2023 was a great year to be a sports fan. Most of the traditional measures of fan interest increased, more emerging sports rose up, the platforms of sports did some good in culture and society, and it was another year of growing understanding that the future of sports business and fan engagement will be molded, if not led, by those managing the digital and social channels that comprise the majority of time spent and touch points between sport and fan.
There may not have been paradigm shifts in the greater smsports world, but the roots for such massive evolution formed and there’s more recognition than ever that originality wins, meaningful connections matter, and that sports and athletes are the gateway to so much more than the game on the field or court.
With that in mind, something of an annual tradition building off close observation of the space and countless valuable conversations, here are ten areas of interest and themes at the top of my mind in 2024 for the greater sportsbiz industry.
Fan Identity (online and offline)
So much of fandom has been, and continues to be, about identity. One declares themselves a fan of a given athlete or team and therefore does the things that fans do — follow their social, consume content involving them, wear merch showcasing their fandom, and maybe insert it into their avatar or username or profiles. And the notion of identity, in digital and IRL environments, remains paramount. But there’s more competition than ever to own pieces of one’s identity, so the challenge for sports organizations is to foster and reinforce elements of identity, empower fans to showcase it and find emerging and original ways to do it. One more way to tap into fan identity is to align with their other interests and passions, such as our next item…
Creators, Influencers, and UGC
Fandom is contagious and we’re seeing more collaboration and strategy in direct work with online influencers (and ‘traditional’ celebrities) and creators who are already fans themselves. These mutually beneficial relationships benefit all parties when they’re authentic and it’s why you’ve seen teams and leagues in the last couple of years create full-time positions to oversee and execute influencer marketing and relations; others are rolling the remit into social media roles. It’s not uncommon now to see titles like Director of Social Media and Influencers on the staff directories of teams and leagues.
This is not just about direct partnerships, it’s also a larger theme playing out in sports business as the industry begins to appreciate more and more the value of earned media. Earned media — from fans posting about a game, a team, a player — is not new in sports; traditional B2C brands would kill for such organic earned media. But as teams add a strategic layer, that’s where the fun starts. Facilitating creators with content and access, fostering UGC and showcasing to create a positive feedback loop, monetizing it directly and indirectly. The organization of this ecosystem is only just beginning, which leads us to the next theme…
The next phase of Collab
If we had the data, we could probably see a chart showing the growth in the % of Instagram feed posts that are Collabs looking something like 📈 in the last year or so. Mutual relationships are getting mobilized more frequently, whether it’s league and broadcaster, team and player, league and brand. Alongside the Collab posts, the platforms are also productizing the behavior in other ways, testing true collaborative content, with multiple parties each contributing to a single post.
My job often entails ideating around maximizing such organized orders of parties for a given sports or entertainment property. As the fences get more easily traversable and the collaboration being offered by platforms more widespread, it will lead to more frequent, more creative, and even opportunistic collab content taking off. Too often the power of relationships that transcend the field gets taken for granted, which indirectly leads to our next item…
Relationship platform
There are a lot of answers to the ‘Why do we love sports?’ question and a lot of them are correct. But at its core, past the inherent storytelling [and, yes, the wagering] the group dynamics that sports fandom cultivates is the beating heart. Sports fandom offers an opportunity to plan a social night out with friends or family, it can jumpstart a dormant group chat, fuel endless conversation at the bar or the dinner table, and it can lubricate meetings with even total strangers, providing an instant ember of relationship.
So how can sports teams lean into this superpower even more in 2024? We’ve seen the move to smaller group engagement across social platforms, whether it’s on Discord or IG or WhatsApp or elsewhere — sports provides the connective tissue for much of it. Teams and leagues can create more synapses, more opportunities to foster friendships or even initiate new engagements. If sports can master their position as a purveyor of relationships and pastime, there is a helluva opportunity to further enhance the next item…
Direct to Consumer
The trend of leagues and teams developing and prioritizing their owned and operated channels, often with an app and a CRM at the center, is not a new one. But the climate has only hastened these pursuits — the dilution of precise targeting with digital ads is one and more recently the gradual decline of the regional sports network (RSN) business. If all of a sudden teams had to rely on monetizing their live broadcasts one fan at a time, many realized it sure would help to have a direct line to more of them, especially those not already in the database because they’ve attended a game [but still watched a lot of your games/content].
The apps are getting more competitive — they have to. Teams and leagues are asking themselves (and being pitched by vendors) ‘What can we do to entice more fans to spend time on our owned platforms’ (and what value prop will convince them to register/sign in with their information)?’ There’s the low-hanging fruit of mobile ticket/account integration, but beyond that relatively ‘free space’, there’s a plethora of ideas out there, from interactivity to exclusive content to novel features, and lots more. But one area picking up steam for sports and beyond is our next topic…
More gaming
There was an article recently in Vanity Fair about the New York Times’ big bet on games, facetiously stating the Times is becoming a ‘gaming company that also happens to offer the news.’ Meanwhile, the NBA recently introduced ‘NBA Play’, a collection of games in their league’s app. As the competition for time, attention, and true (registered) membership for fans keeps heating up while simultaneously becoming more important, games represent a sticky, engaging, shareable opportunity to capture all that.
Depending on which stat you stumble upon, something like 90% of Americans regularly play games, whether they’re into Call of Duty, Words with Friends, Immaculate Grid, or even an old-school crossword or Sudoku. So it’s no wonder that investment in games is one with a big TAM for teams and leagues. They can be pretty simple, too (see: Wordle and all its variations). With built-in fandom, the games can simply align to general mechanics — challenging but not too challenging, sticky/consistent, talk-worthy, and, well, fun. Keep an eye on gaming, it may even become a growing direct revenue stream as sports organizations start to realize how much their IP can truly be monetized, which brings us to our next subject area…
Premium content, Passive Monetization, and Content Libraries
There are investors that focus specifically on acquiring YouTube libraries. With just a few tweaks and optimizations, archives of YouTube videos can generate a decent amount of revenue from years-old videos. Meanwhile, that documentary you just watched on Netflix was made in 2018 — and most of the content was pieced together from decades-old archives. That long opening aside, the point is that each piece of content a team publishes, cuts, or produces (or even if they don’t and it’s sitting in the cloud storage) is an asset. And those assets can deliver dividends in direct and indirect ways.
Many conversations you have about sponsored content now bring up that their organization saw the light in the last 1-3 years. The pandemic was a big part of it, but so were tailwinds from marketers across brands diverting more of their marketing spend from linear to digital channels. Sports content, from highlights to documentaries and the reality series that The Last Dance and Drive to Survive accelerated in demand, and while many teams already have the capability in-house to produce great all-access pieces, they’re starting to act more like a media company now, bringing in additional help or hiring more to up their volume. Because it brings in money. It brings in sponsors and can provide lasting value through time spent on an app or lucrative YouTube rabbit holes, or through pre-programmed social media ‘archive’ accounts, and maybe behind a paywall for your in-house RSN subscriber (if that comes to be). The number of permutations and options to piece together reams of old highlights, interviews, and B-roll is virtually endless. Especially if you consider our next item…
Generative AI
Generative AI had already made its way into sports well before ChatGPT launched and introduced the masses to the awe-inducing results; companies like WSC Sports already permitted you to ask for ‘All of Nikola Jokic’s dunks from his rookie season in 2015-2016’ and get a highlight package (assuming the big man dunked at all his rookie year). But the acceleration in 2023 was remarkable and does not seem to be slowing down as 2024 begins. It won’t be long before a video producer can use detailed prompts to significantly reduce the time it takes to produce premium content, optimized for algorithms and viewership. Maybe fans will even be able to create rough cuts of such content themselves (perhaps not in 2024).
The highlights-driven generative AI has been novel, but is mostly packages of a player’s top plays or all the ‘x’ from ‘y.’ As emotion and storytelling gets woven into these creations, the content banks are going to build up more and more so that fans may be consistently flipping between Hulu and their league or team’s app when deciding what to watch before going to bed. The relationships fans can build with their favorite shows or podcasts or creators are hard to truly measure, the metrics models are still catching up to digital interaction that’s so prolonged, invested, and sticky. So let’s talk about the next topic…
The evolving nature of engagement
We’re in the middle of the engagement era. Valuation models are often based on engagements (some include impressions, too), but as metrics and real-life results get more scrutinized, for the first time in a while the industry is reconsidering what really matters and, conversely, what just makes all sides look good to their bosses. As platforms evolve, owned channels get prioritized, and more mediums emerge, the old-school paradigms of engagement and engagement rate will evolve, too. If an impression means they walked by your store (excuse the shopping analogy; it works well here, but team platforms are not ‘storefronts’), engagement could mean they stopped and stared for a moment, they took a peek inside, they came in and browsed for a while, they came in and tried something on, they left with a purchase, they never came in at all but looked it up later, they never came in but after seeing a couple Instagram ads they added something to an online cart, they didn’t buy anything but brought a friend to the store — this list can go on and on with so many more variables and behaviors considered.
The point is that the way we think and talk about engagement is getting smarter and more thoughtful. In an industry like sports, where the longtail is so powerful (but more challenging than ever), sports organizations have to get better at understanding what is not just capturing the casual fan’s attention but what is capturing their heart and mind. The lifetime value of a fan is immeasurable, especially when their fan evangelism is accounted for, and as tempting as it is to chase the trees amidst the forest, we have to balance the casual engagements with the deeper fan touches. Expect to see innovation in measurements — not all will stick, nor should they — as we reconsider KPIs like time spent, frequency of engagement, retention, a fan’s connection tree (to other fans) and their potential k-factor, their propensity for high LTV curves, the number of platforms they engage on, and so much more. While we all love the idea of a Joe DiMaggio-like hitting streak when it comes to repeated social media success, moneyball is making its way into the industry as we consider slugging percentage and game-winning plays. That brings us to our final topic…
Eventizing across digital/social
Routine and its less-appealing stepsibling monotony are an inherent part of sports. Especially for sports with longer seasons and vast quantities of games and star players taking maintenance days, it’s hard to make every game matter. (see: The NBA In-Season Tournament as an effort to alleviate that) And that’s okay; in fact, it invites innovation. Teams and leagues are finding more ways, through brand and creator collabs, through theme nights that echo across content and social, through gamification, and more avenues to give fans a reason to consume and care — whether that means attending, watching, or just paying attention on social and digital channels.
These manufactured ‘events’ that try to break up what could otherwise feel routine are also opportunities to capture casual audiences. If you not only accept but embrace that not every piece of content and every campaign and event and game needs to try to reach your total addressable audience, organizations can hone in on specific audience cohorts. (See the appreciating engagement section). Your Hispanic Heritage activations and creative on social don’t need to go viral, but if that content can be really cool for a certain audience, that’s a win.
At the more macro level, it doesn’t take a genius to see the increase in tentpoles produced and propagated by leagues, with the NFL and their schedule release content jumpstarting the practice. What are all the opportunities for a team, whether through organic parts of the league calendar or manufactured events by teams/leagues themselves, to make it feel like a big deal to fans? Get the right partners involved to justify the investment and make the campaigns feel big and exciting, and that slugging % can go up. Other trends in this piece will make activating and executing such ‘events’ on digital/social and beyond more feasible and valuable, too.
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A common refrain for years posits that all brands are media companies, and vice-versa. Sports organizations embody this duality more than ever, with generational brands and an endless fount of valuable IP. Developing new avenues to monetize and actualize it all is top of mind for the year ahead. The pluripotency of sports is unmatched and we’re just starting to realize what that means.