The goalposts keep moving for content in sports.
All-access and mic’d-up players are now a part of every team and league’s arsenal. 360-degree replays, video game-like mirrorless cameras, drone shots, aerial cams, POV views, net cameras, cinematic hype videos that could be mistaken for Hollywood trailers — the acceleration in content quality, diversity, and innovation is remarkable.
So how the hell is a team’s content expected to cut through, stand out, and grab a fan’s attention away from the screens and feeds vying for their eyeballs, minds, and hearts?
There’s no single right answer to the challenge (sorry!), but by breaking from expectations, telling deeper stories that feel made for you and command attention, and embracing novelty, there’s a chance to get fans to stop and engage.
Greg Walter and his team at 2Tall Animation aren’t trying to replace the incredible highlights and photos that sports produce. Those continue to play a major role in fan acquisition and engagement, fueled by the daily renewal of more eye-popping plays and moments. But there’s a reason animation is such a powerful complement for sports and sports fans. It can embellish the inherent mythology in sports and bring to life the legends with which fans already identify in sports. And animation can allow teams and leagues to explore and exploit unique places in storytelling, creating and capturing fan passion in the process.
“The way we think about sports media is 99% of it is photo and footage based, and it should be, because people want to see their heroes, they want to see the games,” said Walter, the Owner and Creative Director of 2Tall Animation, the animation production studio specializing in sports. “But what’s the other 1%? We feel like we’re the other 1% that somebody might grab onto if they want to do something completely different, or if they want to create some media where they can control it and go anywhere they want to, because you can go into any storytelling space, you can go into any visual space with animation.”
The versatility of animation means it can serve many masters and aim to achieve diverse goals. But the often-exaggerated nature of animated projects is more conducive to enhancing the avidity of existing fans. Consider those illustrations that leagues such as the NFL and NBA will put out around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, full of exacting details that only the biggest fans will recognize and appreciate. It’s those types of ‘if you know you know’ elements that strengthen fan identities and lead casual fans to want to enhance their own immersion into the property.
Walter discussed how thoughtful 2Tall is with its clients in identifying those brand elements and esoterica, which bring to life that community and identity.
“Usually it’s to take the current audience and take them to a new place. Like, it’s not necessarily to gain a new audience. It’s to double down on what the audience is already excited about,” Walter said about the nature of 2Tall’s objectives with clients. “Especially if we’re doing something in venue or we’re doing something on social media, what we really want to do is we want to create a piece that looks like it was made by a local for that team.
“And what I mean by that is we’ll dig into all the local Easter eggs. We’ll have a lot of creative meetings to figure out, Okay, where is the team? Who are the heroes? And more importantly, who are the fans? What is the culture around the team? And even more importantly, why do these fans love following this team? Besides geography, what about this team do they put their hopes and dreams in so that they would stick with this team when they’re good, when they’re bad? Is it a blue-collar city where it’s [about] grit and hard work? Is it a flashy city where you want to go big and lights and all that stuff? What’s drawing the moths to the flame?
“And then how do we show something interesting and new to this audience to get it even more excited and to see the team, the city, the franchise in an interesting new way?”
As Walter described the depth of exploration in their animation projects, it became apparent how powerful the animations can be to foment the brand — its messages, totems, tokens, and traits. One may not instantly think of a cool video board hype reel or an illustrative storytelling vehicle on social media to create a brand platform, but the degree of familiarity and fidelity built into the animations, combined with the unique visual appeal, can open (or create) new worlds to explore across mediums and touch points.
“More and more as we approach teams, and we’re creating videos for them, we’re also packaging up still assets for them, and we’re writing into the contracts we’ll also get you some still assets you can use over some looping assets that you can use on your boards any way you want, or in your merch,” said Walter. “And you can cross-purpose this stuff, so you’re not paying for something that’s going to show once or even once before each game. You’re paying for a package of other things that you can then give to your video team, to your merch team, and then they can recompile them in interesting ways.”
Whether animated or not, teams and leagues produce countless videos of varying forms that aim to stir emotion in their fans — at games in the arena or stadium, on social and mobile in the feeds and stories, and on countless other platforms. But while the social feeds may give you some semblance of performance through likes, comments, and shares, it remains difficult to understand when this content truly breaks through. The best content doesn’t inspire tapping a heart; it touches the heart, making the fan feel something, enhancing what it means to them to be a fan.
In evaluating the success of their projects, Walter and his colleagues and clients recognize there are variables they can and cannot control. If the team is mired in a slump or losing situation, that’s bound to affect how any content is received, animated or otherwise. At the same time, when the content does hit with its full intended effect, especially in-venue, there’s no easily quantifiable way to know it. So, for Walter and 2Tall, it’s part-art, part-science.
“You can’t measure ‘Did the audience get a little bit louder when they saw this thing?'” said Walter. “I will say that we did a couple of things for the Super Bowl this year. We did one for the Eagles and one for the Chiefs. The one for the Eagles played when the Eagles were really at their peak, and the crowd went wild for it. The one the Chiefs, unfortunately, played right as the crowd started realizing that this one was really getting out of hand, and it was a dead room, apparently. So it’s little bits of data like that that we can go on.”
Not all animation is meant to serve the same purpose or elicit the same feeling, either. If you haven’t yet gone and looked up any of 2Tall’s work, there’s no telling what you’re picturing as you read about ‘animation.’ Maybe it’s something akin to anime, or perhaps something resembling the Nickelodeon cartoons of the ’90s and ’00s; animation represents a vast spectrum, and to put animation in a single box is inaccurate. So, this whole conversation about animation in sports is multifarious, a menu within the medium that organizations should navigate with intentionality.
“There’s kind of a choice point,” explained Walter, who founded 2Tall in 2012. “Do I want to go into a lane that people already know and work within that, or do I want to use animation? That can be anything. You can go collage, you can go rotoscope animation, which is traced animation, you can do trippy, you can do photorealistic, you can do graphic novel, you can do street art. You can do a whole bunch of different things. You know, what satisfies the assignment the best?
“If you want to do street art, there’s a materiality about street art. You expect pavement, you expect walls. There’s a tangibility to it that we can work with to give something that’s got kind of a solid feel, where your feet are on the ground and you feel like you’re at ground level, or we can do something crazy and trippy that’s got lots of colors and it’s out in space.”
This article started out by lamenting the Sisyphean quest to produce content that stands out. There’s a perpetual arms race in content, not just in sports, but on every screen and frame vying for sustained attention. The velocity and volume may be greater than ever, but the cyclical, one-upsmanship nature of creative is simply part of the game. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Creative is a field that compounds. The evolution and innovation will continue because new ideas build upon existing ones. The roots of just about any creative field can be traced back centuries, so it’s not about eschewing convention, but veering just a bit, taking chances, and playing outside the lines of expectation. As Walter has survived and thrived amidst the accelerated timelines of creative trends and techniques, he welcomes the challenge of giving fans something different. Something that’ll make them stop, notice, and digest.
“People’s relationship with social media is very problematic, but it exists and we are existing to create content for that,” he said. “And people are comfortable with the thing that they like to go on and slide through. But I think people are hungry to be surprised. And anytime that you can give somebody a good surprise, there are bad surprises too, but a good surprise, that’s a little victory. That’s like a breadcrumb that can lead to other things as well.
“And that’s kind of how a lot of this churn happens. It’s like somebody does something interesting, you know, and then someone else sees it and they’re like, I can take that a little bit further, and then it churns into something bigger.”
