Month: July 2023

It’s fun to imagine the genesis of modern professional sports. That gradual buildup that started from a handful of individuals taking in an otherwise friendly game played at a high level. From there you get tickets and crowds, ‘fans’, radio broadcasts, TV, social media, and, before you know it, sports teams and leagues that boast billions of fans worldwide.

But for most of that history, the end game was attendance. Heck, it wasn’t all that long ago when some teams battled against broadcasts or pushed for blackouts unless games were already sold out, lest they cannibalize paying fans. And even today, for many, the season ticket holder is still seen as the highest echelon of fandom.

The picture is a lot more complex these days, though. Your team’s most valuable fan may never buy a ticket.

Elisa Padilla saw the evolution, having been in and around sports marketing for decades, including stints overseeing marketing for the Brooklyn Nets, New York Islanders, and Miami Marlins. So as media deals continued to explode and social media took off, she witnessed first-hand that ‘fan engagement’ rapidly evolved and expanded beyond the arena or the ballpark, with new goals to chase beyond attendance.

“[If] you can’t get to a game for whatever reason, it’s the team’s responsibility to be able to ensure that you have access to the team — whether it’s television, radio, digital, so when you think about the KPIs, when you think about social media, it’s about growth,” said Padilla, who now runs Kick It By EP, drawing out leadership, career, and industry insights throughout sports and entertainment and beyond. “How many people are following you? How is your account growing? How are your fans engaging? What is the reshare [rate] like?

“At the end of the day, you have people that are buying your merchandise, that are contributing to your TV ratings, your radio ratings and they’re your ambassador, they’re equally as important as the ones that are spending money to come into the arena.”

Fans are everywhere, they’re engaging everywhere. And no matter how sophisticated our analytics and tracking get, fans are also engaging where we’re blind to it. So when it comes to digesting the fan experience, it’s all more complicated than it was when Padilla was starting out in her career, when one of the primary concerns was how the in-game entertainment and experience resonated with fans in attendance. The never-ending feeds of social media offer a real-time glimpse of fan reactions, though — instantaneous insights.

But I asked Padilla about how leaders look at this vocal minority on social. Even a tweet that gets ratioed is still most often a mere thousand or so replies, a drop in the ocean for a team with tens or hundreds of millions of fans. It’s about understanding the direction of the tide, though, she said, and recognizing when a preponderance of evidence exists across touchpoints that’s resonating.

“I think it’s just having a temperature on what the chatter is,” she said. “And it’s just like if you have 24 comments, I’m taking this as an example, and 12 of them are negative and eight of them are not, it’s like, okay, that’s one view. And if those comments are on Instagram, well, what are they saying on Twitter? What are they saying on TikTok? What are they saying on Facebook? What are they saying on Reddit?

“I think it’s more important to really have your finger on the pulse, and if it’s something where the sentiment is red flags all across, then I think that that’s where you address it.”

It’s only getting harder to even understand how to find the pulse now, with new platforms, behaviors, trends, and tactics popping up seemingly every day. Everybody reaches an age when we can’t quite understand everything ‘the kids’ are doing. Heck, the way that Snapchat’s UX intimidates older users is often described as a feature, not a bug. But the more one moves on up from being in the trenches, creating the content, and pushing the buttons, the more important it is that leaders lead, but know enough to understand the big picture.

Padilla never shies away from new platforms and appreciates the role and responsibility of guiding the doers, managing the forest while experts tend to the trees.

“I approach it where I know enough about the platform, but I lean on others that have the expertise from a user perspective,” said Padilla, reflecting most recently on the emergence of TikTok the last few years. “Like, I know that there’s a generation out there that uses TikTok as research, so it’s like, okay, when we show up on TikTok we need to make sure that, whatever brands you’re working on, you have to show up from a place of knowing that the majority of the people that are going to see your content are potentially using it as research. So what do you want them to know? How are you putting your brand out there?”

TikTok, and social platforms in general, represent enormous opportunities for teams to grow and engage global audiences, well beyond what one could even conceive to fit in an arena. Padilla even spoke about the Brooklyn Nets being among a handful of US teams with a presence on Weibo, the Chinese platform often described as being similar to Twitter. 

Remember earlier on, when the season ticket holder was atop the pedestal, the pinnacle for fandom? Well, when you have thousands of fans in Brazil watching your Instagram Reel or millions of fans in China following on Weibo, the picture gets a lot more complicated, but also a lot more potentially lucrative. The goal isn’t to sell tickets, to drive tune-in, or to necessarily make a sale. Those fiscal investments by fans are all great, sure, but it all starts with the prerequisite of earning emotional investment. Only then can you lead them to conversions and find ways to earn their revenue-producing support, in whatever form that may come.

“The way that I look at it is it’s about evoking emotion, driving action to share of wallet,” Padilla explained. “So if you produce a piece of content and you’re evoking emotion, what is the action that you want that customer or your fan to take? Is it that you want to lead them to your website? Do you want to lead them to a landing page? The brand has to figure that out. 

“Then how once you get them to do that action, then what is the next step to get your wallet? And it may not show up the day that you post the content. It may show up six months later. But as long as you’re evoking that emotion and breaking through the clutter, I think that you can justify it.” 

Once that emotional connection is formed, a fan becomes a fan. And then begins the desire for fans to show they’re a fan — can a fan be a fan if they don’t demonstrate it in some way? Consider the myriad ways to showcase it — going to the games, wearing the merch, watching the broadcasts, following and engaging on social media, messaging friends about the team, customizing one’s avatar — and the avenues to activate fandom only increase.

But even as it all gets more complex, the basics still reign supreme. When the team wins, hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals around the world feel a warmth in their hearts, a compulsion to stand and cheer, a desire to high-five the person next to them. Everything else follows that feeling.

LISTEN TO MY FULL CONVERSATION WITH ELISA PADILLA