Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP440 Two Circles, Pareto and the global chase for sport's Long Tail
Two Circles is predicting the global sports fanbase will grow from 3.2billion to 4billion by 2033. But below that bullish headline, there’s some nuance. For example, two thirds of consumption comes from just 20% of the most dedicated fans. So there’s a race on to get at that remaining 80% of casual fans, who make up the famous long tail. But how?
Christian Harrall-Baker is Director of Content, formerly social media lead at the Premier League.
Laura Andriani is Senior Vice President, Consulting in New York.
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner
We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday.
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport.
Our entire back catalogue of 400 sports business conversations are available free of charge here.
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher and every podcast app.
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series, you can reach us via the website.
if I said to you now, can I see your TikTok feed please? It feels like quite a personal question, right? It's not something you go and show people around.
Hello, welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. I'm Richard Gillis. Two circles is predicting. The global sports fan base will grow from 3.2 billion to 4 billion by 2033. But below that bullish headline, there's some nuance, for example. Two thirds of consumption comes from just 20% of the most dedicated fans, according to their numbers. So there's a race on to get at that remaining 80% of casual fans. Who make up the famous long tale of sport. But how. What can individual sports do to take advantage of this insight? We asked to two circlers Christian, Harold Baker, who's director of content, formerly social media lead at the premier league. And Laura andreani is senior vice-president consulting in the New York office.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I have got so many Gen Z cliches running around in my head. You wouldn't believe. And I want to start because there's a load of questions I've got about sport and It's relationship, not, it's not just a demographic thing, but it's also a tech question about an audience behaviors and all of those things. And whenever I see two circles research, you're very bullish on how this market is going to evolve, which obviously I'm very pleased about, but we want to get into some of the details. So. Laura, why don't you kick us off? I was going to ask what your favorite, Gen Z cliche is, but you can answer that if you want, but what do we know for certain?
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:So I think one of the cliches we hear a lot is that Gen Z, It's kind of related to that attention economy that Gen Z is just not spending as much time with sports as maybe previous generations had because they are pulled in every direction and there's all these new options for them that, that weren't there when, when I was younger, when you were younger. And I think that's a bit of myth, Gen Z actually consumes on average 23 percent more than previous generations do, and that's consumption of sports content. So right then and there, you're kind of myth busting a bit to say actually. They're spending time with sports and that's actually growing. And if they're younger right now that, that number is going to continue to grow. I think the other thing that we've realized, and I really hope we get to kind of delve into this because it's a topic that I think Christian and I are both very passionate about is that sports fans in general they want to learn more, right. And there's this kind of like knowledge and curiosity cycle that happens once you start to learn a little bit more about something. your curiosity increases and you kind of go down the rabbit hole and you want to look for more so that you can fill that knowledge gap. And so what we've seen, and I'll bring it back to the Gen Z piece right now, is that Gen Z is actually building knowledge about sports on social more than they are through the consumption of live sports. And I think that's a really interesting topic to talk about because when you talk about the phone and you talk about second screens, Where we're seeing Gen Z really dive deep into building their knowledge of sports is not traditionally on live. It's actually happening on the phone.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:So they're consuming more sport, but sport wants to sell them. Live sport. I mean, that's the sort of juxtaposition, isn't it? That we're in. I've just come back from Sportel last week and there's a lot of people selling the live match in various forms and they're wanting us to pay subscriptions. And this is where, you know, the demographic argument starts to fade back. It's actually more about what sports selling, sport in inverted commas. It's obviously, you know, But it's just a useful way in What it's selling. There's a mismatch between just the way in which we're consuming stuff, regardless of whether it's sport or not. And that's difficult to see how those two things are going to sort of work through in the same way. So there's going to be change in some way, but your fundamental point is that it's not a disinterest in sport. The competition is Netflix. The competition is roadblocks. The competition is everything else. It's an entertainment economy. It's an attention economy, all of those. tropes. There's some truth in each, you know, bits of them, but they don't answer the whole thing. Chris, what do you, what's your sort of starting position?
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah, consumption of the media is growing because they have more places and locations where they can consume the media from, right? And when you are an industry whose value and wealth is built predominantly on media, right? It's really easy to get worried about that when you're worried that the, where the attention isn't on the live media rights. But there's two things. We know that people age up into consuming more linear content. And two, and I know this is a big topic for you Rich, is how are sports organizations monetizing their content? non live content. Can we be doing a better job of engaging and monetizing elsewhere and be less reliant on the live media rights in the live media space? So yes, Gen Z are currently consuming more sports content from a variety of different locations compared to previous generations which gives us a better opportunity to monetize elsewhere, but we also know that they're going to age up into consuming more live content in the future too.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I like the phrase age up.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Age up, get
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:What is it, do any, how old is Gen Z now?
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I'm a young millennial. So I think they must be, an old Gen Z must be coming up to mid to late 20s.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:And then you've got Gen Alpha.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Gen Alpha, who we are referring to as the first fully online generation. You know, they're going to be raised completely in the iPhone world. So they're going to be, you know, I think about the oldest is about eight or nine now.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:Okay, let's focus that cohort. So they're aging up and the sports industry is hoping that you're right in that, you know, there's a lot, that age up is doing a lot of work. So fingers crossed that they will turn into versions of me who spends, you know, quite a lot of money on subscriptions, not just in sport, but across various things. how are they going to be different? Do you think? How are they going to evolve differently?
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I think the scary truth is they might not actually be that different at all. They might much like, how when I was, you know, 18, 19, 21, and I was reading millennial headlines about how we were spending all of our time gaming. And actually now I'm in my early thirties and I'm doing less gaming and watching more live TV. I suspect they're actually not that different to generations that have come before them. I think what will be different is they're going to probably be more tech savvy. I think we have more options in the tech that they use. And I think that consumption of sport and where they choose to consume their sport is still going to stay prevalent, be it podcasting, be it social, be it linear, be it gaming, which we know is really important. We believe in two circles that there's going to be more sports fans than ever. We know that they're going to consume more content than ever. And I think fundamentally how they go about it and why they go about it the stories that they buy into the reasons they follow clubs, federations rights holders more generally aren't fundamentally going to change. So. Same but different, maybe? I don't know, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a cop out answer, but I think all the data points we have suggest that we need to worry less about the consumption of media rights, generally.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I remember going to the two circles summit not this year, but last year and made by 14 was a sort of headline, which seemed to be Significant and have implications because what you seem to be suggesting, well, you tell me what that's about, Laura. What is Made by 14? What does it mean?
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:Yeah, so made by 14 was one of the key insights that we presented around kind of driving fandom for the first time in our our, the basic premise of that was if you are a fan of sports, that's made to be a fan by the age of 14. You're, I think, 92 percent more likely to be kind of what you would call like a core fan. That fandom, when it's seeded in really early, it tends to stick around for life. And one of my favorite kind of side data points of that is that the music industry found that was this I think it was Spotify had done a very similar study. And when I thought back to like, who are the bands and the musicians that I maybe became a fan of by the age of 14, I'm like, Oh man, I'm still a fan of them. It's right. And so I think there's some really interesting things there. And the other point, one of the other data points that we talked about was the impact of your community. So if you're made by the age of 14 to be a fan and you're surrounded by a couple of other people in your kind of immediate sphere, let's say friends, family members who are also a fan, you're 79 percent more likely to be a core fan. So these two things, like if they're true, then you're in a really good place. But I think what we talked about most recently is like, if those two things aren't true, like what's your plan? Right. And so I think that's where we're trying to push you know, the industry as a whole to really think about that longer tail of casual fans, because your core fans are generally going to be your core fans forever. But if you have these younger fans, who've just kind of entered your environment, and they're, you know, they're in their teens, and they feel like they're part of that community, like, what are you doing to nurture that kind of early fandom? So, I agree with what Christian said earlier about like, I don't think that intrinsically there's like vast differences in Gen Z versus older generations. I think one of the key things that is different is like their expectations are higher, you know, that kind of like the 18 year old 19 year old now they expect a lot more from. Sports properties and rights holders in terms of, you know, where they're showing up, the places they're showing up, the things they're talking about, the amount of personalization. I think that's maybe a little bit, one of the differences. I
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:are, I am, I'm interested in the women's sport question and the women's football question is that it seems to encapsulate a lot of this conversation because there is a lot riding on the idea that, you The audience is different fundamentally the subsets between traditional men's football and women's football are quite wide apart and there is a, you know, there is a bit in the middle, but there is a, I've seen 50, 60, 70 percent as the difference. I don't know whether that's true or not because I haven't done the research, but I'm interested in if you are in that situation and you are looking at a potentially new audience of fans. Let's call them non traditional sports fans, whatever that means, they wouldn't be being raised by people in the community question that you raised there. How do you engage with them? Is there any good practice that you can sort of point to and say, yeah, that's a, direction of travel that's worth looking at.
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:So if we look at women's basketball in the U S it's obviously gone through a tremendous amount of growth and really, you know, positive storylines in the past year, but all of these WNBA teams are now sitting on probably a fair amount of data that they should be spending time on. Really deeply looking into to understand these new fans and kind of what attracted them. How often did they watch when they came to a game? What did they do? What did they like? What didn't they like? What are the friction points that they're currently facing as new fans? We've done a ton of data you know, kind of insights and learnings in this within the space. And I think. Christian probably can speak to a little bit of what we call like that knowledge gap of what new fans don't know and what kind of core fans know and that is that space that you were talking about that middle ground of like where is that gap? Right? But just to give a really good example I I think it's the Mystics they had games WNBA games that were on like a weekend Saturday or Sunday at like 2 p. m. And, It's not prime time. And it's like, how do you fill the stands? Well, they knew that, you know, the casual fan loves a good brunch. And so they said, we're going to offer a brunch style ticket brings you, gives you, you know, a mimosa and some food. And suddenly like you're coming for a different experience than maybe the core fan would come for. And I think that's just a simple example, but it's one where they understood what the friction point was. They understood what were some of the key motivators of those new fans. And then they presented an option and said, make an afternoon out of it and we'll provide you with some things that make it more enjoyable. You don't have to be a super fan to come and have a good time. So those are just kind of a couple of thoughts.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah, and we know from the work we've been doing that traditionally, 60 percent of sporting consumption comes from, as an average across the industry comes from 20 percent of the fans, right? So 20 percent that that thick, that big head at the top is 60 percent of consumption, which is leaving, you know, roughly 36 for the further 80. That's a long tail. And in that long tail is a lot of significant value. And there's also a lot of significant value in trying as best as possible to flatten out that curve. So you're making better routes to engage with that audience, but also your. You know, Instead of trying to make more reasons for that 20 percent to engage with you, actually create reasons for that casual fan base to engage with you. And it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a clunky analogy, but my wife works in the cosmetics industry particularly fragrance, which obviously has a lot of, Like brand loyalty and a lot of people who will stay with Chanel number five or whatever for years and years, which, well, a bit of a clunky comparison isn't too dissimilar to how sports can sometimes operates when I was talking her through this work. And when I was talking about, you know, how much budget you align to, you know, speaking to your loyal audience is like, Barely anything. Why would I? My goal is to go and grow the audience base. My is to go and reach people where they are and build up brand equity and build that brand salience and make people care about us. And so often we will work with our clients who are so worried about losing or alienating their core. And I realized two people from two circles talking about core at the moment is probably a little bit confusing in light of recent acquisitions. We spend so much time focusing on the core, but actually this underserviced or this non traditional fan are ready and waiting to be spoken to. They want to be spoken to. We're just not doing it in the right places for the right reasons or in the right way. And There's a few things we talk around, be it, you know, removing frictions, be it building knowledge. All of these things are examples of things we can help inform and tactics to grow the audience, but there's a whole host of other ways, I'm certain.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:What are the frictions?
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:Oh gosh, what are the frictions? They are countless. There are as many frictions as there are, uh, types of sports fans. I would say that the way that we look at it is, you know, we kind of group them into you know, kind of life friction and other friction. And life friction is things like You move away from home and suddenly you're not, you know, down the street from the stadium that you usually attend matches at. It could be that you have kids and suddenly your schedule changes. It could be that you take on a new job and that requires you to spend more nights working and less time, you know, watching a lot of sport with your friends. And I think that. Those types of friction sports properties haven't necessarily thought that they can play a role in that they don't they kind of feel like that's yours. And I can't really influence it. And I think what our feeling is that if you truly understand what that life friction is, you can actually try to adapt your the way that you talk to fans and try to help them mitigate that. The other types of friction are things like, you know, the, one of the ones that I feel often as a sports fan is the fragmentation of sports media rights. Right. And so, the fact that I have to go to three, four different streaming services to watch any given league and on certain days I can't remember where I'm going to be watching that and I've got to go spend, you know, a couple of minutes tooling around Instagram and, you know, Google one box to try to figure it out. Those are just simple types of friction, but I think that fans feel the friction and that's why I say you really have to understand what those friction points are so that you can try to mitigate against them. I think we've seen some really good examples. You know, Christian's talked a lot about with me about Premier League and some of the things that they do to reduce friction, try to get fans to understand things, how they use things like fantasy and the different types of fantasy games they offer. Some of which are, you know, low barrier to entry, maybe the friction point a fan feels is, I need to know everything about every club and every player to even try to make myself a competitor in that space, and actually the Premier League has said, no, actually, we're going to offer a fantasy draft type game, and, here's the three simple things you need to know. So Christian, I mean, please feel free to take it away. But I think the friction points that we see in sports and both digitally and physically that they are bountiful for sure.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:And I think on that point we were talking about earlier about creating motivation, when we looked at this, we found that for fandom wasn't because of a lack of motivation, but it was because of a influx of friction. It was an influx of stuff either controlled or uncontrolled by sports IP rights holders or or life events that they weren't but yeah, but they couldn't control and removing those frictions, I think it's going to be an understanding why those frictions exist in the first place is going to be, you know, part of it. And what we're not saying is don't, you know, media rights and fragmentation aside, like there are some things which are, will feel uncontrollable, which actually we can help assist them.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:It's interesting because you've, again, the assumption is that you have to do different things, new things, you know, we've had over the last few weeks obviously it's conference season, but um, Pique has been around, you know, great Spanish player, brilliantly articulate bloke talking about Kingsley, you know, and everyone is chatting. Oh, well, that's the future. That's what you have to do. You have to just get, you know, influencers in, you have to get creators in, you have to play with format, make it shorter, blah, blah, blah. And there is a sort of roadmap. Suddenly people start to make decisions based on what I think is a bit flaky, dodgy Intel, you know, and actually it's quite, I think you're onto something where you're with identifying the friction and then trying to remove it. It might be the easier route rather than a sort of moonshot, a new format, which is going to be expensive. It's or a new territory or whatever it is. And, you know, we're seeing all over the place, new events popping up primarily. I mean, you can, these things are never going You know one or the other, but some of it is genuinely trying to grow an audience. Some of it is just commercial, you know, necessity, trying to grow the, grow revenue in whatever way they can. Let's just pursue this friction for a minute because I think it's really quite interesting because it feels like I've not really had this conversation in the past. And the one that we bumped into a lot. When we do piracy and we quote quite often is that, you know, that one of the reasons, you know, there is a significant number of people who are both paying for sport, football, Premier League, but also pirating it and streaming it illegally. And that's so it's money, but it's not just money. And then when you get to Gen Z, money is a big part of it. Factor because they haven't got the property wealth. They haven't got all of the stuff that my generation is sort of benefited from. So they feel poorer. They might, you know, in that sense. So it's a different environment. What other frictions are there? I'm just trying to think there's there might be something to do with television itself, the way in which the sport presents itself, because quite often those are again, if I go back to you. If I go to the women's football, they've just done a WSL, just on a new deal with Sky. There is an opportunity here to do it differently. And I'm wondering what that would be and whether or not actually football presented as it's always been is getting in the way, actually. It could be that if you do it differently and you treat the fan differently, either on, as a media product or as, we've had Maggie Murphy on here and on Expected Goals talking about liberating a team from having to do a certain thing on match day, the same as they've always done, because the process is always there. Let's just talk about what other sticking points there are. Cause I think it's a really quite interesting area.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:there's a few case studies we talked through. Some are that sense of community. So how do you create experiences, either physical or digital, which make people feel like they are part of community. And I think the best example of that, that we've seen in recent weeks and months is the, I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong, is the COSM screen. You know, the 8K one in Dallas. And that has just built me insight that actually we have a lot of disparate fans in different locations who don't feel like they're part of the action. They want to feel close to the action. So we're going to create this incredible experience. We're going to pay a high fee to get people to come along. And all of a sudden they're selling out every single week for various sporting events. They've just raised 250 million to go set this up in 30 new locations by 2030. And it's all built my insight of people want to feel closer to the action part of community. You know, it's a. Tale as old as time. CBS you know, they recognize that kids, and if we're talking about gen alpha, this is a nice example. Kids don't like watching things that they are unfamiliar with, right? Familiarity breeds habits. So they, as part of their as part of their broadcast options, they created the Spongebob Squarepants Superbowl, where they simulacast the Superbowl alongside Spongebob Squarepants IP in the form of various characters coming up on screen and, you know, giving interviews, etc. And we found that kids are more likely to watch it. And actually, if you go on any website, such as Reddit, and you search how it was reviewed, they talked about a lot of casual fans watching it and engaging with it as well. So as an example, where they've gone, okay, kids aren't staying with us. How can we get them to watch it? Because they're not because their attention span is full. I think that's really key. It's because they're unfamiliar with the IP and unfamiliar with the Superbowl. How can we get them to stay with us?
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:That's really interesting. You sort of, you, again, you can, there's the data then the story and it's useful when it feels right. When it feels like it does feel like that. I've never SpongeBob thing and thought it was a bit stunty. Now you said that I can see. The familiarity question I think is really interesting because it's about comfort and it's about home and it's a stressful world and it's, you know, we talk a lot about anxiety, not just in that generation, but across the board and whether that's, you know, you've got people, the movement of people is just part of modern life as well. Comfort and Nostalgia is also in there in a way in terms of, you know, for an older generation, but comfort and familiarity is really interesting. I never really thought about it in that way.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:It'd be really easy, I think, to when you see those headlines of, you know, CBS break, you know, viewing records with Spongebob Squarepants broadcaster, just look at it at face value and go, Oh, really? Gunge on my TV screen? That feels a bit gimmicky. But actually the insight is sound. The insight is that kids like spending, you know, shock horror time with characters that they're familiar with. bringing back to life is a, I think a successful example of where they've recognized, you know, a deeper layer of insight and brought that to the fore. And then now hopefully those kids are familiar with the Superbowl as a concept and next year or next season, we'll be more comfortable with, you know, the NFL rather than it having to be through the lens of Spongebob.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah.
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:And if I could toss one other kind of piece into it, when you think about the NFL, one of the things that, that I think they do really well is they think about the kind of full 360 of the fan experience. So in recent years, they've Really progressed a program that they do at the grassroots level around flag football. And they've actually done this. They've launched flag football programs outside of the U S and I think that's such a smart way to drive affinity amongst these younger generations by basically saying, listen, you don't have to know every rule about football. It's really confusing. Here's what we're going to do. You guys wear the red shirts, you guys wear the blue shirts, you've all got your, you know, your flags around your waist, and, you know, we're gonna just do really simple, fun drills. And oh, by the way, you guys, you know, you get to be the Giants, you get to be the Chiefs, and suddenly, you've created these little touchpoints of knowledge. That someone who isn't tuning in every week to watch the NFL might just next time a game is on and say, Oh, actually I want to sit and watch this. Cause we played this when I was a kid, or, you know, I played my son plays in this, or my daughter plays in this. And, you know, I actually, now I have a touch point of familiarity. And so I think. Just thinking about kind of the so many different ways in which a sport can have touch points into a fan's life. It's not just single through, you know, linear or single through streaming. It can also be through merchandising. It can be through experiential. It can be through grassroots.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I mean, the NFL is interesting. Again, we met, we mentioned this, but, it might just be they're a, they're an outlier, but they don't appear to be impacted by a disparate range of outlets on, you know, in terms of their media strategy, whereas we would normally criticize a sports governing body for being in too many different places, confusion, cost, subscription fatigue, you go down that. Whereas actually the other view is, well, it's, you're reaching more people where they are. So it's quite, you know, it's a sort of circular. thing. And you start to then, you can argue, you know, which way you like, frankly formats and their relation to the sort of core. So the flag football, let's just bounce off that for a minute. I sometimes wonder at what point the new thing separates from the old thing, if you sort of mean. And this is purely because I've just done a, you know, We've just done a podcast on tennis and paddle. And Pickleball and there's a sort of local row going on in Britain about who owns it and it's, whether it's the LTA and tennis and whatever, but it is not about that particularly, but it's just in terms of the line or how far from the core. Whether that's the right phrase, and I took the mick out of Ben Sharp, who's a chief executive Callaway Golf, because he's a big fan of crazy golf, as I used to call it, and he's saying, no, they're all golfers. And I said, well, he's, they're doing that for commercial reasons. Cause they want to, they want a big golf number at the top of the funnel. And he's saying, no, there's, you know, there could be people floating down and I see it, you know, and why not, I can see a world where if people are reading your two circles research and they're saying, right, okay, we need to get them at 14, we need a sort of strategy that, that reaches out from their traditional heartlands. And then what? And one of the things will be new iterations of their sport. And I'm wondering what the pros and cons of that are and how, what the potential traps that might Lime weight. What do you think?
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I think that's quite a big question, right? But I think the formats does feel like a little bit of a trap. I I work with the hundred. As one of my, as one of my clients, I think the work they do is fantastic, both from a family and from a kid's perspective. And I know that you've had various podcast guests who have varying different views, and a hundred and a bit success of it. But if we'd look to the point earlier about building familiarity and building building a connection to a sport and then building from it. I think it's been, I think it's been really successful. We know that a casual fan base knows three times less than a core fan base, right? So your average casual football fan in the UK knows three times less than a core fan. And that is across, that is an average across competitions, clubs, history fan culture whatever it might be. So I think, An example of a format which helps bridge that gap. I think could be beneficial and, to your point about running away, where do you introduce a format which becomes more successful than the originating point, right? Where do you build a format which actually goes to speak to that casual fan base and build them into the core fan base and you accidentally create a bit of a, create a bit of a monster. Is the IPL an example of that? Is T20 an example of that? I don't know, but I think it's an interesting. An interesting premise.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah. it's sort of interesting to talk about because you get into a sort of innovators dilemma problem, a sort of Kodak question about the worry that a new thing is going to, you know, grow or it's probably and in practical terms it's quite often something has happened over there and a governing body will try and own it. Which is what, what is happening with tennis and paddle and pickleball. And you can sort of see it in wild swimming. You can see it in park run. You can see it in CrossFit. You can see it all over the place. And that's really a sort of a fairly boring, sports politics bun fight. thing. And I, and you know, that's just about the way in which we reward and punish governing bodies with money, you know, and how we want them to behave and we're incentivizing them to capture movement, whatever shape or form, if it resembles your sport, you'll try and put you, you'll try and grab it. That's a cynical view. But there is also something interesting about that three times thing is really worth just pursuing. because I sometimes look at. Communications from clubs, from leagues, from teams, from events. And they're very often, they miss me in terms of you know, they're the opposite of personalization. They are sort of either assume I'm an idiot and don't know anything, or it's the other way is, you know, rugby is always, they assume I know loads and I don't, and it's, you know, then. Then I'm not interested either. So actually hitting me, you're getting to the really difficult bit of identifying, you know, you've got a nice insight there in terms of, there is that imbalance, obviously, between the knowledge, there's a knowledge gap there. But then you get to how do you what do you do about it? And the temptation is always to over communicate. I always think we've got anybody, you know, you think, okay, if in doubt, we'll communicate something. And they start sending, emails and whatever, and people put barriers up and you get into that caper. what do you think in terms of how you then evolve a strategy or a next step on top of that insight? The three times insight. What can I do with that if I'm a sports governing body?
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:The one that, that I, that makes me think of this Rich, what you're saying is the Premier League, right? Premier League launched US specific social handles. Why? Because they knew that their global social handles spoke to a certain audience who was You know, pretty deeply steeped in the PL knew it, knew the players, knew the traditions, knew the history of each club that wouldn't necessarily resonate with an average American fan who may be new to watching PL. And I think NBC has done a phenomenal job of really bringing that league to life here in the US and really creating a reason to want to watch and spend your a lot of your Saturday and Sunday mornings. But they knew that they needed to launch us social handles so that it could speak to us audience. And the way that they've done that is really thinking about how do you tell the stories and how do you actually educate fans without pandering to them, without being, you know, like you said, heavy handed with these like really direct and dry calms. We're never going to, you know, Try to tell an American fan, like, this is how football works. Of course not. But if we actually bring to light, here's a reason why this person is considered a super sub because of this, and this is why you should care about it. It's because this is something that's revelatory or something that you don't see very often and you're educating through the storytelling. And I think that's when the magic happens because those who do already know that story, who are core fans they're not going to be turned off by it. They're not going to say, why are you kind of like telling me something I know I already know. And so I think the social space is a really interesting one for you to be able try to change your approach to different fans. And I think, you know, the algorithms work quite well in the sense that, you know, what I see on my feed is different than what you see in your feed. And, you know, Chris, please jump in if there's something that you feel is, It's also like kind of helpful to get this across, but I think just taking Premier League as a really simple example, I think they've done, you know, a really nice job realizing what the friction was, realizing what they had to go after, and then trying to formulate a plan to address it.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I think you've summarized it really well by the way. I mean, Rich, do you have TikTok?
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I'm now, I never, I'm addicted to TikTok.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Right, it's, if I ask, if I said to you now, can I see your TikTok feed please? It feels like quite a personal question, right? It's not something you go and show people around. And I've sat in part of my role at Two Circles is helping clients navigate this very tricky question, right? Where do we push audience growth without alienating our, you know, our core base versus how do we communicate better with our core base on our operating and own channels? And so often I'll sit in a room and somebody go, we can't do that because it will really F off that group. We can't publish that. And actually, in a world where, in a world where Meta and various other platforms are increasingly trying to look like TikTok and working really hard to and those platforms are working really hard to serve content to the right people, all of a sudden we're using channels which are personalized directly to us rather than based on what our friends are consuming. And that changes what we should be publishing on them differently. We need to worry less about alienating our core fans and think about, okay, if this was going to be seen by a new fan for the first time, what would we want them to come away from it? And I think that is really, it's a really difficult task for a group of marketers and a group of digital content producers who sit and think about this all day and they're at the coalface and they are probably passionate sports fans themselves to kind of go, well, I know way more about this than everyone else. So therefore I should trans. Push some of that knowledge on to people and, you know, back to that point we were talking about earlier about building knowledge, make them more knowledgeable.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:So would my TikTok feed as a Spurs fan be noticeably different if I lived in the States or if I lived in Brazil or if I lived in China, would that would alter in a way that I would appreciate that difference in that there would be a coming down in terms of sophistication of the assumption of understanding or the assumption of knowledge.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah. So IP sorry your IP address, the way you are based is a determining factor in the content you're serving. They have, I, they have, I think over 5, 000 different data signals. To determine what you should be served. Some that is consumption based, some that is location based, some is that some of that is on the people you interact with the most and what they interact with based. So while there is still a bit of information based on what your friends and followers are consuming is nowhere near as what it used to be. I think the example we use all the time Internally is, you know, 10 years ago, you're, you used to go with your friends to a concert, to watch a single gig. That is what social media used to be like. You used to consume with the same stuff that your friends and family were consuming. Now it's far more like Glastonbury, where you can go along, choose the acts you want to watch and spend your time with. Yeah, you might bump into your friends along the way and you all might go together to watch one thing, but actually it's a far more of a curated experience. And that example of Gen Z earlier. What they're doing differently, they are curating their experiencing experiences. They're sat on their phone and if there's something they don't like, they're going to go, No, I'm not interested in that. And they're curating their experiences far more pointedly than they have done previously. You know, it opens a whole different can of worms, which we can get into if you'd like. But the
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:What, why does it open a can of worms?
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Because I think to your point around anxieties around phone usage and phone devices, it means that they have to be not only just consuming, but also be an active participant in what they consume. And that is a different power dynamic than I think we've experienced before.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:So one of the things about TikTok is, I mean, I'm quite lazy with it. I just you sit there and let it come at you. I don't, you know, do anything. Well, I say I obviously do because it's reading me all the time, but there is a I don't actively go and follow people. I don't. Do much in terms of like on Twitter, even a few years ago, I would have been quite good at curation and got people off my timeline. And again, that's become more difficult as everything's become more blurred on Twitter or X, whereas on TikTok, I thought I saw it. I'll just let everything go and it'll, you know, I'll let the algorithm do the work. Do you think that period is going to come to an end? Do you think I will start, do I need to start taking, being much more of an active participant? In it, or will I miss what I quite like about TikTok is it just delivers stuff that I didn't know I wanted.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:So again, I think the age of determining value by followers is going to decrease because your content is now being served to people who don't follow you. So how do you attribute value to that? I've always been a, you know, I've always been a big fan of reached impressions, which is a very normal thing to be saying on a Monday afternoon. But how do you determine the top of funnel by followers when actually your content is being serviced to them anyway? I think if you were to really, maybe dwell on what you're consuming a ticket and go, actually, I'm seeing it really quite a lot of this, and I'm not that interested anymore. I mean, you just, I think what we'll see is not people following and that being an actor. This is what I want to hear more from, but people going. This is a thing I like, I'm going to actively like it rather than consume it, or I'm going to say I don't like this and I'm pretty sure in fact, I say pretty sure I'm 100 are actually beta testing a dislike button. So if you see something you don't like, you can immediately download it, which is a system we're seeing more in anonymized online spaces like Reddit and Discord.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:So that the way in which okay, I'm just trying to think what the, how to respond that because I've got, this is not all about me, but it's quite interesting to find, you know, just to think about what the application of this is. Might be, and the sort of end of the follower over the la, what does that mean for the sort of relative fame? Because obviously that's how sports teams, Ronaldo, everyone is the easy sort of cliches. You go to follower numbers and they're, you know, he's more popular than her and therefore he's worth more money. How is that going to work out? We'll still know The status, presumably, but it won't be in follower numbers
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I think we'll still see follower numbers because I think they essentially become like an opt in version, right? This is not only have we reached X amount of people but X amount of people have opted in or chosen to follow us because they're interested in what we're determining. So, you know, clunky funnel analogies which aren't always perfect. It's an example of a step to fandom or a step to of people to choose in. So, you know, maybe death of a follower was a little bit dramatic, but I think It will be fewer, less important than it is now. And I we currently caution, you know, our clients against determining a value against it, especially for the likes of commercial partnerships, because actually there are better metrics we think, be it draw time, watch time, views, et cetera, which can help that.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:and that, I mean, it's a jaw dropping number, the sort of 5, 000 sort of data points in which they're, you know, that TikTok is serving me information again, if you transpose that onto on the sports side, they're not going to be able to do that or they put, you know, what personalization means to TikTok. Is so far away and the, you know, and therefore my experience of what I think personalization is, it's so far away than my football club, A League can achieve, is that, I mean, I'm, there's no way they can get there, presumably. They're going to have to, there's going to have to be some accommodation between Sport Inc, in inverted commas, and the platforms. Because that gap is just too big.
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:part of it is sports organizations and rights holders having to kind of be okay with knowing that they are not going to always. capture the kind of totality of their audience. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you try to create these really closed environments, these really like behind a registration wall or behind a pay wall, because you want so much to know your fans and have this like, you know, very close direct relationship with them. I will never say that's not important. It's vitally important for the health of your business. But if that's kind of your quantifier or your qualifier of success, I think that's where it's short sighted and a relative kind of, adjacent topic to this, that we see a lot within sports is rights holders wanting to protect or hold onto their IP. And wanting to kind of shut the average fan out from using their IP because they're worried they'll dilute it or they'll use it in ways that, you know, they don't deem you know, of the quality or the level. And I think it's really interesting. One of the case studies that we talk about is Disney and Disney has, you know, arguably one of the most expansive and valuable libraries of IP that exists. And yet they don't come down hard on anyone on TikTok who is using their IP without their permission. They, first of all, just, it would be a massive undertaking to try to even do that. But they kind of allow it because they realize that even though that's happening on the outside of their walls, it still has a relative impact. To the overall health of their brand. So I feel like there's something there where it's like, and I think you talked about it rich, really smartly. Like you have to kind of know what. You want to use as some of your primary qualifying data to understand your, you know, the size of your audience, how engaged they are, the depth of their engagement, but you have to also kind of be okay, knowing that there's going to be fans that aren't going to fall into that bottom of funnel. And it doesn't mean that they're not important, you know.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:I think there's a, just on that, I think, I keep bumping back into this, actually this issue is that I don't think, and this is a big, stupidly dumb statement, but I don't think that people who work in sport or sports, But understand brand on a sophisticated level, I think there's quite often a misconception or a misread of what data means and what its use is in the broader scheme of things. And I think what you're talking about there is, you know, that control, that desire to control the, what they think is the brand, which is essentially quite often just the logo. And it becomes a sort of IP lawyers thing about, you know, you can't use that. It's actually that balance between, we've seen Nike go through an interesting sort of period where one reading of the last few years is that they've gone to performance bottom of the funnel over, you know, the big stories that we associate with Nike in the past. And so that brand aspect and quite often the accusation against Nike. Sports clubs is that they've never really needed to think about brand in any sense because they've just got blind loyalty. They've got, you know, they take it for granted. So they've never actually had to learn about brand in any way because they just had a served audience and it's quite a painful experience because there is a, there is an unknown. As you say, there's an, there will always be an unknown there. You can't get there with data tools on their own.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:It's also really hard when, But you know, some of our US sports clients aside, especially in the UK, when your finances for the next year might not be determined till come May, it might even be determined after your financial year begins. So building a long term brand vision is really difficult when your literal fundamentals of success or failure are built on short term goals and successes. So yeah, it's a story, it's a story we see and we work quite hard with. And I think in terms of You know, addressing that is, it's an education piece and to your point of getting people bought into what the value of a brand is and actually being able to determine that, you know, your brand has a value that you can put on your P& L against everything else you own as well. So that's that's a, that is a key point around that. I mean, and to your point about personalization. I don't think we, I don't think, I think someone said that you need to have 10, 000 bits of personalization to make it really valuable. But I mean, I think even just some personalization will go some way. I mean, when was the last time you landed on a sports website for the first time and the experience you got would be that? be completely different for one you had if you landed a fifth time. You know, if you're a, if you're a fan of the Australian A League and you just want to find out who's top of the league, but you land on them for the first time, you should just be presented with the information you're searching for. Whereas if you landed on a clothing website, I'm certain they'd say, Hey, last time you were here, Rich, this is what you're looking at. So you might be interested in these things, you know, the cookie based data and, you know, Google's ever changing rules makes that difficult, but some personalization goes some way in tailoring the experience that people have of And I think a lot of that can also stem from websites and domains and things that sports organizations have now come from a background of journalism. They come from, we used to have a, program team and then we built a website and the program team moved to a website and it's built in a journalistic and news based source rather than a commercially driven commercially driven sense. And that, I think that has to be a slow transition. I think you can do both things at the same time.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:Yeah, it's quite interesting. I sometimes think that the slowness of the transition in sport means that the smart ones will just jump a generation every now and then, you know, they quite often say that, you know, India missed PCs and they just went to mobile straight away. So it, I, you know, the not being cutting edge. With, for example, personalization, it might be that by the time sport gets to, you know, by the time my football club gets to sort of TikTok, Amazon levels of personalization, I will be so over personalization and be rebelling against it. I don't want it. So, you know, there's that whole, the lag in both the technology, but also the psychology that surrounds the technology that actually the, our response to things are as important as the thing itself. And actually that, that plays a significant role. I remember talking to Chris Anderson who wrote The Long Tail. I did an interview with him years, donkeys years ago, and he said that book was the most pirated most, you know, they used to in China at the time where, you know, book publishing was just notoriously difficult because of people would just copy it and sell it on street corners and he sort of came to an accommodation and said, well, actually, and it was a brand accommodation. Well, it made him famous, which meant then he could then go, it's like the old Microsoft, you can they'll pirate us until they can afford us type position where you go and say it builds the brand, it builds fame. And then we will monetize it at some point down the road that doesn't help a commercial director who's got a quarterly report to get in and it must annoy loads of people, but you could sort of see that's Man United over the years, all of these dodgy shirts that have appeared around, you know, and you see them in every bit of the world that is doing a lot of brand work as well as, okay, you know, you don't need to chase that person for that sort of 690 or whatever they're going to have to, you know, right. I'm looking for a sort of future gazing last bit, a last question. what sort of conclusions do you think we could draw? We've been all over the place and thank you. And I've really enjoyed it. in terms of just going in different directions and questioning some of the received wisdoms. how do we head to the end? What's the most hopeful thing that you can offer us as we go into the end of 2014 into 2015, 2014 into out of 2024 and to the second part of the 2020s. Because two circles are bullish you. About the marketplace, they're bullish about sport give us your own personal reason for optimism.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I'll go. Shall I go first?
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:You go, first.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:I, yeah, to your point, Rich, Two Cycles is about the future. I think the fact that there will be more sports fans than ever before in the future, you know, the golden days are potentially ahead of us. I think it's something really excited. I love sport. I love sharing sport. Part of the reason I work in the sport industry is because I love being surrounded by people who love sport and that is both colleagues and fans. And the reason I do content and social is because I love making people excited and building sharing all of it. I so I think the future is. There's opportunities for people to grow the sports that they love through knowledge sharing, through, you know, being advocates for it, for freeing up things to be advocates for so I'm excited about that and helping make that happen. I also think there's a lot of excitement in how we do that. Right. You know, you're not, we're not just going to be reliant on linear. We can do it in many more creative and interesting ways and helping our clients build into be exciting brands that people care about for a multitude of reasons. It's going to be, it's going to be class Laura.
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:Yeah I totally agree with that. I mean, I'm just, I'm optimistic because we've seen the data and we, we really feel strongly that there's, facts and evidence that shows that this industry is poised for enormous growth, but also as a sports fan, I just, I see it in my day to day, I see, you know, having lived in New York at a time when the Liberty won their first championship years ago, that would have been something that a niche audience got excited about. To see the entire city really light up and to have my colleagues in my office, who I didn't even know were fans, tell me that like, they were going to the parade these are the little things that you see and you kind of, you can see that people are wanting, To become bigger sports fans. They're wanting to get into sports. I think participation is a huge piece of this. And the fact that, you know, there's more sports to play, there's more options to play. It's definitely all showing that things are trending in the direction of growth. So, yeah, I think, you know, the recommendation that Chris and I make to, to our clients and to the sports rights holders of the world is like. Just really sit down and ask yourself these hard questions of who are your underserved fans? Who have you never really talked to? Why haven't you talked to them? What are their friction points? How do you better use those advocates and those superfans to actually reach those really casual fans? If you don't sit down and actually work through these things, you end up just kind of going back to doing the same old. So I think just. Sitting down, asking hard questions, even if you don't have the answers you know, it's the start of the journey. So as you can tell from my voice, I'm extremely optimistic about all of this.
richard_2_11-04-2024_150746:That's great and it's lovely to hear because it's I think there's been a sort of, well, there is a conflation between the decline of the sports bundle and people sort of jump from that into sport isn't popular anymore. And I think there is a, that's a You know, that's just plain wrong. And we all know that really to be true, but there is within the sort of sports media, sports marketing industry, because it's so central in the money, you know, the question about where's the money going to come from, what's going to be the model, all the things that, which are very legitimate business questions. And we, you know, we give them an airing to say the least, but there you can easily. Start to say, okay, well actually maybe sport isn't as popular as it once was, which I think is a nonsense. So thank you very much for your enthusiasm and the, and evidence as well. So, so Chris and Laura, thanks a lot for your time. I really appreciate it. And we didn't mention Laura, we didn't mention the US election. So that was good. You know,
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:Yeah. Thanks for that. Much appreciated.
christian_2_11-04-2024_150746:Thanks Rich.
laura-andriani--she-her-_2_11-04-2024_100745:Really appreciate it. Thank you.