Tumblr and Yahoo Sport predict the winner of UEFA EURO 2016, with Germany defeating Spain in the final for the championship
England and France to the semi-finals.
As the UEFA EURO 2016 tournament approaches, the social stratosphere has erupted with fans shouting out about all things football across the web.
Given the magnitude of social buzz, Yahoo research scientists were tasked with predicting a tournament winner based on a combination of scientific expertise and unique access to data from Yahoo Sport and Tumblr – one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
These research scientists waded through more than 24 million Tumblr blogs, comprising over 20 billion posts from the first five months of this year, to surface all EURO 2016 conversations on the platform. Next, they examined four years of Yahoo Sport data for each team in this year’s tournament. They then developed a statistical model for predicting the winners for each match, which predicts Germany to ultimately lift the trophy.
A victory would mark a golden age for Germany who would join the elite ranks of teams to hold both EURO and World Cup trophies simultaneously. This would put to bed the ghosts of EURO 2008 and the 2010 World Cup, where Spain’s triumphant runs left Germany defeated.
According to Yahoo’s predictions, England will face a familiar foe - Portugal - in the quarter-final stage. Portugal are England’s bogey team, having got the better of them in Euro 2000, Euro 2004 and World Cup 2006, but it looks like England will have revenge this year, with a predicted 2-1 victory in extra time.
A sterling performance is also expected from the Republic of Ireland in this year’s competition. They look set to beat Italy and Belgium to the top of their group, making it into the quarter-finals, despite Belgium being widely regarded as one of the favourites to lift the trophy.
Pre-tournament favourite and home team France is predicted to sail through the first three rounds, but will then face a dominant Germany, who historically seem to find extra gears at the latter stages of the knock-outs.
Check out the full Tumblr blog post for a more in-depth methodology on how our Yahoo research scientists developed their predictions, and stay tuned to Tumblr and Yahoo Sports throughout EURO 2016 for a comprehensive hub of analysis and breaking news.
See below and attached for graphical representations of Yahoo Research’s winners forecast.
Here was my recent Q&A ahead of a presentation I'm hosting in the summer at the Elite Sports Performance summit at London Excel. Typically focuses on sports science and sports data, this year the theme is digital, with a focus on how sports data is beginning to weave its way into the digital fan's conscience: http://www.espexpo.co.uk/news/blog.asp?blog_id=1187 Q: In January, Yahoo Sports and FC Bayern Munich announced a global media partnership where original digital content is being cross-promoted to millions of fans across the Yahoo network. Can you tell us more about this partnership? IN: Bayern approached us last year as part of a drive to expand their fan base, particularly in the Americas. Due to Yahoo Sports’ scale in the US we often speak with clubs over here about fan acquisition and activation partnerships, but Bayern came with a refreshing approach. They are impressively ramping up their media output, and were willing to flex and adapt to create compelling content specifically for an American audience. We have a German Yahoo editor embedded in the Bayern camp, who knows the DNA of the club and works closely with our US editorial team to craft and create the right content, and to promote it in the right way to maximize impact. It’s great for Yahoo Sports because we get to mold some genuinely original ’behind the scenes’ content from one of the biggest football clubs in the world. Q: What are organizations such as yourselves doing with digital content to keep fans talking about sport? IN: That’s an interesting phrase of question. At Yahoo Sports we believe the key for engagement is to give fans a platform to ‘talk’ about Sport, however large the group, wherever they are in the world, and whatever the team or game. We’re always on the lookout for what will turn everyday fans into fanatics. That’s why we’ve focused on utilities like Fantasy and stats in the past that can turn casual users into power users. We’re in the middle of rolling out a messenger utility for sports fans that’ll be baked into our site and apps. It’s utilities like these that create ‘power users’, users that are generating thousands of pageviews or hundreds of app visits every week. In terms of content, we’ve spent the last twelve months trying to rely less on agency wires, and focusing on very opinionated pieces, be that from fans or respected writers. We’ve recruited a network of fans and amateur writers, who’s only remit is to write on what they are passionate about. It’s not always the best quality, editorially speaking, but the long tail of community, comment and buzz these articles drive is unbelievable. It’s raw, straight from the terraces, but this is what’s driving fan engagement today. Q: How are you offering personalized experiences for Sports fans online? IN: Yahoo was one of the pioneers of content personalization. Since around 2007 we’ve been targeting content at users, based on what they explicitly and implicitly tell us they are interested in. Today in 2016, we’re still refining the personalisation algorithms for Sports fans as we learn from our engagement data. The algorithms have all the standard parameters you’d expect, like team and sport based weighting, but we’re also experimenting with situational and emotion parameters. If your team have just crashed out of the Champions League, you’re state of emotion plays a big part of what you want to consume. If we’re able to take signals, based on both your team’s result and what media you just consumed or clicked on, to make a best guess as to your current emotional state of mind, we can better serve up the most relevant content. Q: How can we understand fan consumption patterns, particularly with various digital experiences over online, mobile and social channels, and what parameters should be considered to make smarter sponsorship investment choices? IN: Today I think there’s a bit of a gap between what sponsors want and what fans are really engaging with online. We know fans love engaging with ‘behind the scenes’ club content, and we think one of the best platforms to push this on is Snapchat, but if you see how Centennials are engaging with this content (swiping through and discarding each item at a million miles per hour), it’s totally not sponsor friendly, or conducive to immersive engagement. During live sport, fans are engaging less with boxscores and match stats, and instead crave instant clips, vines and goals as they happen. These clips are more than likely ripped, pirated and typically poor quality, which again is not sponsor friendly. So how do they reach the coveted younger audience? Since we acquired Tumblr, we’ve taken story telling and content marketing to the next level for brands. It also helps that some brands are totally savvy to what engages users- when we worked with Beats in the last World Cup, their video ads actually lived natively amongst our content, and at times ranked as some of the best performing content across our network. It will get easier for brands and sponsors. We are already witnessing leagues like the NBA for example, loosening up around clip rights, which enables fans to get more creative with clips and footage, legitimately, and it’s reaping dividends for them in terms of engagement with a younger audience, and social following. Q: Could you reflect on some of the most exciting innovations in fan engagement? Is Virtual Reality going to be the way forward in 5-10 years? IN: Being a big sports stats nerd from an early age, and now lucky enough to work in this industry, for me one of the most exciting areas of innovation is actually in data collection, in particular for football. It’s crazy how far behind US sports football is in terms of its data, and with the tech we have available at our disposal today, we still don’t really understand simple things like player positioning, pressure and movement. Better stats and data make the game more fun for fans at the bottom of the food chain, and also better inform the decision makers at the top. Virtual Reality will be a prominent tool in our fan engagement arsenal soon, for sure. VR is somewhat a unique tech innovation, because with cardboard and smartphones the price point for mainstream consumers is already within reach. The VR marriage with Sports is natural, and you see most VR startups dipping their toes first into Sport, because it is within Sport that there is most opportunity for disruption. As Stadiums fill out and ticket prices for games and competitions continue to scale out of the reach of the common fan, VR will become a serious and competitive alternative for live consumption. Q: What are you hoping to get out of the Fan Engagement Symposium this June? IN: I’m looking forward to hearing from STATS LLC- I think their move into Europe and Football will kick start a data revolution, both in terms of tech innovation and new metrics and analytics for football. The VR ‘theme’ will be popular, and I see Virtually Live is an exhibitor- I’m looing forward to seeing what they, and the other startups in this space are up to.
Increasingly I’m finding presentations, research and data on digital media trends and habits of millennials confusing and noisy. They’re all now opened with the tedious caveat of how a single 18y male student is very different to a 34y mum of two. No shit. I’m steering around the noise for this ‘shallow dive’ into what is engaging younger audiences, by focusing on the next generation, Centennials (or iGen, Gen Z), that is Sports fans under the age of twenty-one. A much narrower and easily identifiable demographic. At the same time arguably the least known about, but the generation that will change the way we all use technology to consume Sports digital media.
The sports industry, still largely run by fat cat boomers and suits, hate to turn their heads this young. Millennials were hard enough to squeeze revenue from, and Centennials will be an even harder nut to crack. Premium advertisers, and increasingly now even programmatic and class two advertisers, bent on performance and optimisation, identified long ago that kids ignore advertising. Native is all that Centennials have known, so it’s increasingly hard to distract and disrupt their user journeys with cheap brand ads. They’re also more savvy and educated than any other generation, meaning propensity to ad block, cord cut and pirate stream is higher than ever before.
“Young kids will see the Rolex brand, but are they going to go and buy one? They can’t afford it. Or our other sponsor, UBS — these kids don’t care about banking. They haven’t got enough money to put in the bloody banks anyway. That’s what I think. I don’t know why people want to get to the so-called ‘young generation”. Why do they want to do that? Is it to sell them something? Most of these kids haven’t got any money.“
Bernie Ecclestone, 2014
So long as Bernie runs F1, the sport will continue to drive itself into the ground, as its older audience (literally) die and a younger audience emerge, hungry for instant gratification, snacky entertainment soundbites and gamification, all of which F1 has ignored. Centennials, unlike their Boomer grandparents, will never commit three hours of their Sunday to sit on a sofa and watch a Grand Prix on TV. Alas, I promised this was a ‘shallow dive’ so i’m not going to dwell on Bernie and F1’s demise any longer. Below you’ll find a quick review of four Sports apps flying high in the first 2016 Free (Centennials definitely do NOT pay for apps) App store ranks, all skewing Centennial, and the reasons why they’re cutting through with this most mysterious demographic of fans.
FUT
If you follow sports on social networks, YouTube or indeed visit the App Store sports categories, you can’t have avoided coming across ‘FUT’ at some stage. This is an acronym of FIFA Ultimate Team, a mode of the popular FIFA console game, that allows you to build and manage a team. It’s also the most common mode you use when playing online with friends or the world. Ah, the penny starts to drop. FIFA is by far the most popular sports console game in the world, and even the fastest growing game, in terms of units sold, in the US. The FUT websites are hugely popular (Futwiz.com and Futhead.com combined attracted over 2.5M Users in the month of Dec 2015 according to Comscore), and if you type ‘FUT’ or ‘FUT packs’ into Youtube and look at how many views videos are generating, you start to get a sense of just how large the long tail of web traffic EA Sports is creating through its FUT community and fans. The FUT sites have released rudimentary apps in app stores, and they’ve crept to the top of the ranks. You can even see ‘FUT Card Creator’ at #13 - yep you guessed it - for users that want to create custom FUT cards with their own face and imaginary stats. The interesting thing about these apps is there isn’t very much interesting stuff in them. They are simply databases of FIFA player stats, with a tool to filter stats. The feature that makes them most useful for me is the forums and community, which debate anything from stats and packs, to current form of real life players. They get a lot of bad reviews from users that “couldn’t find much else apart from stats”. But despite their simplicity, because of the popularity of the game and the appetite for quick access to game data, they are a permanent fixture at the top of the app ranks.
433
I can’t recall how I first became aware of this app, but that’s generally how all viral and word of mouth apps reach their new users. So that there is a good start. I’ve been using this app for about six months now, initially because its alerts drew me back time and time again, but more recently because I like the short form format of stories, and the slate homepage, which reminds me of a time I forced myself to use Flipboard and Zite everyday, as a result of tablet early adopter syndrome. For Sports, there is still something to be said about a ‘tiled’ start screen, which feels perfect in a weekend or Champions League day, when there is so much going on at the same time. Between game days 433’s tiled homepage comes alive with viral and buzzy football content, and it is this that is attracting a younger audience. Emojis stuck on images, funny photoshop crops GIFs and rips of goals as they happen. Much to the disdain of rights holders I guess (consider this app has more users than official apps and apps of TV broadcasters shelling out billions on rights, more Instagram likes, more snapchat engagement), but kids don’t care where it comes from, they just need it instantly. Despite the legalities, there’s much to be learnt by the leagues and broadcasters here. Stateside, NBA is leading the way in loosening up around clips, vines and loops created from live game steams. And it’s working. NBA now has the largest and most engaging social footprint across all sports and leagues. They have the highest engagement across Instagram and Snapchat, thus with Millennials and Centennials. No coincidence then that the NBA is the fastest growing sport in terms of audience. Compare that to F1.
KICK
During the early 90’s, I was one of the millions of kids trading football playing cards in the playgrounds of England. I was fiercely proud of my collection, and dedicated hours every week cultivating it. It taught me the art of negotiation, inter-personal skills, math- I even recall organising a meeting at a park to trade an Alan Shearer card, setting my price based on making a positive ROI from the 70p bus fare. KICK from Topps is essentially all of this, wrapped beautifully into app form. With the 2016 iteration, kids need not carry around a worn out wad of cards wrapped in rubber bands, and they definitely need not travel across town by bus to trade. They have their collections conveniently, digitally stored within their smartphones. There’s a real time trading marketplace, chat forums and gamification meaning it’s easier and more addictive than ever to build a collection. This app has sat at the upper echelons of the UK app store ranks for almost a year and half now, and there are schools in England that have banned this app, because of its addictive usage spilling into the classroom. No PR is bad PR, hey Topps?
UFL
The premise of the game is beautifully simple- it’s standalone fantasy for individual games. Your task as a user is to draft two players once the lineups are released, one hour before kick off, and watch them score points for almost every action on the pitch. However, unlike traditional games you cannot simply sit back and watch. You are equipped with boosts, freezes and other tools to influence yours and your opposing user’s points scoring. This creates a competitive ‘battle’ environ, incentivised and funded by UFL coins, the virtual currency with which the game revolves. It’s clearly built with Centennials in mind, and with a brief browse of the global leaderboard, you can see that’s exactly who they’re attracting. Sign up is simple, onboard flow is quick and intuitive, and with two taps i’m into my draft. The draft is magnificent and it’s really the app’s unique selling point for me. I’m torn between if I think it’s magnificent because there’s nothing like it out there for soccer, or if it truly is magnificent in its suitability for pick up, quick fix, daily fantasy play. Either way, it’s sticking with Centennials, and expect big things when investment flushes in to this young UK startup.
Recently I presented a pitch at a Sports Digital Media conference, within which I explained the ten most important factors to remember when it comes to engaging fans with your digital media output:
1. Sports is entertainment
2. Emotion sticks
3. Emotion sells
4. Storytelling
5. Snapchat is messy
6. Environments matter
7. Intrude
8. Every second counts
9. Fans are tribal
10. VR will change the game
1. Sports is entertainment. Sports is big business. Celebrity is now meshed with Sport. A Kardashian at a PSG game will draw more clicks, streams and eyeballs than anything about the game itself. Even one of the best players that ever graced the earth (Ronaldo) pales (literally) into insignificance in comparison. Sports is indeed big business, and Sports leagues and clubs need to be thinking like big businesses. They need to be looking beyond locals, beyond filling forty thousand seats every week- how do you reach and glean revenue from your global fan base? Media. Clubs need to be thinking like entertainment and media companies. As the best clubs ramp up their content output, they are failing to properly distribute and monetise it. The vast majority of content production never sees the light of day, and is consigned to some dusty archive. Their output should be akin to a media business in terms of scheduling and personalisation too. They need to create and farm the CRM better, and give fans what they want, when they want it, on the platforms they frequent. They need to give global fans a way to engage, interact and consume the club. When they fail, they fail to reach the true potential fanbase that their success on the field should warrant.
2. Emotion Sticks. We are swimming in content right now. We have more content, across more platforms than ever before, yet it’s becoming harder to retain and remember the good. Content that evokes extreme emotion is remembered easier. We also know that emotional content, in particular that with a positive sentiment, is more likely to be shared. In short, emotion sticks. I used Steph Curry as an example of how off the court stories have created an emotional bond with the player- for every record broken and story from the court, there is a story about his family, pictures of his cute kid at press conferences, or stories from his childhood following his father around. For every ‘MVP’ story, there are stories about his rejection as a child for being too small and scrawny. We know as much about Steph Curry’s life as we do his three throw technique, and this emotional bond is what makes him such a marketable and likable star. What works today? Back stories like Curry’s rejection as a kid. Athlete vulnerabilities, acts of compassion. Athletes connecting with fans. Birthdays, anniversaries, milestones. Emotion.
3. Emotion sells. Two videos played: Neymar Beats, Ibra Volvo. Brands and content marketers are more savvy to this than ever before. More savvy than sports media outlets, clubs and leagues in fact. As a result their ads are becoming so emotionally charged, so personal, unique and informative that thy are becoming content and living alongside some of the most expensively created original content (in terms of popularity/streams). Emotion sticks and emotion sells.
4. Storytelling. For this the backdrop was Moneyball (the book/movie). Of course it helps that Brad Pitt is the star, but the point of the movie reference, and to some extent the book, was that although the narrative was analytics, the writer wove emotion through the story. Emotions create connections, and as above, stories stick and are retained for longer. Beyond Pitt, Beane and the Oakland A’s, storytelling is becoming more important as live footage, data and content becomes more locked down by rights restrictions, and inaccessibly expensive. Media are finding stories ‘around the game’- the before and after the game instead of simply the game. VR companies, for example, undeterred by rights of live footage, are instead focusing on the before (the game day preparation, the locker room, the warm up), and the after instead. Then I moved on to modern platforms like Snapchat, and how the mobile generation is consuming stories via snapchat, which leads me seamlessly onto rule number five…
5. Snapchat is messy. But that’s what makes it beautiful. It’s messy because sports clubs, players and athletes are showing us more insight into their lives than ever before. That’s messy because athlete’s lives are chaotic, frenetic and honest (see Royston Drenthe’s snap from his car, below. The ex-Real Madrid winger has more haircuts than games these days, and they all end up on Snapchat). Most football players I follow post images and video of their houses, their families and their team mates, and it is almost always ‘uncut’. What I mean by ‘uncut’ is that on almost every other social network, you can take the time to filter, crop, cut, do a second take- essentially craft the perfect post. On Snapchat, it’s one cut or no cut, and the end result almost always illustrates the chaotic and messy nature of athlete’s lives. This is unique and this is why it is beautifully engaging. For athletes it also feels somewhat private. Even though it is open and public, the ephemeral nature, and design of the platform, means it is difficult to get a sense of just how many people are seeing your content. This creates the perfect conditions for spontaneity and frivolity. Athletes spent years getting media trained by their clubs and agents, and it all seems forgotten when it comes to Snapchat! Snapchat is also messy because the platform has yet to organise content in a logical and efficient way for real fan engagement. I follow over ten football teams and a multitude of players, and it’s a real drag trawling through rubbish to find nuggets of good content. And it’s messy because if you really study how teens interact with snapchat, it is not at all conducive to immersive engagement. They swipe and tap through posts at a million miles per hour, most trying to cut through the noise to get to their friends’ content. The masses may be here (Snapchat) but the environ is not yet conducive for deep emotional brand engagement. It’s fun, it’s unique, but it’s messy.
6. Environments matter. Media companies will spend vast resources securing talent, content, interviews, time with clubs, and then ruin it by failing to apply good thought to their production environments; Where will you film? Where does the talent like filming? What is going to evoke deeper conversation? Who will the talent bounce off and spark chemistry with? When publishing a picture, sometimes the most interesting anchor of focus is what is in the background. Likewise with video, sometimes what is going on in the background, can be the most insightful and unique element of the video. Intimate environments like limousines and private jets, can often make people feel secure and at home, thus they give away more honesty in their answers. Equally some people can freeze in confined areas. Your last environmental factor, and often most critical, is music. You can make the most turgid and monotonous speaker and/or speech seem epic and dramatic with the right music playing in the background. Environments matter.
7. Intrude. Clubs, leagues and athletes are putting more ‘behind the scenes’ content out in the public domain than ever before. It’s some of the most engaging content online because it is a unique insight into something before unseen. Remember:
Behind the scenes content should feel like the audience is intruding
Behind the scenes content should feel personal
Behind the scenes content should feel unscripted
Behind the scenes content should be beyond the pitch
Behind the scenes content should feel unexpected
Behind the scenes content should expose
8. Every second counts. In a world where video rules and auto-play is increasingly becoming the norm, literally, every milli-second counts. We’re all competing for eyeballs and attention in the same stream, so your content has to stand out. You can have the best content in the world but if it is hidden behind poor stills and a lengthy intro, no one will see it. Here I talked about having great thumbnails, titles, overlays, stills and how the first milli-seconds must engage. After the initial first seconds, I spoke about what makes Millennials, Centennials and the snapchat generation share. Then I focused on sports fans. What makes fans share? Referring again to emotion but also introducing the concept of authenticity. Almost half of millennials value authenticity over anything else. Authenticity and emotion- you start to realise why many in this space think clubs and leagues are sitting on unrecognised value.
9. Fans are tribal by nature. Fans will share what they think other fans will want to see. A recent Reuters report on digital news trends stated that, across every country, surveyees preferred automatically delivered, algorithmic news (37%), than the judgement of journalists or editors (30%), and that only 22% prefer news based on what their friends recommend. So in the world of News, users still trust the judgement of journalists over their friends. In Sports it skews the opposite way. Fans trust and follow the opinions of their fellow fans. Fans are tribal by nature, and will gather where likeminded fans congregate. They hanker for communication and chat with other fans, and there is a genuine hunger to be amongst one another. Social viewing platforms and groups are new engagement currency, and we’ve seen Media and tech giants start to show an interest in live rights packages, because of the engagement potential of sports fans. Lastly I started talking about disparate global fanbases coming close than ever before through VR, and related it back to LiveLikeVR’s ‘social stadium’ experience.
10. VR will change the game. As I started on emotions, I end on emotions with sensory experiences. VR can bring sensory, immersive, tactile and emotional experiences all into one engagement platform. It can bring fans closer together than ever before, and it can put fans in the best seat, their seat, every game, even though they may live thousands of miles away from the stadium. The stadium is your playground. Or at least that is how the clever VR startup marketeers have led us to believe VR will change the game….
That marketing dream is fraught with rights and legal restrictions. Live broadcast of in game footage is locked up in rights, expensive to film, produce (from a VR perspective) and will not become a reality until VR reaches critical mass enough to warrant paying for the big rights packages. What we have today, is an opportunity for VR to tell the story around the game. TV broadcasters are the masters, artists in fact, when it comes to producing and broadcasting live sport. Why try to compete? But what about the game before the game? What about the day? Imagine experiencing a day in the life of your favourite sports star- the moment they get up, how they travel to the stadium, the pre match rituals, the superstitions, the locker room, even the warm up. VR’s white space is a space never before conquered.
2014 was the year of the World Cup. Techs and startups in the industry used the event as an excuse to redesign, launch apps and innovate upon their platforms already live. Last year was the year of sports applications, sports social networks, sports fan blog networks and viral sports content. 2015 was meant to be the year we took stock, look back, relax, put our feet up, brace ourselves for the whirlwind that will be the Olympic year of 2016. Instead, we were busy dreaming beyond the Olympics and into 2017, into a year so foreign and exotic in its distance, into a time and place where perhaps we don’t physically need to move from our sofas to play or consume sport anymore. Into a world where engineering is automated and bots farm out our product updates. Autonomous drones look after our every whim and VR, AR and AI provide us the vista within which we consume eSports, the sport that has surpassed all other Sports in terms of popularity. Here are the Sports tech trends of 2015, our dreams of aspirational innovation (with some plain old reality mixed in for good measure):
1. eSports
“It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition….Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports,” John Skipper, ESPN President (Sep 2014).
Well hasn’t John along with all the rest of the naysayers in our industry, now got a lot of egg on their well moisturised faces? No one could deny the audience potential. Amazon’s $1B acquisition of Twitch exposed eSports fanaticism and audiences to the mainstream, and since then every market analysis has pointed toward solid, consistent growth. The naysayers though would reiterate time and time again that audience is nothing without advertisers, sponsors, investment, broadcast, coverage and stars. All of that and more has arrived at the door of eSports HQ, buzzing to see if they can come join the hottest party in town. Red Bull, Nissan and Logitech are but a few sponsors that want a bit of this young, engaged and loyal fanbase. In fact this fanbase is everything we, the sports industry, have been craving for years. A massive skew towards millennials, fiercely loyal and engaged to an extent that there aren’t enough hours in the day to fix the habit that is eSports consumption. Prize pots have bulged from a few thousand dollars to over $5M (the 5 team members of Newbee, the 2014 DOTA 2 winners, shared $5.03M), which means over night celebrities and millionaires are made from eSports these days. Even before the money came, eSports Youtubers and Twitch broadcasters outranked all but the Music industry in terms of aggregate followers and subscribers. These are the Sports stars of the 21st century for millennials, and we’re only fifteen years in to said century.
2. Virtual & Augmented Reality
Startup lesson #1 for 2015: When pitching to VC’s and Investors, if you’re not in this field, be sure to add tedious link to AR/VR somewhere. This is for sure the VC flavour of the month right now. In every incubator there are two or three of them, the tech giants are creating affordability and the advertising sectors are seriously considering VR as an effective marketing channel. It’s landed.
In reality, neither are new to Sports. Since the 80′s TV stations have been using AR to overlay action, stats, analysis and projections onto live broadcast. In American Football, Rugby and Cricket, advertisers have used AR to project sponsor messages onto the playing fields for years now. Many a time have my eyes and brain felt disconnected by the visual disorientation of an AR advertising hoarding just behind the goal. How many of us have froze in wonderment when a player innocently jogs over AR advertising?
Whilst 2014′s startup scene attempted to get bums off sofas and into gyms, participation sport, and stadia, 2015′s are a bunch of renegades sticking the middle finger up and stating “If you want to sit on your sofa and pirate stream live sports into your living room, fuck it, you go ahead mate. In fact, crack another cold one, and we’ll bring the stadium right into your living room if you like.” Startup LiveLikeVR are one of many that enjoyed some limelight in 2015, with their prototype VR app claiming to enable fans to ‘watch games in a virtual stadium with friends’. With their app on your phone, and a VR headset from any reputable manufacturer, you can watch the game live, with your friends in the stands as avatars. That’s cool right? NextVR is another startup grabbing the attention, by bagging $31M of investment from Time Warner & Comcast. NextVR made a name for themselves providing VR solutions for the Golden State Warriors, including streaming their first game of the 2015 season to their userbase. JauntVR attracted even more investment, this time from Disney. Although Jaunt claims to span much more than just Sports, much of their PR activity centered around Sport, including extreme sports, golf and, again, the streaming of live sports games. Every one of them have their toes dipped into the sports market, because it is here that there is most opportunity for disruption, as stadiums fill and sell out, and more users cut the cord in times of austerity, VR is primed to mop up the pieces. Not an exhaustive list at all, but 2015 saw Comcast, Google Ventures, Nike, Disney, RSE Ventures, Madison Sq Garden Company and Time Warner all invest in VR. In fact there were 119 deals by December 1, worth $602M in total, invested in VR startups.
In November, UK Sports betting giant William Hill invited the London tech press into their innovation lab to show the world how they were partnering with Oculus to develop VR solutions for horse racing. Their intent is to enrich the betting experience for punters, by having them don a headset that transports them right onto their backed horse. As a seasoned gambler myself, I can guarantee I’d be spanking my bookmaker’s plastic seat with an imaginary whip if I was to equip myself with a VR headset in my local bookmaker’s shop. But with affordability creeping towards us, it’s kinda scary to think this innovation could be disrupting the betting experience sooner than we think. Not only would it enrich the betting experience, but it would bring the sport to a much younger audience, something horse racing desperately needs.
3. Daily Fantasy
Daily Fantasy hit us like a train in 2014, and gathered momentum in 2015. The two ‘$1B startups’ dominating the US became $3B+ unicorns each and have been joined by Yahoo, and a flurry of startups. Most impressive for me has been the ecosystem and community that has bubbled up around them. Bloggers, vloggers, lineup optimizers and data analyzers have been conceived from nowhere, the industry creating a long tail of entrepreneurship, innovation & invention. It was a tale of two halves for Daily Fantasy this year, as during H1 the waters stayed relatively calm. Daily companies were the darlings of the tech and sports press, and everyone wanted a piece of the action. The second half of the year saw Daily Fantasy thrust into the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, as the US authorities got the scandal they needed to start unpicking the thin grey line within which these sites operate between lawful and illegal in the US. Gambling or not, Daily Fantasy continues to grow, eroding traditional forms of Fantasy along the way, and stealing market share from both this and the gamification/second screen market.
Meanwhile, away from American soils, Daily Fantasy games continue to blossom. If 2014 was the Winter from which Daily Fantasy Sports was conceived in markets like India, Australia and the UK, 2015 was most definitely the Spring within which it blossomed. The handful of startups became twenty to thirty, and traditional blogs and communities started covering Daily Fantasy extensively. Marketing messages like “Win cash today with your Fantasy skills” and “One Day Fantasy Football” were extremely powerful in markets where Fantasy has traditionally been prizeless, and where wagers and sports betting were already synonymous and prevalent. These are marketing messages also resonating powerfully with the impatient, instant gratification seeking, value hungry millennial audience. As the startups grew, the big boys began to see dollar bills. Fanduel & Draftkings both publicly expressed intent to enter the UK market, and prominent investors and VCs, desperate for payback, encouraged their sports startups to take the jump into Daily Fantasy. Internationally, watch this space for 2016.
4. Reimagining Engagement
In previous years, the sports industry had rightly been hung up on engagement. The problem with the digital sports industry is loyalty and customer relationships are notoriously difficult to build- sports stats and news are such a common, often duplicated commodity, and as such the apps and sites that people visit are very disposable by nature. 2015 was the year we began to reimagine engagement through better use of tech. The difference this year is instead of just trying to get more new technology into the hands of fans, 2015 was the year we began to create better technology experiences to enable fans to engage.
At Yahoo Sports, we tried to transform our own Fantasy Football product from Fantasy utility, to second screen must have. We recognised that when it comes to Fantasy teams, fans will consume games they never would have before, to a very granular extent. We were parsing granular ‘kick by kick’ data through our game, plotted on pitch x-y coordinates, and archiving away a huge repository of interesting match data. We decided to expose it in a stream to a small % of users to see how they reacted. It drove up engagement KPIs to unprecedented highs, and subsequently we released it to 100%.
Over in the States, the San Francisco 49ers moved into their brand new stadium late in 2014, and with it furnished their fans with a host of new tech to engage and enrich the game day experience. With mobile antennas and wifi boxes stored under seats, every fan is equipped with fast connectivity, and with the club’s official stadium app, fans can order food and beverages to be delivered to their seat, store their ticket info, watch real time stats and engage with other fans. The 49ers are reimagining how fans should engage with their phone, each-other and with the team on game day. As a result, they are able to mine the data they collect on a game day (said to be 500 terabytes of data on a game day), and maximise revenues through in app purchases. In the first season alone, the app has increased revenue for the 49ers by $2M through food, drink and merchandise purchases.
Wearables were a trend from 2014, but it was incredible how many users were abandoning their wearables after a few months of use. Users still love the concept behind wearables so what is the reason for abandonment? Consumers just do not know what to do with all that data they are generating. Big data is useless without an analytical layer to make sense of it, and every wearable company was dropping the ball. In 2015, we started to see Wearable companies solve for this, by developing virtual ‘coaches’ or automated systems to provide actions and advice from analysing data generated from wearables. Users are beginning to find reason to continually engage, and with it retention and engagement is increasing, and abandonment decreasing. Again, an example of creating better tech experiences to enable fan engagement.
5. Rebirth of Club Content
International colleagues often ask me why Premier League clubs enjoy such huge global fanbases and following, yet have tiny audiences on their owned and operated club sites. The full reason behind this probably deserves a separate chronicle, but here’s my distilled version:
Around the year 2000, clubs started launching their websites.
But no one wanted to give their content away for free. This was in a time before ad funded sites were a success
So they all set up subscriptions and memberships, putting up a paywall barrier between their content and fans
Inexplicably, in most cases this also put their content out of reach for non-UK users.
They also all outsourced their websites, meaning they learned nothing about content trends and how users were reacting to their content
Their content was also, frankly, pretty rubbish.
In the next 10 years unofficial fanzine sites saw huge growth. Some grew to 10x the size of their ‘Official’ counterparts
Around 2008, Clubs bought back their own sites/domains, and started to move towards the free or freemium model.
But even today clubs are still struggling to play catch up. Unofficial fanzines were so popular, not just because they were free, but because they had to sensationalise and make up content to engage fans. Naturally their content is questionable in its authenticity, but it is exactly the type of content that works on the web. Online, fans want to get lost in a few minutes of sensational opinion, or to humour themselves with a few minutes of moonshot and aspirational transfer rumour. The clubs are still catching on to this aspect of digital content, but the one aspect they are beginning to master is original content creation. They are catching on to the value of original, behind the scenes footage they used to write off as rubbish. I remember chatting to a Premier League club, who described how they had deployed a full-time photographer to follow the team everywhere. She took thousands of snaps every day but the club discarded most, choosing only to publish a few, very professional and polished snaps. Later, when we were discussing a photo blog, they showed me some of the discarded ones. There were photos of players joking around with eachother, messing around at lunch, players talking to fans outside hotels. These were real life, powerful, captivating insights into players and staff. The club were simply discarding these as rubbish.
In 2015 clubs are beginning to realise the value of the content they sit on. Especially as they focus on social networks and the need to keep feeding fans with rivers of content- they will publish almost anything and it’s from this strategy that they’re learning most. Clubs like Manchester City (I must admit to having a real soft spot for their ‘Tunnel Cam’ as seen above), Arsenal, QPR and Barcelona are leading the way but others are following fast.
Photos have been the most undervalued and under-used media format on digital for many years. Think about a computer screen – pc monitor, tablet, mobile – pictures should be the most suited format in terms of consumption for this environ. Video and streams suit the TV, and text suits paper. So why have digital media companies and publishers been so slow to embrace them and marry the device screen and photos?
Early experimentations were disastrous. High quality pictures taken by high-end cameras were awkwardly uploaded in original format, and with early household internet connection speeds, and no optimization or compressing, load time was painful. User experiences were poor- primitive media sites would often have photos housed on pages that required users to scroll down and to the right to view the whole photo. Slideshows didn’t exist.
Around the middle of last decade, Media outlets started experimenting with slideshows, and in 2005 Yahoo acquired Flickr. Flickr was my first wake up call to the power of the abovementioned marriage. Flickr’s strength was its core contributors, amateur photographers with high-end cameras, which meant the content was quality. But Flickr didn’t stumble upon its success. Their founders and early product team empowered photographers to combine quality photos with stories and tools to build communities around these stories and sets. Unbeknownst to most, Flickr innovated and created many of the patents for features common to social networks today, like user tagging in photos.
This article is my interpretation on why photos are so powerful and why media companies, still slow to embrace them online, should be kicking themselves.
Brilliant Hobo
Eight years ago I favourited this photo on Flickr, not for its quality, but for the accompanying story and follow up comments it garnered from followers and fans. Accompanying the original upload, from the author:
I’ve seen her wandering around from time to time but I don’t know anything about her. I don’t believe she’s homeless and she carries with her a haunted dignity which I find fascinating.
I picked up this roll from the lab yesterday morning and enclosed with the roll was a note:
"The woman with the white coat, lives somewhere in Melbourne like a hobo. However, she is a brilliant classical pianist and whenever she feels like, she goes to the city library and plays the most beautiful music and all classical."
I hope one day to hear her play.
A community has grown around this one picture and comments have flooded in over the years. One posted this article on her tragic but beautiful life story: http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/articles/2010/01/05/1262453588337.html?page=fullpage. People want to help her, want to listen to her, even want to travel across continents to find her and listen to her play. All this timespent, engagement and community, conceived from one photo.
The grind of supporting
Recently I came across a brilliant photographer called Stuart Roy Clarke, whose iconic photographs of 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s football in the UK have won critical acclaim across Europe, and have grown a cult following on social networks and football blogs. For me he is sort of an enigma- I tired to connect with him at a football conference in Manchester but was unable to. I found around 50 of his photos on his brilliant site http://homesoffootball.co.uk/, but was hungry for more. After following his twitter account I found a bunch more on this site, and stumbled across my favourite so far. Unfortunately his photos come with little information, little story, mostly just location and dates, which adds to the mystery of this photographer and his work.
The mystery is beautiful and captivating because it allows the audience to make up their own story. I called this particular photo ‘The Grind of supporting”. I had no idea where this photo was from, nor which team these hardy supporters were following. I had clues- the boy’s kit, the dockyard cranes in the background, the yellow bus, but not much else to go on. Nobody is talking to one another- is this because their team had just lost, or because of the penetrating rain that has worn the boy’s face paint off and causing him some discomfort. Is he crying because of the rain, or because of the defeat? Whatever it is, you can feel his pain. The draw of these photos is the purity- there is something very pure about these supporters and this photo- it is a time before mobile phones and mass media, before TV money, billionaires and £100 tickets forced real fans from the terraces to their sofas.
I actually tweeted this picture and Stuart thanked me. In hindsight I should’ve thanked him for the privilege of being able to browse his work, for free, online. In thanking me, his army of followers saw my post and from that I discovered more about the photo. It is early nineties. It is Greenock (home of Greenock Morton), a port town in the north-west of Scotland. Apparently, according to the locals who contributed to our small conversation on twitter, it always rains in Greenock.
Lost Liverpool
The redevelopment of Anfield, Liverpool FC’s home, has recently made the headlines of sport sites and newspapers globally, as the club publicised shiny new images of what the new stadium will look like. Unless you live in the surrounding area, you probably aren’t aware that this has been a project in the pipe for over ten years. However as Liverpool lurched from one owner to another, plans have stuttered and stumbled. Liverpool FC actually started buying up property surrounding the ground over ten years ago. Whole streets of beautiful Victorian houses have lain derelict for years, and are now being demolished ahead of building work to start next year. I wanted to find out more about the project, and specifically anything about the displaced families, of which there should’ve been hundreds. I found moving and poignant comments and stories (once again on flickr): https://www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolsuburbia/2341220341/in/photolist-emPmoe-4yTneX-fuN1XV-fuN1x2-cGdqe1-dX31Jy-cQhaLY-g7HNxp-joSXGZ-4yXBJs-he5fWq-enf12q-he5dtN-faWRmy-fbuUvN-3KgNC2-euuMqa-aF6aJi-7Yz1UE-PJpfu
Users left tales of their life experiences in these houses. Some even commented on which window their bedroom was once behind. I was moved by many emotions when reading these and spent a considerable amount of time looking back at the photo, imaging what it would have been like fifty years ago on this street. Just one photo. Captivating. One user commented on a different photo that these houses had now been pulled down, so I searched for more.
The Liverpool Echo have been documenting the regeneration of the Anfield area with a series of slideshows. Again, no story or comment accompanying each photo- it is easy for an editor to publish a slideshow with generic, emotionless commentary. But the void allows the audience to play out their own commentary. I see Victorian architecture at its finest- the care and attention given to window and door frames. The beautiful ornamental letter boxes and front steps. The JCB at work demolishing this to rubble is a jarring juxtaposition. The last residents of this house could probably even recognise the paint and wallpaper on the last remaining wall. There’s a poignant sadness to this, with a reminder looming large in the background of why.
There are three very different groups in this section of my matrix, but the one commonality is that they're all booming right now, stealing users and minutes of timespent from those in the other three quadrants of this matrix.
Club & Fanzine Sites: It's been interesting to analyse a transformative couple of years for club focused sites, fanzines and those that customise 'team stream' style experiences. It's by no means accidental or representative of a shift in consumer demand. Fan hunger for news on their favourite teams has always been immense, but clubs and sports publishers were slow to realise the engagement potential, and slow to ship features for filtering and personalisation online. Now, in 2015, these sites and apps are enjoying a traffic and audience boon. So what happened?
Clubs have slowly dropped their paywalls and registration barriers to entry, which were huge throttles on users, traffic and pageviews through the last decade.
Clubs are also realising that their fan-bases are not local, but global. Barca fans are just as likely to come from Kathmandu or California, as they are Catalunya. The digitally savvy club of today has its site in multiple languages, has many social networks broadcasting unique content in multiple languages, has merchandise that can be procured in multiple currencies and shipped worldwide and has online forums awash with multi-cultures and languages.
Social networks have also fuelled growth. Unofficial sites have boomed off the back of the proliferation of social networks, attracting fans through free content and really finding a place in the market. The sheer amount of unofficial sites and fanzines out there for any club, alongside official sites, mean it is now effortless to curate a list of 20 sources on Twitter and create a very engaging team stream right in your Twitter utility. As such, Twitter now gobbles up most timespent within this group, and within the 'Live' group I'm about to move onto next.
Personalisation algorithms and customisation features are maybe the single largest factor for a shift in fan timespent. The industry discovered intelligent ways to scan and tag content, both their own and external, and present it in a hugely engaging 'team stream' format. Bleacher Report's UK site did an impressive job of launching this to market in 2013, their 'team stream' site flirting with the top 10 in the UK Sports site and sports app ranking on a regular occasion. Bleacher's success should be celebrated as they were a brand relatively unknown in the UK, starting from zero at launch, but their product (customisable streams, well targeted alerts), blended with good content curation, was a hit with fans hungry for team based content.
Live: It's very simple. Yet hundreds in this space manage to screw it up. Just get score updates to users, fast. Many toy with big data and infographics to enrich the live game experience but a fan values nothing higher than immediate updates and being first to know. This is why apps like Livescore, Forza and OneFootball win to begin with, but then struggle when experimenting with new features and end up wrestling with their identities. There are hundreds, if not thousands of players in this space, but it’s not a sports company that is winning, it’s a social network- Twitter. The immediacy of Twitter, and simplicity of its CMS mean journalists, commentators, fans and players will take to Twitter first to broadcast, before moving onto the next platform. Despite lots of Twitter clones catered for soccer, no one has beat them, probably because Twitter haven't tried to change or tried to be a sports destination. Live is also inherently mobile. In fact it has become mobile only. If a fan is front of his PC or TV, he'll still have his app open to check on live scores. It’s a unique space in that sense, because nothing else has managed to migrate its audience to mobile at such speed.
Piracy: It's sad, and I loathe to include it in this matrix, but it'd be naive to believe piracy was in decline. In fact with ever quickening connections, sharp increases in prices for live (legitimate) TV broadcast, and more tech savvy pirates than ever before, fans are moving in their droves to find illegal content. Gone are the days of the Premier League and similar federations chasing pirate sites like Justin.tv & VIPbox- today's version of noughties pirates are owned and operated by the same tech giants that have been so integral in growing the profile of Soccer- Google, Facebook and Twitter. In 2007 the Premier League tried, and many years later failed, in legal action against YouTube for illegal streaming of protected footage, and today's enemy of the state is Vine, Periscope, Meerkat and similar. Almost as quick as the live goals get scored, there's a wave of vines (owned by twitter), primarily distributed via Twitter, for public consumption. Sporting authorities and leagues across the world are nervous about apps like Periscope and Meerkat, that allow fans to broadcast live footage from their stadium seat or couch, onto social networks. This is how Millennials are consuming 'live' today. So although piracy is separated for the purposes of this analysis, it is very much a part of the cluster around the ‘live’ experience.
Ten, even seven years ago you could have flipped the position of these two groups in this sector, as original publishing houses struggled with overheads and misguided strategy, whilst aggregators and portals sliced traffic from their immense reach into their respective Sports verticals. Today both are struggling for growth against the headwinds of more innovative and unique propositions, but now original publishing houses and magazines have stolen the reach once enjoyed by the former.
General Sports News (magazines): Where, in the not so distant past, these sites were struggling to migrate their businesses online, today they are amongst the most popular destinations for fans in the market. Magazines or newspapers like Marca in Spain, L'Equipe in France and FourFourTwo in the UK, have historically suffered badly from a drop in subscriber numbers for their physical print magazines. They scanned and copied the printed word to primitive websites, coded in pop up ads and site takeover experiences, and expected the users and advertisers to come. It was a model that once worked in a world before the Internet, and now everyone is online we’re just bringing our content to the masses, right? Wrong. In the middle of last decade no fan wanted to read full length articles online, wait for heavy, worse, multiple pages to load with glossy images and too much text. And no-one, not even your most avid brand champions, wanted to pay a subscription for online content thy can get free everywhere else. After a decade of struggles for the magazine industry, including many of our favourite 80’s and 90’s titles shuttering, at the turn of this decade the tide started to change… Facebook & Google, the lifeblood of all of these categories of Soccer sites & services, had long been awarding rank and traffic to original over syndicated content. However, it wasn’t until around 2010 that the industry reached a tipping point where both of the above had perfected their algorithms and crawlers, and the original publishing houses had learnt how to master SEO and SRO (Social Referral Optimisation as it was known then). Original content became king, and syndication and aggregation alone was no longer a viable strategy for Sports sites in the market. The publishing houses pivoted their online content strategies and the audiences started organically coming. Subscriptions even became successful as these players learnt where to draw the line between freemium and premium. The second turning point for these publishing houses was around 2013 when content strategies for social really reached maturity. Social networks and community sites required a new breed of content, and as fans migrated their timespent from traditional destinations to social networks, the publishing houses had to follow the traffic. Again, these sites ended up winners because they had the editorial and journalistic manpower to afford separate teams looking after content for social. Today they dominate the Soccer market in terms of audience, but are stagnating in growth & engagement as many fail to board the trend trains like Fantasy, Fan blogs/communities and personalisation. They also individually struggle as they are single language offerings, meaning the opportunity is only as big as the soccer fan base in your one market. Not only do these players have a growth ceiling in terms of unique users, they also suffer chronically from engagement shortfalls, having settled on strategies to soak up users from Facebook and Google, whose firehoses are notorious for sending ‘one page’ visitors that bounce immediately. Today, in 2015, the strongest are evolving, but it’s an illustration of how fast and frequent this industry changes, that this category has had to reinvent itself three times since migrating it’s print content online.
Sports Aggregators & Portals: The once kings and kingsmakers of this market, now play catch up to more innovative product and content strategies. AOL, MSN, Terra, Tiscali, Virgillio, T-Online- portals and email providers of a bygone era, still draw enough traffic to underpin competitive sports sites, but all understand it is not enough to attract serendipitous visitors or organic traffic. There are exceptions, like Yahoo, who continue to invest in journalists, original content and product innovation in the Fantasy space, hence remaining the #1 trafficked Sports destination globally, but younger soccer fans no longer will list Yahoo Sports within their top 3 daily fixes. MSN have swayed from aggregation, heavy investment in sports editorial, and most recently back to full automation, but across virtually all markets they’ve dropped out of the top ten ranks for traffic in the sports markets, and for Soccer specifically, don’t even make the radar. Many of these ex-portals are paralysed by internal politics and boardroom impatience, that a Sports strategy typically won’t last more than 12 months. That makes it very hard for users to place an identity on these sites, and so they’ve become a secondary, tertiary level reference sites for fans.
Circa 2008
Ian: “but this isn’t sport. It’s garbage”
Max: “the plan is to get them in, and then get them clicking around until they reach the real sport”
Ian: “look at your data- these users drop immediately and quickly. And look at the comments- these users are angry. They feel duped.“
At the time I was managing our Homepages and network wide analytics, and was concerned at the dilution of engagement on our most engaged property, Sport. The sports team were experimenting with click baiting and viral videos before the market even knew the concepts existed. For that, I should give them credit. Fast forward 7 years and we’re all doing it. Be that to win traffic (clicks) from Facebook streams, Outbrain modules or from Google, we’re all fighting for eyeballs through our content packaging. At the time I called it the ‘dirty side of sport’ but today I concede it is a necessity for success in the online market.
Sportainment: There are companies doing it well like Eurosport, who corner it all into a section, an appendage almost independent from the rest of their app/site. If users want to immerse themselves in viral goals and footballer’s girls, they can. If they want serious analysis, it’s available without pollution or dilution of the tone. There are companies that are doing an ok job at Sportainment, like Bleacher Report’s UK arm and Buzzfeed, the former weaving it through their daily output and the latter, known for nothing but this content, doing a better job than everyone at anticipating the viral soccer trends first. There are companies that are doing it badly- scraping from Buzzfeed and SportBible, and doing nothing else but. Having said that, this category of sites are in pole position so far as my market grid depicts, so it isn't a bad place to be doing something badly. This category is growing fast and retaining users week after week, day after day. As users migrate to Facebook & Twitter for discovering and media giants get better at content ranking based on popularity, the bandwidth constrained online fan is much more likely to see this content in their online journeys than ever before. We conducted our own research a few years ago, which theorises that sports fans immerse themselves so deeply in straight sports analysis during the weekend, across all mediums, that on a Monday morning and into midweek, Sportainment is a welcome break, in particular if your team has lost. The same research revealed that environmental and situational parameters were also a factor in the growing popularity of this content- in the privacy of a user’s laptop or mobile phone, they were something like 5 times more likely to click on a slideshow of footballers wives, than they were likely to consume the same content on TV or in a newspaper. The situational part was that often, when online, the user only has a brief window within which to consume content. This doesn’t lend itself to reading an in depth analysis, so the brain is already wired up to more naturally want to consume entertainment, which does not take as much energy to compute. These factors have combined to drive this category toward the top right of my matrix, eroding away at those at the other end.
Betting & Gambling: Today, 2015, these sites and apps are booming. From stadia hoardings to TV breaks and highly targeted online ads, you can’t escape the proliferation of gambling marketing. User acquisition and LTV is so valuable in this sector, that these companies will pay through the roof CPC ad CPA to win new audiences. But it wasn’t until they started branching out into live streaming, gaming, news and most critically (but belatedly), launched their apps, that they started to make real inroads into the traditional soccer market that we are analysing today. Betting apps have become the rage in markets like UK, Italy and Spain, as savvy users realise their alerts and game data streams are more 'realtime' than traditional sports apps using standard Opta, Stats Inc or similar data feeds. Often betting apps will deliver a goal alert before it is streamed on ‘live’ TV. That is an awesome competitive advantage for the data hungry fan. Some gambling sites live stream the lower league soccer games, and all of them now deploy innovative live infographics to inform users what’s happening on the pitch. Odds have also become content. Casual fans, perhaps trying to make a decision for their fantasy team, will use these sites as prediction tools for scores, scorers and starting lineups.
An epiphany, mid autumn 2014, whilst knee deep in vast volumes of internal user data and industry business intelligence. A cold realisation that I’m no longer in the desired demographic. We’d been scoping out a few startups and gaming apps in the london startup scene, talking to them and gleaning strategic insights along the way. The majority of those sports apps jumping into, or dedicated to gaming or gamification of live sport, were solidly averaging mid to early twenties in the demographic they were attracting. For this industry, a healthy skew towards youth. Encouraged, and for the first time that season, I dove face first into my internal 2014/15 fantasy soccer user and usage data. A little surprised, our avg demo tipped thirty. In fact it was mean 33. In the 7 years I’d managed this product, I'd never seen it over 30 before. Calmly, I filtered (massaged) the data like any good analyst would, to get more favourable results and make me feel better. I filtered only retained users, 10 weeks into the season, stripping out all those who’d dropped. It felt valid and logical, and I was comfortable with the theorem. But the data skewed even older. After several validations, comparisons and situational checks, I experienced said epiphany.
Fantasy Football (Soccer): Millennials can’t last season long fantasy games anymore. They are a format played by their dads and uncles, and a relic distilled in films from last decade of nerdy groups of old guys sitting around a flipboard. A time before computers, Internet and definitely apps. Most importantly, apps. Imagine telling a 14y old to come join a game “App Store ye say? No child, this be a recreational past time of The World Wide Web!” Jokes aside, the sloth like speed with which the fantasy industry migrated its products to mobile was ridiculous, and has participated in is decline amongst younger audiences. That said, it remains a stalwart of the soccer market, and engagement behemoth, albeit on PC predominantly. It is not uncommon for multi sports sites to see over 50% of their engagement generated by fantasy. I know a media powerhouse that quadrupled page views year-on-year, from an already high base, thanks to launching a fantasy soccer product, and at Yahoo we often tipped 30% (of our total sports traffic on fantasy). The epiphany was that today’s world needs something different. A format that will engage and delight the information hungry but bandwidth constrained millennial generation. Something more akin to Daily Fantasy or Match Attax perhaps? The epiphany was also that I am no longer of the desired ‘younger’ demographic.
Stars: This is a category close to Social Networks, and with somewhat of an overlap with the Sportainment category. I believe it belongs on its own because it is a fundamentally forging a change in the way users are consuming soccer content. The emerging success of sporting social networks is chiefly driven by the popularity of our sporting idols. Ronaldo, Messi, Totti, Ibrahimovic and company have more followers and fans than their domestic teams do, and whole nations will defect from team to team following their national icons. As Ibrahimovic moved from Ajax to Inter Milan to Barcelona, to AC Milan, to PSG, as did a loyal following of approximately 5M Swedes. On Search engines such as Google and Yahoo, 20+ Soccer stars regularly feature in the top 100 search terms of the year. Ronaldo & Kaka are the only sports stars on the globe in the top 30 most followed on twitter. Ronaldo is the most liked person (Facebook) on the planet. More than ever before, fans are searching and consuming via the player entity rather than by team or topic.
These are the categories of sites, services and apps that are emerging in the Soccer market, and eroding timespent from the more traditional players in the market. These categories are underpinned by startups, flush with investment and willing to take risks in innovation and bets on technology that will be transformative. It is also no coincidence that the categories in the emerging sector are chiefly ‘mobile first’ and often ‘mobile only’ experiences. This corner (of the graph) skews young, technically savvy and highly engaged, exactly the type of fan the big techs and media outlets are desperate to reacquaint.
eSports & console games: Millennials are spending an inordinate amount of time on these sites, researching and discussing console games, of which in the soccer market the FIFA series is far and away the leader. Kids (Millennials) become youtube stars with 1M+ subscribers just for posting the goals they scored and the games they played on FIFA. Match Attax, the football card sharing app has been banned in many schools in the UK because kids are obsessively trading football cards in class.
Daily Fantasy: This new form of Fantasy is fast cannibalising traditional Fantasy games, and is a money making machine for those that achieve success. It also skews even younger than traditional Fantasy, which is interesting (common industry intelligence is that millennials have a shorter attention span, therefore can no longer last an entire season) for large techs and media outlets looking for a younger audience.
Fanblogs & Contributor Networks: Late last decade there were a handful of startups in this space - SB Nation and Bleacher amongst the most successful – that have quickly become digital sporting powerhouses. Today there are a new breed of startups like 90min.com (formerly FTBpro) entering this space, but everyone else is catching on. This is content created by real fans, full of passion, opinion and awkward bias, but that's what makes it captivating and different for fans, and beautifully effective in terms of SEO value and viral/social potential. Most importantly for business, it's free.
Sport Social Networks: Soccer fans want to get closer to their heroes, and that's why the likes of SportLobster (backed by Cristiano Ronaldo), Kicca, Score with Friends and Breathesport have been busy signing up stars as brand ambassadors. The original reason for the emergence of these 'Facebooks for Sport' was because fans were using twitter, Facebook and others to have conversations on sport, much to the ire of their followers and friends. The pitch to the stars is that these are the platforms for them to intimately reach real fans, without the confusion of Facebook or the trolling of twitter. These sites are also skewing young, a socially savvy demo who are much more likely to own a Messi jersey, than they are their local Premier League team’s jersey.
eFitness & Wearables: Today Soccer lags where Cycling, Athletics, Cricket, Tennis and American sports accelerate into this space. Fitness apps have bubbled up to the top of the sports appstore charts, thanks to tactical marketing and today’s youth being that much more health conscious than Gen X and Y ever were. Other sporting organisations like Rugby and NFL are realising the big data opportunity that wearables are creating, and are embracing them with an open mind. Even if Soccer’s antiquated governing bodies refuse to accept new technologies, and wearables are not yet so technologically advanced to be woven through the fabric of our favourite sport, mass adoption and digital consumption has been eroding away at more traditional soccer sites, apps and services.
I was asked recently to identify and analyse the competitive landscape and trends of the digital soccer (football) market, with a specific focus on European markets, and so decided to calc category coordinates for an x (audience size) and y axis (audience growth). Where publicly available data is missing, like for immature categories such as Daily Fantasy and nascent categories such as eSports, I have gleaned data from market research and tech press articles on startups in the space.
Interestingly, the categories fell almost uniformly onto two perpendicular lines, with two outliers being Betting/gambling top right, and Sports News Aggregators low on the y-axis. For ease of this market analysis, I’ll group the categories into five groups:
There’s been an industry shift of late, from a general ignorance and neglect to sense of importance for the humble push notification. From the advent of apps and their accompanying notifications, developers have utilised them as engagement drivers and marketing signposts (despite OS best practices ‘threats’ of disabling apps that spam users with marketing push notifications), in an effort to essentially help users remember they have the app on their phone. Today that ethos is shifting, aided by OS guidelines and advancement of their capabilities and limitations, but also by product visionaries and innovative tech companies willing to look at notifications in a different light.
I recently sat with the Founder of a football startup making waves in the industry, and we chewed the fat on the good and bad competitors in our space. He divulged how they’d recently concentrated focus of the entire company to reimagine and redesign their push notifications, which drove deep thought about how they, and the industry in general, had been using them to date. He wanted the whole company focused (I say ‘whole’- this is a small startup) because he believes notification and alerts as an extension of the product, as important as the news streams and data.
If you think about it, he’s justified in this mindset. Particularly in the world of mobile sports, where competition for user’s attention on their smartphones is fierce, and fans often have five, perhaps ten apps all doing similar things on matchdays. The notification is the only ‘view’ of your product a user is likely to experience, so it is in this sense that creating the best user experience makes sense. First impressions are key, and if you evoke a negative emotion from your users as soon as they’ve downloaded your app, by triggering notifications with gay abandon, they will not stick. You can ill-afford negative emotion in this, the app ecosystem, within which success revolves around word of mouth and crowdsourced app ratings, and nothing is truly indispensible.
The Founder of said startup explained how they started exposing as much information as they could fit in their goal alerts, so that users may actually not need to click-through, but will, in the long term, recognise their notifications as higher quality than those that simply alert ‘something’ to bait users into tapping to open the app. He believes this sets his app apart from others, and sports fans will start to realise the good over the bad in time. He envisions eventually being able to calculate his true reach by being able to count users who simply view the notification. iOS and Android wigs will undoubtedly already be considering this to further encourage quality over spam and tap bait notifications, but for now the industry remains split. Apps that want to deliver the highest quality experience, be that in app or outside with their notifications, versus those bent on driving up sessions and open rates with their teaser notifications. It is a risky play for a startup, but in mobile sports, the most harshly saturated competitive landscape of all, it is a play that illustrates confidence in their longevity and ability to set themselves apart in terms of quality user experience.
Game, app and web developers all strive for the same goal- engagement. Engagement falls into three categories; casual, habitual, obsessive. In this industry, how do we achieve obsessive engagement? As a digital professional, having worked with products for over a decade now, app and web, and also an individual who has struggled with OCD and an addictive personality all my life, I feel well qualified to identify and conceive products that fall in to the last category. This past year I’ve been working on revamping one of my favourite products- Fantasy Football. It quickly became one of my favourites back in 2008 when I realised just how loyal, passionate and emotional our users were about our product. I’d never experienced anything like it before, nor have I since. I became a regular user of our message boards, contributor in the fantasy community and regularly helped out on the customer care desk, to get immersed and really feel the sentiment of our userbase. It left me overwhelmed with a sense of pride for being responsible for a product so many loved, relied upon and were emotionally hinged upon its success and failure. We recently surveyed a bunch of our users and got some interesting insights into the mindset of a fantasy manager:
20% of UK Fantasy users have stopped a car during a journey and more than one in ten (14%) have lied to a loved one in order to change their fantasy team.
One in five Brits (22%) update their fantasy team on the toilet.
50% of Italian fantasy football players have made their changes on the beach.
30% of fantasy football players across Europe have left a night out with family or friends early in order to change their team.
Image: The moment distilled- drinks with friends. You hear a rumour one of your fantasy players failed a late fitness test. You deliberated over your change for too long- your friends have gone. How long have they been gone? Who cares.
I will often look back to chapters of my life in which I know I’ve been hooked with something; product, game or vice, and deeply analyse why and how the obsession takes hold. When I was 8 I was obsessed with the rubix cube. I’d often ask my dad to concentrate more on rearranging the rubix because it became so easy for me I wasn’t convinced he was making it hard enough. By the time I was 10 I used to obsess that something terrible would become of me if I didn’t complete it in 60 seconds. It haunted me every day but I couldn’t stop picking it up. By 12 I was obsessed with sudoku- same premise - if I didn’t complete it quickly enough something awful would happen. Through my teenage years it was a more time sucking vice- the Football Manager PC game. This is the focus for my analysis on obsessive engagement. Through my teenage years, and almost all of my twenties I couldn’t put the game down. If I wasn’t playing it, I was almost definitely thinking about it. Only in the last couple of years have I managed to kick the obsession, but every now and then I get the urge to go back. At its height, I remember having my laptop open on my commute to and from work, tapping though matches to try and reach another milestone. Wouldn’t sound ludicrous typically, but this was whilst I was driving my car, laptop on my lap or on the passenger seat. I convinced myself it was acceptable because i was only playing in stand still traffic, as was the case in almost every morning commute to and from work when I lived in Switzerland. Years earlier, at university, I recall my first few days at my new student house in Bristol. I arrived, unpacked my computer, set up the room in the optimal way for football manager consumption. All my belongings stayed boxed up for weeks except for my computer and football manager disk. A computer and a disk. That was all I needed to be content. It was an escape- a parallel world where the worries of life only reached the ceiling of deciding who to sign in the transfer window to pick up your beleaguered team. I passed up dates, put in 12 hour shifts playing the game when I should’ve been in lectures, doing coursework, revision or just sleeping. I even dragged housemates and friends into the game. What was it that so addicted me, and what are the ingredients to transform a product from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must not put down’.
unpredictability breeds intrigue -
competitiveness and accessibility
evolution draws loyalty
user investment nurtures passion
That’s really it. Four ingredients- Passion, accessibility, loyalty and intrigue. I’ll explain a little about each below but if this post is already TL;dr, just have in mind those four elements and you’re winning.
1) Intrigue.
If a game is predictable, it is not interesting. You need elements of luck, randomness, unpredictability, but weighted heaviest with logic. Example, if you’ve built an amazing team, it must still lose now and then. It is impossible to win every game. That’s the nature of football. Every formula and calculation in the game will indicate your team should win, but the randomness factor built into the game’s backend may result in you losing. It’s logical because in real life great teams lose. They even lose to awful teams, which is the beauty and pull of football. Intrigue keeps you hooked because you want to see what is around the corner. If you put in one more day of effort, sign one more player, play a different formation for one more game, good times might be around the corner.
2) Accessibility.
Your product needs to be designed so any one can pick it up. Okay, maybe not anyone, but let’s go back to the football manager paradigm. Casual football fan or deeply fanatical fan. New user or obsessed long term user. User with no friends, virtual friends or friends right there in the room with them. It’s an important ingredient for user acquisition but hugely important for retention and engagement too. If a new user picks up the game without instruction and makes mistakes early on, you’re already half way to losing them. Equally if a veteran user wants to play and restart playing year after year, he needs to be challenged each time. If you create a game that means without friends or other users you can’t compete, then you’re on a road to failure there too. Competitiveness is a huge factor for engagement and it’s what often tips products from habitual into obsession. Email is a habit. Facebook is a habit. Whatsapp is a habit. Their engagement exists because of a base human need to communicate. Games, challenges and knowledge drive obsessive behaviour. Inbuilt in all of us the desire to beat, win and become better, whether that be beating other people or beating ourselves.
3) Loyalty.
Loyalty is tough to achieve in the digital world. Services and utilities are so prevalent and disposable in today’s digital world, that if you are discontented or tired of one, there are ten alternatives to turn to. That’s the beauty and the beast of this industry. Story telling is the is the key to loyalty. If you allow users to invest in story telling or building something, you are much more likely to avoid attrition and achieve loyalty. Today I’m trying to achieve loyalty (measured chiefly on user returning season after season) on fantasy football with two tactics; creating the best fantasy product in market and enabling users to build a story of their history and performance which will ultimately build your manager profile. This profile you will take with you through the seasons, we’ll encourage you to share and be proud of it, which will in turn seed user acquisition virally. Users will not want to lose their profile, thus less likely to turn to competitors. Football Manager, FIFA and other sports console games have all realised this in recent years, which is why you increasingly see ‘career mode’ or ‘ultimate team’ as it is called on FIFA, taking precedence in the game start flow and marketing. They’re sucking users into investing serious timespent in building their own stories.
4) Passion.
Sports fans are passionate about the sports they follow. That is the beautiful aspect of working in sports- one of these boxes is already ticked for us. We don’t have to try and foster or nurture passion, just simply provide a platform for fans to amplify their passion or provide an additive experience for them to enjoy their passion. Football Manager achieves it because it creates a parallel universe where fans are able to realise their dreams and manage their club, proving their footballing knowledge and tactical know-how is better than that of their peers and the real life managers of today. FIFA fosters passion by allowing users to compete as a player and manager. Allow users to amplify it- American fantasy games enable this with smack talk, a vehicle that allows users to gloat, share and challenge eachother, which has quickly become an integral element of the gaming experience.
