Watch or listen to episode 328 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Dave Benson, Founder & CEO, SuperQuickQuestion.
Dave Benson has sat in a lot of seats: ESPN, Bleacher Report, MLB’s Fan Cave, and a marketing run at IBM, before founding SuperQuickQuestion, the one-on-one, one-minute video meet-and-greet platform. We get into why the meet-and-greet has barely changed since our dads’ day, the eye-opening reality that 60% of contracted athlete appearances never actually happen, how a hard one-minute clock makes athletes MORE willing to say yes, the death of the shill post, and why the smartest, most nascent leagues treat fans as assets instead of threats. Packed with stories, real numbers, and takeaways for anyone working in fan engagement.
It’s never been harder to earn attention. In case you haven’t heard. And even major sports organizations are not immune to this challenge.
There’s just too much competition for attention. Infinite scrolls, creators creating, and new apps or new bells and whistles — all trying to capture just a few seconds, let alone a few minutes, of attention.
Sports teams and leagues continue to seek and find ways to break through. Some of the most forward-thinking are leaning into emerging platforms, innovative fan engagement initiatives, and augmenting both new and timeless consumer behaviors. Joe Farren thrives in this dynamic ecosystem, one fueled by ever-richer datasets, incredible new capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence, and novel and deeper forms of fan interaction.
Farren, who spent years driving innovation programs at Hawk-Eye and Manchester City before launching his own consultancy, Future Sport Co, recognizes that, while venture capital firms can incubate innovative new tech and startups in the hopes that there’s a massive winner among a bunch of bets, sports organizations can’t necessarily afford to carry such risk in the hope of a return down the road. But they don’t have to, Farren says; they can turn these new tech and platform swings into revenue streams.
“Ultimately, venture is a one-in-ten bet — only one is really going to pay off,” said Farren. “So clubs aren’t driving short-term revenue directly through a venture arm. You need ways to actually bring these startups in and help create new assets, new top-line value, and new media to drive short-term revenue — otherwise you’ve just got this venture arm, which is a risky bet that might pay off and might not. There are ways to drive value in the short term for commercial purposes.”
Farren took this mindset and developed a framework for exploiting new platforms and technologies to drive and enhance fan engagement. It’s less about novelty or habituating fans to new behaviors, and more about observing evolving paradigms and identifying where teams can play a relevant, value-add role. Farren noted two distinctly different examples to elucidate these ideas. Whether you’re building something new or meeting fans where they already are, there’s a consistent throughline.
“If you look at the case studies and approaches, there are essentially two,” said Farren, who grew up in the UK but resides in the US today. “Either you show up where your fans already are — you identify emerging platforms like Roblox, which has 350 million monthly active users, and build experiences, activations, and products on those high-volume emerging channels. Or you build net-new products and experiences, which might be slightly higher risk but equally can drive attention, engagement, and dwell time into your owned-and-operated — like a Spurs AI studio…
“When you’re looking at new emerging-tech products and activations, you should be thinking about how that tech or platform can enhance or enable existing fan behaviors.”
There’s a bit of resource allocation and risk calculus when it comes to innovation, especially if it involves bringing in new tech or entering new platforms. Such initiatives can certainly be one-offs, often backed by a sponsor, while also serving as a testing ground to see if iteration and repeat engagement are worthwhile. But there is inherent risk in a one-off; it can flop. That’s part of innovation and being early movers, instead of waiting for proven concepts. Even then, proven concepts can be fleeting, with platforms and fan behaviors rapidly evolving these days.
However, there is also risk in standing up an ongoing endeavor. There is no shortage of projects and activations lying dormant in the hinterlands of Roblox, and if organizations treat ongoing activations as one-offs, setting them and forgetting them, they might as well be one-offs, but ones with a stale, unkempt artifact left behind.
“The thing I keep coming back to is that attention is so ephemeral — it’s really hard to drive always-on engagement in anything these days, because trends and habits change,” said Farren, who helped drive Roblox initiatives during his time with Manchester City’s City Fan Labs. “What you’re seeing on Roblox now is that a lot of clubs are straying away from investing in always-on experiences, because the habits of what games people are playing change so often. So trying to build a game and expect people to come to it for two years isn’t necessarily a smart strategy; you might take a more activation-tempo-led approach.
“But there are ways to build mechanics that create enduring, repeatable attention and engagement.”
The avenues for novel and inventive fan engagement are varied. Even within my conversation with Farren, he touched on Roblox, digital collectibles, generative AI, 3D replays, and more. So, in determining where to spend time and resources, and which innovations are even worth doing, there has to be strategic consideration. As Farren described it, echoing a former colleague, it’s something of a guiding principle: just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should.
It goes back to the basic tenets of marketing, and understanding the fans you’re trying to reach, and, when applicable, the goals and target audience of the brand partner.
Part of the acceleration in novel and innovative activations in recent years has been fueled by the proliferation of data in sports. We’re a generation removed from the release of Moneyball, but the revolution is coming not from more extensive box scores and enlightened perspectives on performance; it’s the exponential increase in new data streams coming from incredible camera technology and wearables that track every movement and location.
This data’s original intended use was for performance and recovery, the team operations side of the house. And it is certainly put to good use in those areas. But clever thinkers like Farren and his peers in digital, broadcast, and beyond saw greater potential in the startups and technologies that bring this data to life. Yet realizing these opportunities requires coordination and communication, which underscores the value of having a department or individual whose role is just that, Farren told me.
“This is again why having in-house innovation expertise really helps — pattern matching the technology to all the different use cases internally,” he said. “Say you’re on the performance side of the house [and] engage a startup and say, ‘These guys can help us improve player performance.’ But that one startup might have many other use cases that aren’t obvious at first, but come to light as you’re testing and learning with the technology and integrating it. You need that internal resource to pattern match across departments and build out the one-to-many assets and use cases of that startup. Without it, there’s a lot of lost and trapped value and inefficiency in orgs because of silos. That internal innovation lab or unit really helps solve for that.”
The end goal with all these cool new products, features, and integrations isn’t just new inventory for sponsorship. It’s not just about reaching new audiences and developing new fans. It’s also about producing products and activations so neat and enticing that fans want to engage. They’ll come to you — to your game on Roblox, to your app or website, to your channels. That’s how you win attention in this era of endless options, crowded by creators and, of course, a lot of generative AI slop muddying all the waters.
“If you look at AI more broadly, gen AI tools are cannibalizing traffic and engagement to owned-and-operated — I think traffic to native sports websites is down something like 50%,” said Farren. “So teams and leagues are going to need to deploy new features, products, and experiences to give fans a reason to come to their owned-and-operated. There’s got to be a distinction between information and experience. It’s about creating immersive experiences that get people to engage in your owned-and-operated and give up their first-party data in exchange for an amazing experience.”
Sports organizations have built-in advantages in the battle for attention and audience. Sure, the tribalism of it all and the gambling elements. They have an ocean of data with innumerable permutations for engagement and content. They have brand affinity that gives them a leg up in emerging platforms where people spend time. And they have the attention and emotional investment of thousands of potential guinea pigs, who can serve as an apt set of beta users for new products and experiences.
That’s why sports businesses can be the early movers among all consumer brands. They can be the first touch for novel experiences and tech; they can pioneer new business models; they can be the innovation leaders.
But it’s not innovation for the sake of it. It’s about building business cases, understanding where ‘can’ and ‘should’ intersect. That’s how the best sports organizations keep doing what they’ve always done, turning fans into fanatics on whatever platform comes next.
