Creative ideas for challenging times: Exploring the new reality for sports events
By Chirs Kennett and Marcela Garza, members of GREITM and the Innova Institute
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many industries including sports, which due the importance of live events involving large gatherings of people has been hit hard. Sports events organizers are faced with a major challenge: how to adapt to a new reality of social distancing.
We have recently seen some sports leagues and competitions return as lockdowns ease in certain countries. Live sports have returned to our screens but are very different compared to what most fans are used to. The new normality of stadiums is to stage games behind closed doors. With no fans present a key revenue stream is lost – gameday spending; and perhaps more importantly, the atmosphere generated by fan interaction is lost. There is an urgent need to keep not only the fans engaged, but also the sponsors, advertisers and media companies that finance professional sports.
Technology has a key role to play in maintaining the engagement with fans and stakeholders. Sports event organizers are urgently looking for solutions to avoid losing audiences to the competition. In the middle of lockdown La Salle-URL organized a virtual encounter to explore how through technology the sports industry can overcome the challenges that the pandemic brought and keep sport events attractive to the spectators, the sponsors and the media.
La Salle-URL brought together a group of 25 creative thinkers to explore 4 key challenges faced by sports event organizers and their partners in the COVID-19 context. Participants included a mix of talented university students and professors from La Salle-URL, entrepreneurs and staff from the high tech startup incubator Technova Barcelona, and representatives of sports organizations including City FC, Euroleague Basketball, FC Bayern Munich Basketball, Girona FC, Zalgiris Kaunas, and the Red Bull Media House.
The 25 participants were divided in 5 focus groups to work on challenges related to fan engagement, sponsorship, media, and venue management. During the working sessions the participants solved problems, generated ideas and defined possible solutions based on a Design Thinking Sprint dynamic. Here are the main results…
Fan engagement
Fans are the beating heart of a match, they bring energy and emotion when their team is playing, but if games are played behind closed doors they might feel displaced and ignored. The connection between the fan and the team must be reinforced to keep loyalty up so, how do we achieve fan engagement in this new reality?
The first focus group went beyond the traditional activations and came up with some ideas to engage fans through technology. Esports were identified as a key opportunity. According to the 2020 Global Esports Market Report the Esports industry raised 950M€ globally in 2019 expecting a 15% grow in the next years. When the Covid-19 crisis began the Esports industry continued to thrive despite the economic disruption increasing sales and playing time engaging even more gamers and consumers. The solution proposed in the focus group included the broadcast of sport games on Fortnite where fans congregate and watch the match together as a way to engage Gen Z audience. Create in-game digital assets like Skins and digital overlays with dynamic sound or lighting effects that change based on user engagement, also adding famous gamers to do the play-by-play commentary, and giving the opportunity to the viewers to choose which audio channel to listen to can increase the engagement. The merging of real and Esports creates a hybrid reality which is more immersive and potentially engaging, particular for younger sports fans.
According to the expert participants, a positive outcome of the COVID-19 crisis brought has been the increased openness towards technology and innovation in sports. It gives the opportunity to create new business models, engage fans, and maintain close relationships. Examples include mobile applications, VR, AR, BOTs, AI, and 5G. Most of them are still in the adoption and experimentation phase as the crisis has given an unexpected push that rushed the use of this technologies making marketers to move ahead and skip months or even years of planning and development.
In this line, another solution proposed by a second focus group included AR avatars to simulate fans’ cheering on the screen. The idea proposed that fans could create their own avatar and interact with each other, for example celebrating a goal together with your friends or other fans that you can meet there. Interactivity was identified as key and the idea developed to consider the creation of an independent AR app where the avatar appear when pointing at the screen, highlighting the need for collaboration with broadcasters as existing key stakeholders. In the same line, another solution proposed the creation of a virtual reality environment by simulating a full stadium with the faces of season ticket holders watching at home. Recreating the stadium experience in VR, meant that the stadium would feel full, and with VR the fans feel like they are part of the action.
Sponsors value exchange
Sport clubs are suffering from the uncertainty created by cancelled or re-scheduled events organised under very different circumstances and they fear brands will move their sponsorship investments to other assets where more exposure is guaranteed. Suddenly sport is faced with more immediate competition from a wider range of potential entertainment substitutes with fans ready and available to consume new digital contents. In the new context we are living in communication has become more open but it is crucial to leverage partnerships and reach for new opportunities that emerge as new assets for the sponsors. How can value exchange with sponsors be ensured?
The first solution proposed by the focus group involved retail and food delivered to the fans at home when they are watching the game to create closer relations with fans and at the same time opportunities for sponsoring.
In a different line, experts saw the opportunity to adopt emerging technologies such as AR to increase interaction with sponsors’ brands, direct purchase opportunities and the capture of fan data in real time. One of the shared ideas was to create an AR based app where fans can press a button and presents sponsored by a brand will appear on the screen. Any decision involving sponsor-related activities must involve the analysis of fan data. Data has played a crucial role in the sports industry in recent years, particularly in terms of monitoring fan behavior and monetizing engagement. Fans are consuming increasing amounts of sports content generating large volumes of data and the clubs and sponsors can capitalize the user journey on social media or in their digital platforms and monetize the information.
Data analytics gives direct information from the fans, this information can help to personalize communications, segment content, and create personal experiences. The accelerated digitalisation of sports would provide more data and insights that if used well, could lead to new opportunities to add value and monetize assets.
Media experience
One of the big questions with closed matches is whether broadcasting games in empty stadiums will still be interesting and attractive for fans. This forces media to re-think existing practices and look to new formats. To face this challenge, how can we adapt the sports media experience?
Some of the solutions proposed in the focus group involved innovating on the production process, focusing on providing tighter angles during the live game to avoid too many shots of empty seats, more and better replays, new points of view through embedded cameras, microphones to put the fans in the game, and innovate on commentary options.
During the confinement phase, the absence of live sport content has seen fans consume alternative sports-related content on an increasing variety of social media and content sharing platforms. Fans have been consuming a mix of athlete and fan generated content as they share their experiences in confinement and nostalgic re-runs of historic content. The focus has shifted away from teams and leagues to individual athletes who are communicating direct to fans and building their followings and personal brands in the process. This has posed a major challenge for sponsors and advertisers who have lost the live activation opportunities that sports events provide on broadcast channels. Sponsors have had to move with the audiences and seek them out on different digital channels and platforms as fans spend increasing amounts of time online. In this sense, the ‘second screen’ has become the ‘main screen’ for many sports fans. Instead of supporting or augmenting the live event experience, mobile and desktop devices have become the main screens for sports fans.
Another solution presented was to increase ‘second screen’ engagement. Providing more content on channels used as second screens can increase engagement between fans, fans and teams, fans and athletes. This could include data, hashtags, competitions and gaming, or unlocking exclusive or customized content to mention some characteristics. Personalizing the experience can give fans more opportunities to take decisions and choose what the watch and how, involve them in live decision taking and interact with them. We can expect a rise in fans consuming digital products, it is key to diversify content in different platforms and adapt it as content consumption will be more and more visual aiming to reach the fans’ emotions.
Match day fan experience and new sources of income
Today we live matches exclusively through media as the access to stadiums is for now prohibited. Soon we will have the opportunity to go back to cheer our teams from our seat in the stadium, but the tendency marks that provisionally things will be different than before the COVID-19 crisis. How do we adapt match day experience and the use of the stadia?
One of the focus groups highlighted the importance of fan safety and support. A need was identified to make the fans feel closer than ever to their teams by being 100% transparent and communicating continuously with them regarding what measures are being taken to ensure their safety and including them in the club’s policy decision making process.
On the other hand, there was also a need to re-use and commercialize existing assets and resources. For example, selling e-season tickets, exclusive original content through a paywall, limited VIP seats, or club or sponsor branded masks and gloves for fans and staff.
With closed doors matches there’s no matchday income, a total lack of atmosphere and lots of uncertainty as to how long this situation will last. This will make some clubs struggle financially, but may also result in a progressive disengagement with fans and sponsors. In terms of matchday, the most important aspect to confront is the income reduction from closed doors matchday, followed by the reluctancy from people to come back to stadium. As we must adapt the matchday experience and the use of the stadia, could the stadium be used for other purposes?
The last focus group provided a list of ideas and solutions that can be new business lines to increase income. Some of them are more participation in mobile videogames and Esports competitions. An example was highlighted from LaLiga, when they suspended their games at the beginning of the confinement, the Esports world were given the opportunity to see professional footballers participate and compete in a FIFA20 tournament with a benefic cause raising more than 150.000€ to fight the COVID-19 crisis.
Other solutions presented were pay-per-view broadcasting from different places and moments in the stadium, including time outs or trainings for example, or virtual pre-game activities with paid content. A different idea is to involve the betting fans by selling live match data and statistics that can help them make better decisions.
Further than leveraging the digital assets, now is an ideal moment to reinforce collaborations across sports, be close to the ecosystem, and capitalize with other sports and events by working close with the partnerships team. The sports industry must work together to make it stronger.
Overall reflections
Fans are desperate for live sports events to fully return and keeping them engaged is more important than ever. Adapting to the new reality for sports events requires a fan-centred approach and the need for insights about what they need and want. The hungriness of fans for live sports content and the need to innovate around the changed nature of live events (empty stadiums and the impact on matchday) provides opportunities to accelerate the introduction of new technologies and forms of engagement. Sports organizations should be ready to try with more disruptive solutions that break with the traditional sports consumption model. A space has opened to experiment and search for new models that could be more sustainable.