3 Phases: Sport Hiatus, Resume, The Next Normal
It’s now only a few weeks that the world has entered an unprecedented challenge and our industry, the professional sports tech, and media, has been impacted with no live events happening and a series of consequences that are rippling down the pyramid of the sports ecosystem.
Analyzing where we are now and looking forward to how the situation can evolve I have identified three phases that we will potentially have to go through.
I called them Sport Hiatus, Resume, and The Next Normal.
I am focusing solely on what my expertise is (if anything), “enabling and monetizing passions”, and leave all other parts to the field experts (finance, rights, fitness, …).
1. Sport Hiatus
No live sports happening, this moment has redefined an industry, removing the source element of the whole thing.
Most rules we operated under are less applicable now and there is space for more innovation and creativity, furthermore, a lot of blockers have been removed because of different priorities.
I have heard an exec in a major sport league saying: “What we are putting together in terms of digital and remote production now in 4 weeks would have taken 4 years to make it happen under normal circumstances.”
I predicted some weeks ago the 5 things sports and media companies could do to fill the gap, in this blog post:
SportsPro’s Michael Long also expanded on teh concept on Sport Hiatus on a seminal article
Deltatre shares their views in this blog post on deltatre.com
Content production and flexibility
Those with stronger content strategy and production skills have an advantage as the absence of Live Sport have decimated the content naturally available — and in a structured way (Pre-game, Live-game, Post-game, highlights, etc…) — for sports and media properties.
Media companies, which naturally have strong content production capabilities may have an advantage now, as well as those sports properties that have developed an internal media company.
Social is often the best escape route because of the flexibility of it and the ease of creating content on those platforms.
Esports
F1, Nascar, Moto Gp, NBA N2K and FIFA20 have somehow dominated this period in terms of virtual sports that replace traditional sports, with many other sports trying to fill the gap with new virtual product launches.
The news from this last weekend is that it seems this works with fans, records numbers of viewers and great fun for all, with real Players/Drivers/Athletes involved as e-gaming competitors.
Latest: Horse Racing, a peak audience of 4.8 million people tuned in to the weekend’s Virtual Grand National on UK commercial broadcaster ITV.
Access to players/athletes
Athletes and Players are a natural source of authentic content and being all at home these days they have started to share massively various elements of their life from fitness to skills to fun stuff, and fans are loving it.
Great examples below from Olympic Channel and Roger Federer.
Social vs O&O
Social takes center stage as the easiest way to engage with fans in a moment when all rules have to be rewritten and many have flocked to those platforms these days.
In contrast, not all Own & Operated (websites, apps, OTT) platforms have been flexible enough to accommodate the quick needed changes without substantial redevelopment.
Should I say that a sport-specific CMS, Interactive video player, UX targeting platform, and Audience Intelligence solution that understand your audience, and act on the data instantly, are crucial in this time of change or would it be too much of a promo for deltatre? (Answers: Forge, Diva, Axis., mtribes)
Network Traffic
Quite obviously, with people at home, network traffic related to video streaming and e-gaming has exploded, read about it on sporthiatus.com
Winners
Who are the winners in this phase: Esports, Players and Social.
2. Resume
Sports will resume (hopefully soon) but how?
Everybody now expects that it will start with no fans at the event, as it seems more doable to host an event with the minimal people involved as needed for the sport itself and the media production around it.
I have no intention to dive into how the logistics of it but just focus on the impacts for the fan experience and the athletes/players' experience.
Sport with no fans
Empty stadiums are not ideal for any sporting event, some sports may be more impacted than others.
In theory, fans may not care about it as the game/event may be produced in a similar way to normal, and we can assume everything is the same. But this is the safe route, there is a clear disconnect between players and fans, a broken link, can we be creative about it?
Can we bring fans to the stadium in some ways? Use the big scoreboard to show fans watching the game live, bring audio from fans in the stadium, change the game production to bring authentic moments to fans from the players? Can the isolated audio be even more dramatic than under normal conditions?
At deltatre, we are doing an internal creative brainstorming and a wall of ideas, get in touch if you want to learn more.
The WWE Wrestlemania example: just this weekend WWE has held a two days Wrestlemania with no fans attending in the arena.
A great resource to read on sporthiatus.com
Esports
What will happen to Esports once “traditional” sports are back? Will they stay or go back to a more specialized audience? Will there be now a stronger connection between a sport and the related esport?
Fans & Players
Will fans be ok with it? Will they get used to it in zero time? Will games/ events played without fans look more artificial?
Will players be able to focus under these weird circumstances? Will they perform at the top without fans cheering?
Predicted Winners: Those Sports organization that have embraced change and have been flexible to adapt in time to the new scenario
3. The Next Normal
It is clear we will not go back to normal after this unexpected moment that changed almost everything around us (at least in most countries), and there will be a new normal: The Next Normal.
To be clear this is speculative and will be updated as we go, nobody knows at this stage, but nevertheless it’s good to start elucubrating about it to prepare.
How much of what we see happening today in terms of fans' behavior, content strategy, approach to direct-to-consumer will continue when sports resume?
Clearly live sports will re-take center stage and a lot of behaviors may get back to what we were used in the past, but many others will not.
What will stay? What will revert back?
Constraints always brought innovation, the most famous example is Steve Job iPod with one button, my personal anecdote is with the BBC for Olympics in 2010 preparing for 2012. We arrived in London with our 4 levels of Information Architecture solution and the BBC design team told us: “Ok, nice but we have just one line for navigation”. IOn the same afternoon by joining forces we redesigned everything to fit and that defined Olympics website for some time afterward.
What I expect is:
- New digital behaviors will be the new normal, so fans expectation will be much higher in that respect, don’t fail them
- Virtual Communities are here to stay, so expect more social experiences
- Remote production will be widely adopted, breaking barriers from the past
- It has been proven that content can be produced at a lower quality but with better and immediate distribution, the shrine is open, go and innovate
- The need for more authentic content will stay, learn the lesson and adapt
Who does not leverage this phase by unblocking much-needed changes through innovation and re-organizes its structure into a more lean and change-friendly machine will suffer in the future and lose a great opportunity.
“If anyone is looking to do things differently, break some rules or traditions that they felt were antiquated in today’s time, this your chance,” said Tony Ponturo.
George Pyne is the former COO of NASCAR and the current CEO of Bruin Sports Capital, “As content consumption changes, are you going to adjust your product,” Pyne said. “This is an opportunity for everybody to innovate and get better. Sports are no different.”
Links
Interesting articles from Jabary Young at CNBC, Joe Favorito, and David Sable.
Winners
Predicted Winners: Those sport organizations that have embraced change and have been able to resist the hiatus as an ecosystem and accelerated a transformation towards new fans behaviors.
Conclusion
Understanding deeply what your strategy is for these 3 phases is crucial for the health of your business, whatever side you are on.
Being open to change and innovation is key, leveraging the moment to apply transformations that were due is important, re-imagine, be creative, stay strong.
This article was first published on https://sporthiatus.com
Stay Safe.
Resources
Sport Hiatus — https://sporthiatus.com
Alex Balfour — Insights
Michael Broughton — Linkedin vlog
SportsPro — Daily Update
