you’ll experience the team’s triumphs and tragedies alongside the people in your life is a big part of why fandom endures and matters so much. Valenta put these ideas into perspective, as the penetration of one’s fandom into their social network is a significant signal of how emotionally invested they are as a fan.

“If you’re talking about growing fandom — whether you want to establish the next generation of fans with a younger audience, or you want to get people to take a few steps further down the passion, engagement, fan value scale — it really all comes down to the social networks that they have that are activated by this thing,” he explained. “When you have someone whose fandom is growing, what you will find motivating that growth is a web of social activity. And if you find someone whose fandom is waning, who is becoming less engaged over time, what you will find on the other side of that is a fraying social network.”

The centrality of sports fandom as a cornerstone of relationships with friends and family is hereditary. Not the part where every Packers fan parent tries their darndest to ensure their offspring also become cheeseheads, but passing on the practice of socializing through sports fandom. It’s seeing your dad have some college buddies over to watch the annual rivalry game, or the family gathering around the TV to watch Team USA in the World Cup. (Too soon?)

Just like kids pick up social norms from observing their parents and other adults modeling behaviors, so too do they understand what it means to be a sports fan. They see their mom give a knowing nod to the cashier wearing the local team lapel pin on the day of a big game. They recognize that the one day each year they get to eat in front of the TV is when the Lions play on Thanksgiving afternoon. So, when sports teams and leagues set out to capture the hearts and minds of kids, to turn them into lifelong fans, the most effective tactics will target the parents.

“It’s important to recognize that adult fandom does not look like kid fandom,” said Valenta, who also talked about going to LA Clippers games with his son, alongside a group of other families. “A lot of what’s taken hold in this conversation is, ‘Oh, kids these days, they root for players, not teams. They only watch highlights; they can’t sit through a game’; they do all of these things that to a 40-year-old seem like they’re not really big fans. And that’s because they’re not, by comparison to a 40-year-old, really big fans. This is an activity that you are socialized into. It takes years, if not decades, to reach peak fandom…

“The other thing that’s really important, especially if you’re a parent — but even if you’re not, if you’re just operating in the business — is to recognize that fandom is a learned behavior that requires repetition over time,” Valenta added. “Parents should model this thing, and it requires repetition. So, it’s not watching one game one time; it’s not watching a couple of games a few times. It’s watching hundreds of games over decades together. The important part is the repetition. But that behavior you’re modeling is stickiest when it’s done in the context of family bonding rituals.”

The other common pathway to developing the next generation of fans is through participation. Sports leagues put significant resources into supporting youth participation. It’s often portrayed as giving back to the community, and it is, but it’s an investment in fan development that they trust will pay off. Particularly for kids, it’s a common rite of passage when playing a sport to imitate the professional star player. They’re also going to be more likely to want to go to the local pro team’s big game with their teammates/friends (leagues and teams often are more than happy to offer a group deal or sometimes even comp tickets to local youth players). And it’s organic that kids will pull up a sick highlight from the big league on their phone to show to their ten-year-old teammates.

If you’ve been paying attention, those scenes should be sending off a signal. The sport is sparking socialization and hanging out together; it’s fueling conversations both at the games and practices and in the hours and days before and after games; it’s driving mutual interest in the pro team and the league’s star players — they’re learning how to be sports fans and doing things that fans do.

The actual sport itself may not even matter, Valenta told me when I noted that there are a whole bunch of NFL fans in the US who have never put on pads. They’ve built up their fandom muscles. They’ve recognized that, to satisfy the basic human instinct to cultivate relationships, being a sports fan is a pretty easy and fun way to do it.

“You get in the habit of using sports as a way to connect, you start connecting about the game and your participation in it and how you’re developing as an athlete, and that also bleeds into how you’re thinking about it as a fan,” said Valenta. “Then eventually you retire, and now what’s left is that you have that fan muscle built up. Part of the point is that once you learn that process and build that muscle, it doesn’t matter that you grew up playing basketball and baseball and soccer — you are now going to be the one that will join the fantasy football league.”

Fans become seasoned veterans, fluent in fandom by the time they reach adulthood. Valenta pegged around age 40 as ‘peak fandom.’ Their fandom becomes closely intertwined with their social lives, whether they’re conscious of it or not. And their lives are better because of it.

This was wonderfully illustrated in an anecdote Valenta recounted; it came from an encounter with one of many fans he and his co-author spoke with for Fans Have More Friends. Valenta told me about Greg Armstrong, a New York Knicks season-ticket holder for multiple decades. They watched him go about his life, observing him at work and even conversing with others at the barbershop. His sports fandom was the ‘activator of his social networks,’ Valenta said. But he closed on the most powerful part. Greg made that 90-minute drive each way with his son. Conventional wisdom suggests that it’s friction to eliminate; in reality, it was the whole point, a feature, not a bug, of the fan experience. What should have been an annoyance, a stressful part of going to games, was Greg’s “favorite part.” Why? Because it meant three hours of uninterrupted, quality time with his son that they wouldn’t have without their shared fandom.

“This is kind of the crux of the whole argument that we make,” Valenta said. “Sports are entertaining, but we’re not selling entertainment. Sports are about the business of belonging. What Greg Armstrong was buying when he purchased season tickets, year after year after year, was time with his kids. And that, I think, is the easiest way to think about what’s actually happening with consumers in this space.”

He’s right, you know. Think about all the relationships in your life that are enhanced by, if not rooted in, sports fandom. The text exchange you had with a friend after Messi’s latest magic in the World Cup, the friendships that form with colleagues through small talk about your favorite teams, and the added interactions and conversations with your parents because of shared sports fandom, the same reason my mom and I have been texting all week.

I think back to a conversation I had when I was in college. I was fully engrossed in sports then, working in the athletic department, writing for the newspaper’s sports section, and hosting a SportsCenter-style show on the student network, while also following countless sports as a fan. A friend asked me, “Why sports?” Why did so much of my life and mindshare revolve around what on the surface is frivolous?

The answer to that question is what Valenta described and continues to study and espouse. Sports may be frivolous and fun, but at a time when loneliness is being called an epidemic and socializing is strained, it’s sports that can drive relationships. It’s sports fandom that can create and connect communities. Because fans do have more friends, and that’s the insight sports business should internalize. That’s the answer to “why sports?”

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WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH BEN VALENTA

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CHECK OUT THE BOOK FANS HAVE MORE FRIENDS

The term “partnership” gets thrown around a lot. Its cousin, “collaboration” (or “collab”), is used just as liberally.

But most partnerships are sponsorships or advertisements with a fancier name. As traditional media has evolved away from the interruptive, you-have-to-sit-through-this-because-it-pays-for-the-content model of years past, content producers and publishers, increasingly “creators,” have taken the reins and helped force a new model. One where the product they’re promoting is worth talking about and showcasing because it’s part of the content itself.

Creators have had no choice. While premium media production companies and influencers are still surviving, if not flourishing, through the more typical corporate shilling, creators are largely earning their audience with every post and every piece of content. All of which makes sports and creators such a natural marriage. Sports are entertainment and community builders, and most creators are chasing those same things.

Major sports leagues already boast millions of fans, but they’re always chasing the next one. Modern sports marketing is less about turning every consumer into an X’s-and-O’s geek fixated on tactics and transactions, and more about opening new entry points into fandom. It was in this evolving age of sports marketing that Neil Tennant came up. Tennant, who today runs 540 Agency the creator management and marketing firm he founded, was right in the thick of it when he started nearly a decade ago on the social media team at the National Hockey League (NHL).

“There’s always a core basis of serving the hardcore hockey fan,” said Tennant, who began his career with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL (a minor-league hockey circuit whose teams are affiliated with NHL clubs). “At the NHL, [your channels] need to be a place where you can find the highlight; you’ll always service and be there for the die-hard fan.

“However, as we know, the goal of marketing — the goal of social — is to reach new audiences, and it’s an amazing platform to do so. For me, it was always: how can I tie in other pieces of pop culture, sports, and entertainment to widen the aperture and relate to new fans?”

The need to think beyond the games and highlights only intensified when the world, let alone the sports world, largely shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While the games stopped, the leagues’ efforts to develop, reach, and engage fans, new and old, continued. In many ways, it was a golden age of entertainment consumption; people were stuck inside, looking for pastimes and community. Sports leagues and teams still had massive platforms but a dearth of content. Meanwhile, the rise of short-form feeds on TikTok and Instagram Reels was ushering in a new, democratized form of entertainment, one where a user with no followers could amass millions of views if the content earned it.

This confluence of events and trends first manifested at the NHL, where Tennant played a key role in embracing user-generated content (UGC). The NHL solicited, showcased, and even monetized (through sponsorship) a diverse selection of UGC, from outdoor rinks to trick shots and much more in between. As this strategy progressed, so did Tennant’s understanding of the bigger opportunity that lay ahead.

“The most common refrain I hear in the creator economy is ‘I was stuck in my parents’ home in 2020, started making videos, now I have a million followers, and I’m a full-time creator,'” said Tennant. “As we were publishing more UGC, we noticed a lot of talented young men and women across social publishing hockey content. We’d share it, they’d keep maturing on their side, until it made sense for us to formally add them on a capital-C Creator basis — stop sharing their content as UGC and start partnering with them more formally.”

Thus germinated a true capital-S Strategy around creators for the NHL. There was no guidebook, no best practices — it was all so new. As Tennant became more engrossed and gained experience and expertise through, well, doing it: working with creators, learning about them, and analyzing the ecosystem, he developed a deeper understanding of the space and how to think about it from a sports-league perspective.

This wasn’t about simply finding influencers with massive audiences; that would be only a half-step removed from paying Meta itself to buy reach. Tennant described the creator identification and activation framework he devised, which guides how he builds a creator wish list and Rolodex.

“I always visualized it as concentric circles,” said Tennant, who, in addition to managing creators at 540 Agency, consults for brands and businesses across sports, entertainment, and beyond. “At the heart, we had hockey creators. On the experiential side, if there was open ice, I was going to have a hockey creator there who understood how to skate, how to shoot, and how to interact with, let’s say, the ice inside of Fenway Park. So we always had a nucleus of hockey creators at all the events, and always in the mix. I think it’s important to always serve the creator community in that capacity…

“The second circle I always thought about, I called them unicorns,” explained Tennant. “These were folks who were interested in hockey but not outwardly publishing or projecting their fandom. These folks are really hard to find — it might be one IG Story where half the image is an [Edmonton] Oilers jersey, and you just see it and keep it mentally. Then the next time the Oilers are in the Finals, I call them up like, ‘Yo, we’ve got to get you to the game.’

“Keeping a CRM, a Rolodex of those folks, made for the most beautiful, most successful partnerships in my mind, because it’s someone who exists outside of your traditional community — so you’re bringing in a new audience, but it’s also authentic; they also understand what’s going on. I’ve hosted the third category, capital-I influencers, on the glass of the Stanley Cup Final, and they’re texting the whole time. I’d often avoid that scenario. You really want someone who’s engaged and makes sense to both audiences.”

As the strategy matured across the development, marketing, and events sides of creator work, the business operations and opportunities became increasingly integrated, too. And at the bottom line of all this, ticketing, merch, and concessions aside, it’s ultimately brands footing most of the bill. That intersection, where brands could reach the audiences of both sports and creators at once, represented a new kind of opportunity to capture.

Tennant described the dynamic, and the value prop, of commingling those audiences for prospective brand sponsors.

“You almost have a triangle effect between yourself, the third-party brand, and the creator, and how those dots get connected can be very different — very successful or very complex, depending on how you approach it,” he explained. “Sometimes a brand would come and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this, can you help consult? Can you do creator discovery, creator recommendations? We want to do it ourselves, but we understand you have relationships and expertise.’

“Other times, it was me wanting to host and produce an entire experiential activation and saying, ‘Hey, this is an incredible value-add — not only do you get new space within a tentpole event, you also gain access to amazing creators. Can you come on board as the title presenting sponsor and help us bring a concept to life?'”

The creator economy is an economy, and with the integration of creators into business strategy comes the need to justify the time, effort, resources, and budget poured into creator collaborations and content. As you’ll recall, there is no conventional, textbook approach to understanding the full value proposition of a creator campaign, activation, or strategy. The value-add for sponsors from the previous section is the easier one to grasp, but the true return is greater — even if it’s harder to measure.

If these were just traditional commercials, interrupting and borrowing audiences and attention, then it’d be easier to compute ROI. But creator activations are more complex, more engaging, and so require a different, more thoughtful equation. Tennant concedes he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s spent years in the space and at least has well-informed ideas for a framework that longtime marketers and agencies can understand.

“Not enough time is spent — particularly from a creative marketing agency standpoint — on both the upfront and the postmortem content performance,” said Tennant. “The upfront is pricing and negotiation, a subtopic I could talk forever about. On the post-activation side, I was always trying to come up with a ‘return on creator spend’ number that would put creator performance adjacent to paid media.

“Paid media is a language most marketers can converse in — CPMs and so on. Could we look at creator engagement, views, impressions, cut it by how much it cost in creator spend, and determine some multiplier to see who performed well against the cost?”

Both the costs and the returns can be a bit opaque with creator activations, but that complexity is a feature, not a bug. Because it’s not just sponsor activation, or marketing, or fan development, or experiential, or content — it’s all of those things at once, and often more. That’s why leading creator strategy in sports organizations has developed into such a robust, specialized discipline, often assisted by agencies or consultants to ensure the right creator is selected for the right objectives, and the collaboration is maximized for the best, multi-faceted return possible. Even with the evolution of the creator economy and the influx of new, often AI-infused solutions, creator strategy leadership still requires a human touch: somebody who can step back, set aside their personal biases, and bring to life a partnership that’ll pay off.

“You have to have some taste, a bar, and criteria,” said Tennant, who identifies creators both for 540 Agency to manage and for its consulting clients to work with. “Then, just like any good campaign [leader] or marketer, there are times where a creator won’t be your flavor — say you like heavy metal, and they’re a hip-hop artist; those scenarios happen.

“But the best creator marketers understand who’s a valuable partner and how successful a crossover could be.”

We’re still in the early days of creator marketing, not just in sports, but everywhere. It’s the emergence of a brand-new channel to reach, engage, and develop fans, to activate partnerships, and to pursue short- and long-term objectives. Its ascent has been more sudden than the arrival of digital and social channels. And the many forms creator strategies can take, across a vast spectrum of creators and their respective audiences, skills, and content, add a layer of both complexity and opportunity.

It can be overwhelming to keep up with the breakneck pace of change in the creator space, but the best path forward is to sprint toward the uncertainty, experiment and innovate, and develop frameworks through practice. Creators will help usher in new fans through more diverse entry points, changing the nature of what it means to be a sports fan. The best sports marketing and fan development channel may be right there in the feed, just a few seconds of scrolling away.

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WATCH OR LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH NEIL TENNANT

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