What if Content isn’t King?

What if Content isn’t King?

Bear with me on this heresy. Content is the lifeblood of our industry, and this is no Jerry Maguire moment. In fact, given I’m a self-confessed capitalist, Rod Tidwell’s “Show me the Money” is probably a closer a fit. 

The prism through which I look at the sports industry is almost always one of – how do we generate more, build a bigger and better industry and set it up for the next 50 years?  One of the logical steps here is to look at Sport as a Platform and my belief that many leagues and clubs/franchises have the opportunity to be exactly that – a platform, or ecosystem.

Where we stand today is in a middle ground. A sector that has woken up to the need for change, is wrestling with what that means and pulling in multiple directions as we all try to figure it out.

As I’m booking my tickets to World Football Summit I’m encouraged by much of what has happened behind the scenes in sports in the past 18 months.

Against significant headwinds, we have seen some phenomenal progress in two core areas that have always been of interest to me. Data and Content.

If Sport can be a platform these two areas are paramount to our success in getting to that place. The trick though to understanding the depth of the opportunity is this…if the Fan is king and not the content, then we can expand the offering and cater to our audiences in the way they want to.

If you want a real-world example, consider Amazon or Alibaba. Fair to say that they have both been successful as businesses. Whilst Sport is not trying to replicate them its interesting to note that they are effectively using Data and Content to keep people on their platforms. The knowledge provided by the data has informed them that content, including sports, is key to keeping their customers coming back, more often, for longer and to spend more money. The data and the content in themselves are not the goal.

Data as your Foundation

It’s not rocket science but I do like the house analogy with data. It’s quite common, scarily so, to hear people discuss how it's not about the data its about the insight and action at the end of it. This misses the point of the data…you can’t build a house without the bricks but of course the bricks are not the end game! So yes we are all looking for insight and actionable knowledge but let's make sure we start at the beginning.

I’m also encouraged that we are seeing some solid moves away from the view that data is just emails and selling more tickets. This was a good starting point 20 years ago but we are thankfully accelerating and seeing increasingly complex setups needed so we can fully understand our audiences. Even more so now that the big tech firms are making it harder, removing tools that have long been used such as cookies.

The products that are being released to our industry such as Pumpjack Dataworks (I’m biased as an Advisor to the Board) and Horizm are helping the industry transition from not just what to collect but also how to decipher the data and commercialize it.

Content as our Catalyst

When you step away from the league level the old moniker of ‘Content is King’ rings hollow. Teams will rarely have access to live content so are already down the list. This hasn’t stopped almost every club has a go.

The volume of club content, across not just football but every sport, is frankly unthinkable given where we were only a few years ago. We live in an Attention Economy so this has been absolutely necessary to stay at the top of mind. Sports are competing against not just leisure and entertainment but actually their own fans – they too are content creators as evidenced by their upload volume across the social networks.

It's fun to see different teams try out new formats and build their own trademark style and we should applaud the investment that has been made in this space. Be it a team’s media house, an agency such as Seven League, or a production company like Copa 90 there have been great strides in production quality and volume and it spans from the non-league to the European Champions.

What was the Point?

Where we stand today though it feels a bit anticlimactic. We are a long way from finished on either the data or the content journeys but now you are starting to hear the question being asked – what do we do with it? What was the purpose of it all?

Because the prevailing thinking has always been that as content was king the cycle was pretty simple…get the data to understand what content works then make more content. Oh, and the revenue will come on in.

If only life were as simple as that.

The Fan Rules

The point is that, especially in today’s world, with so many options and opportunities to distract, the content isn’t king. Of course, some are learning the wrong lessons and will simply keep creating more content (and in this sense I mean organise more matches). The logic is simple but doesn’t hold very well. There is a tipping point when more live content demeans the whole of it. 

If you haven’t noticed, we are in the midst of a content war. From Netflix and Disney Plus to every other ‘Plus’ and this is not ending anytime soon. Competing purely on a content basis is a risky solution and expensive. The budgets the big boys are deploying on original content is hard to compete with. Additionally, as people are increasingly finding, unless it's live, content is actually quite hard to monetize.

The Goal

It can’t just be about the content. Otherwise, the latest tweet and Instagram posts about CR7 joining Manchester United was the end goal…and it broke all sorts of records.

No, the goal is to build your club, your league, into an eco-system that is fed by content and informed by data. This is not unlike the Amazon and Alibaba model mentioned previously – though clearly needs to be bespoke to the sector.

What the ecosystem looks like will very much depend on your sport, size of the business, the appeal of it to local or global audiences, and of course budget.  If you aren’t building an eco-system, then your window of opportunity will only get shorter and shorter and more difficult to compete in. If it's about the next Instagram post, then good luck.

I’ve built a playbook for top-level football, motorsport, and even Rugby. It needs adapting depending on who uses it but it provides the guiding principles and concepts about how to build out an ec0-system or platform that makes sport relevant not just when a post is made, or when a match is played but also whenever the fan or follower has an interest in sport.

For a big club in a destination city, it’s one thing, for a small club is a second-tier sport it’s something different, but in each case, there are ways of building relevance and importance to your audiences.

At the end of the day, it starts and ends with the fan. The future revenue profile, and growth potential, requires thinking this way and not simply trying to sustain the model of the last 20 years. The world changed. The Fan has more options, and the fan is no longer just the person who lives locally and attends. The model, and the driving force behind it must therefore adapt.