Jay Stuart, Author at iSportConnect

Web3 Summit: The potential is off the charts

iSportConnect’s Editor-in-Chief Jay Stuart takes a look back at the Web3 Summit and what he observed from the past two days at the Emirates.

It’s not often that a speaker at a big conference praises the delegates for being “weird” but that’s what happened at the first Web3 Summit in London this week and the comment fit perfectly with the spirit of two days dedicated to next-gen innovation.

What Luis Carranza, Founder and CEO of Fayre, meant was that you can’t think like everybody else if you want to be ahead of the curve. Not all that long ago, anyone sending an email or streaming video was doing stuff that was weird because it was new and different.

There were over 500 delegates at the Emirates Stadium intent on finding out what Web3 means for sports.

Or might mean.

A main learning was that it’s all so new that people are still trying to figure out how it all works and what the opportunities are.

https://twitter.com/iSportconnect/status/1541678881169719296

When I asked the opening keynote speaker, Mason Edwards of Tezos Foundation, to describe his vision of the future of Web3, he happily admitted that he didn’t know.

You don’t often hear that from an expert at conference either – that is what is so exciting.

One thing the many people I spoke to at the event all agreed on ¬ the commercial potential of Web3 for sports is off the charts. A lot of them see this as bigger than any previous tech innovation.

That said, change is not going to happen all at once.

The potential is revolutionary, but we are looking at an evolution. Traditional media, Web2 and Web3 will co-exist. You can throw in the metaverse, however that’s defined.

*The iSportConnect team take to the stage with some of the speakers and delegates who attended both days*

They may live together forever.

Indeed, Carranza said, “We’re never really going to get to Web3. It’s a vision.” Web3 offers the potential of exponential revenue growth, but to get into it, start by looking at incremental things.

“I thought the main initial use of blockchain would be in ticketing,” observed consultant Michael Broughton, who moderated an outstanding session on the tokenisation of sports. “But that’s not the case. Why not? Because while blockchain ticketing might improve efficiency it would not grow revenue and revenue growth is what most sports are looking for.”

And they’re missing the big picture in looking for a quick big win. “When planning our strategy, we out revenue last not first,” said Nick Rend of NASCAR. “Content comes first. Content drives conversations, which drive communities, which drive revenues.” Four C’s worth remembering.

I’m going to paraphrase just a few of the many amazing insights and snippets of expert advice that I heard at the event.

On top of video content from the conference sessions that iSportconnect will be posting, we filmed dozens of interviews with speakers and delegates that will be on the Web3 Summit website.

“With everything you do in Web3, do it as if you’re looking back from 2035. Will you be happy with what you did?2 Jean-Baptise Alliot, La Source.
“The metaverse is Discord in 3D.” Dave Ranyard, Dream Reality.
“The most successful NFTs offer brand new NFT-specific content, not recycled content.” Alexandre Dreyfus, Socios.
“Don’t put the tech first. What matters is content and the fan’s journey. We are more concerned about building content that is ready for Web3 than Web3 itself.” Sharon Fuller, eSkootr Championship.
“A main difference between Web2 and Web3 is that you can delete things from Web2. Content that is minted on the blockchain is there forever.” Fred Antunes, RealFevr.
“The future of NFTs is in providing utility and value to a community, not collectables. The community is the beating heart of the brand.” Jim Daily, LinksDAO.
“Presence is the key thing in the metaverse. What does the avatar actually look like? That’s crucially important.” Jerry Newman, Meta
“This stuff is hard. Give it a try. Don’t use your most important IP when you’re getting started, but this is going to be the future.” Scott Carlson, Nagra Kudelski.
“Jump in with both feet ¬ at the shallow end.” Mike Thomas, Animoca Brands.

Building A Structure To Innovate: “Most Organisations In Sports Can’t Think Past The Next Series Of Games”

Toronto-based Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment is one of the largest and most diversified sports businesses in the world, owning the storied Leafs in the NHL, the Raptors of the NBA and franchises in the MLS and CFL (among others), as well as the Scotiabank Arena, the busiest venue in Canada, and 30,000-capacity BMO Field.

With Rogers Communications and Bell Canada as its parents, MLSE not only comfortably puts digital innovation at the operational forefront but invests in thinking about the future as an in-house function.

The man in charge of that, Christian Magsisi, the company’s Vice President of Technology & Digital, spoke with iSportConnect’s Editor-In-Chief, Jay Stuart, ahead of his participation as a speaker at our Digital & Data Masterclass in London on March 29.

JS: How do you prioritise when you look at something as wide-ranging and fast-changing as innovation?

CM: I think before you get into the specifics of should we do this project, or invest in this new technology, you have to structure the organisation for innovation. We actually dedicate resources ¬ people and money ¬ towards research and development.

“Most organisations in sports can’t think past the next series of games. And you need to change that way of that thinking.”

If you park the technology component for a moment, if you were a business owner and nobody in your business was thinking about next year or the year after, that would probably be a concern for you. But most people operate their businesses that way today, right? Most organisations in sports can’t think past the next series of games. And you need to change that way of that thinking.

We’re four years into the R&D journey, which has been a tremendous transformation. We have a full-scale team that’s dedicated of thinking of things that are not going to affect our business immediately today, and maybe not even for five or even 10 years. We’re also working with our academic communities. Again, I would start with the structure before you focus on the next buzzword or the thing that everybody is talking about in the media.

JS: One of the frustrations in sports is that the big platforms sit in between you and your fans and you can’t really control your own destiny because you don’t have direct access to the data. Is that how you see it?

CM: What’s ultimately important is getting to know who our fans are, and that means not only people who are the people coming into our building but also the people not coming in. The approach that we’ve taken to data, which may be different from others, is less about control and more about collaboration. So, we look to our partnerships, for example.

“If you come to an event with our mobile apps, you just have a better experience being there.”

Our relationship with Scotiabank is integral to the success of the team from business perspective. We can share data back and forth. We work on campaigns and programmes that allow us to do that together in truly collaborative ways that are compliant from a legal perspective. The same goes for our ownership group. Rogers and Bell Canada are the two largest telcos in Canada. And we own our own arena. So we’re in a privileged position in terms of our touch points with fans.

JS: In a world where everybody is attached to their mobile phones, working with telcos must add another dimension of synergy that you can develop.

CM: Of course. If you come to an event with our mobile apps, you just have a better experience being there. Simple things like being able to order food to your seat or talk customer service or get general information for planning your event and knowing what the waiting times are at various places, and of course you can access information of the sports action.

The Raptors were victorious in the 2019 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors

JS: And Rogers is a television company.

CM: They have reach and distribution and they’re interested in sports. It’s tremendously valuable to us. When we want to talk to our broadcasters, our broadcasters are our ownership group. So, we have a level of transparency and a level of collaboration here that may not exist in most markets.

“We’re organically seeing that interest between the teams and we want to nurture that.”

JS: How about the advantages of owning multiple teams? Do fans of the Leafs and Raptors and Argos interact?

CM: Yes, whether it’s just in social media, supporting each other, to making sure that people have an opportunity to enjoy a new sport, we’re organically seeing that interest between the teams and we want to nurture that. We exist to make sports and entertainment available to the city of Toronto and we want to grow the interest in all our sports.

TO FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR DIGITAL & DATA MASTERCLASS – CLICK HERE

Athletics Is A Gold Medal Sport For Safaricom

Jay Stuart talks to Zaheeda Suleman, Head of Brand Experience at Safaricom.

With the Olympics Games in Tokyo well underway, athletes from Kenya, a country where the public passionately follows the Games, are making their nation proud and likely to be rising to the podium many times, particularly in the athletics events.

Those heroes and heroines will have a strong association in the fans’ minds with the brand of Safaricom, the largest telco in the region, one which you may have even seen already.

“Safaricom recently announced a KES20 million ($185,000) sponsorship of Team Kenya’s ceremonial kit.”

Safaricom recently announced a KES20 million ($185,000) sponsorship of Team Kenya’s ceremonial kit, and it has committed to sponsoring individual athletes like up-and-coming sprinter Mark Otieno. With men and women of the national team winning six gold medals in Rio along with six silvers a bronze, all in athletics, it’s not surprising that the sport is hugely popular in Kenya, where Safaricom, in which Vodafone has a 40% stake, controls 65% of the market with 35 million subscribers.

“Football is number one in popularity but athletics is easily number two because we do so well and running is just what we do,” says Zaheeda Suleman, Safaricom’s Head of Brand Experience. “The popularity of athletics has more to do with patriotism.”

This is a big year for sports events in Kenya. The country will host the World Under-20 Athletics Championships in August, and the World Rally Championship recently returned to Kenya after an absence of 19 years.

Safaricom first got into sports sponsorship 20 years ago with what is now the Lewa Safari Marathon, running through the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. Safaricom remains a committed partner of the event, which has raised millions of dollars to fund the Tusk wildlife conservation project as well community development, education and healthcare initiatives across Kenya. Because of the covid pandemic the last two editions have been virtual experiences.

“Safaricom’s sponsorship strategy sees sport not only as a way to connect with consumers at passion points”

Safaricom’s sponsorship strategy sees sport not only as a way to connect with consumers at passion points like football and athletics, but also by contributing to their health, education and economic empowerment.

“With anything we do we look at what the impact is on human life,” Zaheeda says. “We’re not doing it for the sake of doing it. It’s great for visibility, but it has to make a difference.”

Safaricom’s sponsorship of football is a good example. “We have over 30,000 kids taking part in our grassroots league. It gives the players a chance to showcase their talent and their skills. Three of our players were recently scouted and now they’re in university in the U.S.

“If it hadn’t been for the league, these kids probably would never have had that opportunity. So it’s not just about brand visibility or even playing sport. We ask ourselves every time what real impact this particular sponsorship is going to have on the Kenyan consumer.”

“Digital platforms and our phones are giving people things they couldn’t experience before without being there in person.”

As a telco, Safaricom also provides a platform for more people to enjoy watching sport. Zaheeda says, “You have people at an airport waiting until the last minute to board the flight just to get the result of a football match in another part of the world.

“Digital platforms and our phones are giving people things they couldn’t experience before without being there in person. This digital era is making sport a lot more accessible and affordable, and it’s not just a passive engagement.”

Africa’s Absa Extends The Conversation Beyond Football

Jay Stuart speaks to Peter Waweru, Marketing Manager at Absa Group in Africa, to discuss how the organisation utilises their sponsorships across a range of sports.

One of the underpinnings of sports sponsorship is the idea of enabling a brand to tap into the positive attributions of a sports property by association − that the brand can in a certain sense piggy-back on the sport. It would be hard to think of a better example of doing that in a strategic way than what has happened in the banking sector in Africa, where a football property has smoothed a complete re-branding of one of the biggest groups.

For years, Barclays Africa benefitted from the parent brand’s sponsorship as title sponsor and then banking partner of the English Premier League, the most popular competition in East Africa, the heartland of its multi-country operations. In 2018, the Barclays Africa name changed to Absa Group with a new logo. But the EPL connection has continued.

“We have had to be creative in the way we bring to light the sponsorship and the way we leverage it.”

“We have had to be creative in the way we bring to light the sponsorship and the way we leverage it,” says Peter Waweru, Absa Group’s marketing manager. “From a global perspective, we’re not one of the sponsors but Barclays is one of our shareholders and we are the financial partner in Africa and we have the right to utilise the property in various activations. We have a lot of African players in the EPL so consumers see the connection, the EPL is a mass property that appeals across all demographics.”

Absa also sponsors golf, appealing to the “mass affluent” target. “The emerging middle class is growing and they’re spending. Golf is a property that speaks to their aspirations.” The group invested KES30 million ($280,000) in this year’s Magical Kenya Open and Kenya Savanna Classic tournaments.

“In Kenya, one of the things that we’ve undertaken is partnering with local teams and supporting them through different kinds of mentorship.”

To get the most from the association, Absa works with former EPL players like Michael Essien of Ghana or Nigerian Jay-Jay Okocha as well as ex-England star Michael Owen. “We have much invested in bringing the legends closer to audience,” Peter say. “In the past we have been able to bring them to audiences in person. During the Covid crisis, we have been using our social media channels and virtual sessions and fans can ask them interesting questions and it becomes very relatable.”

Absa is especially focused on extending the football conversation to the rest of people’s lives. “In Kenya, one of the things that we’ve undertaken is partnering with local teams and supporting them through different kinds of mentorship to prepare young people for their working lives with knowledge and skills.”

“Our purpose is to bring possibilities to life”

“Our purpose is to bring possibilities to life,” he adds. “We live on a continent where people find ingenious ways of doing things. If you look at our great footballers now playing on global platforms, they started from very humble beginnings, sometimes playing with an improvised ball before they had access to real ones. They found a way forward. It’s a spirit that we as a brand recognise not just in football, but in other things, be it business or whatever. We want to nurture that spirit and help make aspirations.”

Absa is also extending that beyond football, especially into athletics. “It’s an area that we are focusing on to see how we can scale up our participation and help grow the next the next generation of great athletes,” he says. “And a great thing about athletics is that it covers such a wide range of sporting disciplines and that means lots of ways to activate.”

Blockchain Might Be Your Ticket To Digital Transformation

Jay Stuart speaks to Emma McGuigan, Lead – Intelligent Platform Services at Accenture, ahead of her appearance at our Blockchain and NFT eMasterclass on Tuesday, July 20th, where she will be discussing the topic of blockchain further for our community.

It is ironic that the most prominent application of blockchain so far has been Bitcoin because, as I learned from Emma McGuigan of Accenture, cryptocurrency does not really provide a very helpful illustration of how blockchain can be of practical use. She has better ones.

Emma, who leads Accenture’s Intelligent Platform Services, will be taking part in a session on Blockchain Applications for the Sports Industry at iSportConnect’s first Blockchain & NFTs eMasterclass on July 20. I don’t intend to steal her thunder by giving away much of what she might have to say. You would be wise to register and listen to her on the day. As a taster, I will just share a few of the basic ideas that she opened up for me in our conversation.

“Blockchain technology is a pattern that you then need specialist technology to overlap.”

Emma is an electronics engineer who oversees Accenture’s relationships, strategy and capabilities globally for all industries across the leading internet service providers. She used to be the group technology lead for communications media and technology globally. “In that portfolio of clients, we have all the big platform players, the software providers like Microsoft Google and AWS, and a lot of the smaller clients incubating new technologies like blockchain. But we also have media and we have telco, industries which have been massively disrupted over the last five or ten years. I’ve had to be thoughtful really quickly about reinventing their business models.”

As daunting as that sounds, when Emma talks about blockchain she can be absolutely as clear as a kindergarten teacher, which is just what I needed for this subject. So here goes, put simply.

Start with thinking of blockchain as a pattern. “Blockchain technology is a pattern that you then need specialist technology to overlap.” It can create a “distributed ledger” that enables you to track authenticated trades in an ecosystem of organisations which collaborate, like the sports business.

Emma used the music industry as a parallel. And her explanation based on music really does sum it up nicely.

“You’ve got broadcasters who want to broadcast music, production studios who want to embed music, creators of music with a whole breadth and depth and complexity over who owns and creates music from the writers to the performers to the producers, and many others. And you’ve got mediators in the end who are mediating how you monetise the music. And this means that they all need to be somewhat looking at each other’s data. If I’m the mediator, I need to know who’s using the music and what they’re paying for it and when. So you’ve got people wanting to access each other’s systems.”

“Now what if you didn’t need to access each other’s systems and instead the transactions all sit with the piece of value, the object that’s got the value, which in this example would be the music? Then anybody can access the ledger at any time, there’s no access required and there’s no security issue. I don’t need to access anybody else’s system or wait for a file to be transferred. I can just look at the valuable piece of data and understand who’s using it, when they’ve used it, whether payments been made or not made. In principle, you can apply this model wherever you’ve got an ecosystem of a group of fairly static actors that work together.”

I’m sure you can make the leap to who those actors are and what the pieces of value might be in the sports business.

With blockchain, the digital ticket itself is always valid and it holds all the information the seller and the buyers and the venue need to know.

We’ve been hearing a lot about NFTs like the NBA Top Shot collectibles and they will be a big part of the eMasterclass agenda, but a more obvious blockchain use might be for other parts of the sports value chain, like ticketing authenticated merchandise. Indeed, Emma said that ticketing was the first thing that came to kind for her. With blockchain, the digital ticket itself is always valid and it holds all the information the seller and the buyers and the venue need to know. If a ticket changes hands you can follow it.

I said before that Bitcoin is not an ideal example of blockchain. For one thing, the technology creates the value of cryptocurrency, which doesn’t have any real-world value otherwise. And blockchain is most useful when the ledger of authenticated users is fairly compact, like for a ticket. When you start to get into the thousands or millions like with cryptocurrency, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Now, practically speaking, when it comes to making blockchain a reality for your organisation, you don’t just call up the blockchain guy who comes and installs it one morning. There’s more to it than that.

“Technology is helping drive the change but it’s not the driver of the change.”

“You’re getting into the world of really thinking about how you use technology to transform the way you operate,” Emma says. And that means relying on providers like Accenture that help drive the whole digital transformation for you to help you unlock value. And if we look at football, for example, that might not be up to the individual club.

“We get back to the ecosystem question,” she says. “In football the league provides the ecosystem for all the clubs to compete and be successful. The league becomes the catalyst for unlocking the value. It already does that with television rights, with the clubs sharing revenue.” So maybe it will be for the leagues and similar associations to drive adoption of blockchain solutions. It really comes down to deciding what the desired shared outcomes are.

As Emma says, “Technology is helping drive the change but it’s not the driver of the change. The outcome that you want is the driver for change with technologies as the enabler.”

When Fans Are Woke, Brands Are the Ones at Risk

Ahead of iSportConnect’s Brands eMasterclass on Thursday afternoon, Jay Stuart chats to Michael Robichaud, SVP of Global Sponsorships at Mastercard, who will be speaking at this week’s event.

In our era of increasing consumer sensitivity to social issues, the brands that sponsor sports are probably more vulnerable to the risks of cancel culture than the sports themselves, and they’re more aware of being held accountable, according to Mastercard’s worldwide head of sponsorship.

Michael Robichaud, SVP of Global Sponsorships for the company, which has about three billion active cards around the world, said: “We’re further ahead than sports groups because we’re publicly traded. We have executives and CEOs that have to answer to investors on investor calls, they do press conferences where they get asked questions and you have people that can boycott our products.

“Consumers can vote by saying ‘hold on, we don’t agree with the values of your company, we’re going to vote against you by not buying.’”

“Consumers can vote by saying ‘hold on, we don’t agree with the values of your company, we’re going to vote against you by not buying.’ We’ve heard for years that fans are going to put pressure on sports by holding back their dollars and the sports are going to suffocate and they’re going to be taught a lesson. I don’t think we’ve seen a huge history of that. I think actually the closest we’ve seen is the Super League, which was probably the right time for more fan voices to come in and be heard.”

Mastercard’s long-running partnership with the UEFA Champions League has been a mainstay of the company’s activity in sports, along with agreements with the Rugby World Cup, the R&A (British Open) and US PGA Tour in golf and multiple NFL and MLB teams.

Michael’s role covers entertainment as well as sports, with high-profile partners like the Grammy Awards. But the sports side accounts for about 80% of the focus, “if you include Esports as sports.” Mastercard became the first global sponsor of League of Legends in 2018 in a deal with Riot Games. “For us the agreement was initially targeted on major parts of Asia that we just couldn’t get into on any sort of scale.”

Michael will be taking part in the session ‘The Right Fit: Aligning Brands & Sports‘ at the iSportConnect Brands eMasterclass on July 1, where the subject of shared values will be on the agenda.

He says that all the sports bodies he knows are siding with trying to promote positive change. “No sport is going to say, ‘we don’t like those values, racism’s okay.’ The thing you need to look at is what the priorities are. So UEFA, for example, has made its priority fighting racism and the R&A seeks to promote women’s golf and others may have different priorities.”

*World Rugby this month announced a new five-year partnership with Mastercard to accelerate the development of women’s rugby.*

For global brands like Mastercard, staying on top of social trends is not just about protecting themselves reactively against the downside of consumer blowback. Mastercard has recognised the need to be proactive and take part in leading the discussion for change.

More generally, Michael makes a crucial point about decision-making in our media-driven society. You have to be willing to break new ground and move beyond the tried and tested. Women’s soccer provides a good example.

In May, Mastercard unveiled a new deal with the 10-team National Women’s Soccer League in the United States as an official partner, with top NWSL player Crystal Dunn of the Portland Thorns joining the all-star roster of Mastercard Global Brand Ambassadors including female stars from other sports such as Naomi Osaka in tennis and golfer Brooke Henderson.

“We’re thinking about things differently and making different decisions for different reasons, with the single ultimate goal of advancing the opportunities for women in sport.”

Michael said: “For a long time people held on to the metric that only 4% of sports highlights on television is women’s sports. Well, if you use that as your basis and say there’s not the TV audience and there’s not the attendance so it must be a bad product, so you shouldn’t invest or sponsor women’s sports, then things don’t change.

“The reality is that it’s a great product, and people absolutely love and support it. But they don’t know about it or they don’t have an opportunity to see it. The TV ratings for the Women’s World Cup in the US were certainly better than anything that men have had. The whole system needs to get behind the product and let it show what it can do. This requires a bit of a different way of thinking and of companies making decisions and that’s what’s happening. We’re thinking about things differently and making different decisions for different reasons, with the single ultimate goal of advancing the opportunities for women in sport.”

Major broadcaster CBS will show NWSL games. Michael likes that games will also be on Twitch. “You would think some people today might say, ‘Oh, you know, the NWSL is on Twitch, it’s only Twitch.’ In fact, people get more excited that they’re on Twitch than anything else because that’s their audience. Technology always plays a role in things changing, and the NWSL has done a great job of embracing that.”

Verizon, AB Inbev and financial group Ally are also backing the NWSL, whose ninth season kicked off last month and will end with the championship final on November 20.

You can hear more from Michael at our Brands eMasterclass on Thursday afternoon (July 1st), between 2-5pm BST. Register interest by clicking this link – https://www.isportconnect.com/event/emasterclass-series-brands//?code=register

Diversity: The Easy Way for Sport to Show It’s Changing for the Better

In this week’s Meet The Team piece, iSportConnect’s Editor-At-Large Jay Stuart looks at how sport needs to show it is taking diversity seriously. Diversity in sport is something our recent iSportLearn initiative is looking to improve, which Jay is part of, and you can find more information at iSportLearn.com.

I was talking last week with the head of sponsorship for a global brand that sponsors top-tier sports, and he expressed deep concern about the shortcomings of sport in addressing social and environmental issues and the growing danger which that poses for large public companies such as his.

He said that something that he finds especially frustrating is the failure of broadcasters to use the huge leverage they enjoy from pouring millions into sport to promote the positive change that has become absolutely necessary.

And he pointed to the Tokyo Olympics scheduled to start next month as the biggest and clearest example. With the coronavirus pandemic still a danger to public health and the Japanese public so obviously worried, why haven’t broadcasters said anything other than, ‘let’s bring on the Games’?

“Why don’t broadcasters flex their ethical muscle more in their relationship with the sports who depend on them as the main source of income?”

Now there are always wheels within wheels, and it so happens that the main competitor of this sponsor happens to be a TOP sponsor who would certainly not be helped if Tokyo were not to happen. But the point is nonetheless valid. Why don’t broadcasters flex their ethical muscle more in their relationship with the sports who depend on them as the main source of income?

The conversation brought home to me that sports organisations really need to wake up and be more responsive to the bigger issues facing society before they feel it in their wallets in a big way. And it’s not just sports organisations that need to wake up but a huge range of commercial stakeholders.

But we all know this already, don’t we?

*Diversity and representing social issues is something sport must take a greater stand on, says Jay.*

And we know that the sports business is vast and complicated, with so many long-term relationships and investments, and when it comes to making changes, the inertia is huge.

The vulnerability of sports organisations may be unique in our society. Not only are they more exposed to scrutiny on all sides because people are watching them, but that so many of those people actually care about how they behave.

That gets back to the sponsor I was talking with. People don’t care about his brand, they use the product without any passion or loyalty. And that’s why brands like his sponsor sports, to tap into the passion and loyalty people feel about their favourite teams.

“Sports can show they are responding and changing for the better, and they can do it quickly.”

The danger for sports is that most brands will definitely forego that passion and loyalty to avoid the risk of damage to their image and reputation.

But again, we know this too, don’t we?

The point I want to make is that what makes sports organisations especially vulnerable, having a big audience that genuinely cares about how they behave, is also a great strength in these times of mounting pressure on social and environmental issues.

Sports can show they are responding and changing for the better, and they can do it quickly in a way that goes beyond paying lip service to what sponsors need to hear.

“It’s safe to say that no business activity other than sport has so many people of such widely diverse backgrounds all over the world who eagerly want to join up and be actively involved.”

And the good news is that one of the fastest and easiest ways that they can change is not disruptive. It holds no risk for their commercial models. It doesn’t really cost a thing. In fact it will make them money in the long run.

I am talking about sports organisations, so many of which remain bastions of white males with connections, becoming more diverse in their hiring and training and management and leadership.

It’s safe to say that no business activity other than sport has so many people of such widely diverse backgrounds all over the world who eagerly want to join up and be actively involved. Sport needs to do a better job of tapping into their passion and loyalty, and the intelligence and skills they can offer. Study after study shows that diversity pays dividends.

Sport will make the safest investment in its future, and one that’s long overdue, by changing authentically and actually becoming different within.

“We Are Very Exciting For Our Partners Because Of What We Have Done In Connecting With Our Fans”

Jay Stuart talks to Anurag Dahiya, Chief Commercial Officer of the International Cricket Council, in his latest ‘In Conversation With…’

The profile of the International Cricket Council has been transformed over recent years thanks to a massive following on social media, but the attention and engagement did not happen just because of mastery of digital technology. Underlying being number on social has been a strong focus on building the brand – and that brand is not about being the world governing body of cricket.

“We are very exciting for our partners because of what we have done in connecting with our fans,” says Anurag Dahiya, the ICC’s Chief Commercial Officer. “A lot of sports struggle with creating a strong connection with their brands. This is especially true of the international federations. We have worked hard on building our brand.”

The ICC’s brand-building has started with a solid foundation.

“The key to making the be-like-a-fan strategy work is having a content creation team that is strongly grounded in the values of the ICC.”

“The starting point is that we are fans of the sport. We are equal to our fans, not sitting on top of them running cricket. On social media we are not presented as a governing body or perceived that way. It is in our tone of voice. We love the sport and we want to celebrate it.”

The key to making the be-like-a-fan strategy work is having a content creation team that is strongly grounded in the values of the ICC.

“They need to be exactly aware of what we stand for,” Anurag says. “We can give them the creative freedom they need. The reality is that volume of content is so huge if we tried to check everything it would hurt us because we have to do less and that would reduce engagement. It’s a fine balance. There is such a thing as playing it too safe and being too colourless.”

The ICC’s celebration of the 2019 Cricket World Cup with a Rewind of the highlights racked up 500 million video views across all platforms. A special digital flip-book of the winning six attracted 20 million views. Numbers like that are music to the ears of the ICC’s Global Partners including Nissan, Booking.com and Emirates.

The response to the pandemic crisis has shown a digital-first strategy in action. The ICC had a successful Women’s T20 World Cup in Australia at the start of the year but then it went into shutdown mode for events. Since 2004 one of the ICC’s main off-pitch events has been the annual Player of the Year Awards. To make the event bigger and more exciting, it was decided to make the 2020 version the Player of the Decade. The ICC worked closely with its partner Indian gaming platform Dream11 (with 100 million users) to build participation. Indian broadcaster Star Sports, another core partner, aired an exclusive show devoted to the competition, and a dedicated AR filter was launched on Facebook. An amazing total of 1.5 million fans actually voted in the competition with 6 million votes tallied.

“There was amazing engagement and we enriched our data collection,” says Anurag. “So the crisis was turned into a positive in this case. Independent surveys have shown that our relative strength on social media is number one. Having a big following and strong engagement is great but we understand that the value of that has its limits, so we are focused on our data strategy. The voting mechanism on the Awards is a great tool for collecting data.”

“The emphasis will be on using digital to extend the event engagement beyond the physical location.”

For the Men’s T20 World Cup this year the ICC is working to develop really targeted communications using email and the website and app and push notification.

The upcoming World Cup will take place in a bio-bubble, the first time that the ICC has done an event that way. “The limitations will of course impact the ability of partners to activate on the ground, so the emphasis will be on using digital to extend the event engagement beyond the physical location and also to extend it in time beyond the end of play. This is something that the ICC has been working on from the start of the crisis.”

At the start of April the ICC added Himalaya MEN, an India-based company with global ambitions that is already experiencing global growth, as the Official Men’s Grooming Partner for this year’s T20 World Cup and World Test Championship Finals, and the Men’s T20 World Cup in 2022.

One of the obvious selling points of cricket is that it is by far the most important sport in India, with its 1.5 billion people. And it enjoys the same position in Pakistan and Bangladesh, two other countries among the world’s 10 largest. But that’s only part of the story.

“More and more it’s the case that our partners are coming to us to reach countries beyond the 12 Test nations.”

“More and more it’s the case that our partners are coming to us to reach countries beyond the 12 Test nations,” Anurag says. “We have 92 other member countries, and in 2019 we added 20% more players in those countries. Consider this. Five of the top 10 countries in terms of the social media following for the 2019 World Cup were not Test nations.” Those fast-emerging cricket markets will be a fundamental part of the ICC’s partner proposition for the next commercial cycle from 2023-31.

“When we look at a potential partnership the criterion we always apply is whether it will be important for cricket as well as the brand,” Anurag says. “We look for partners that want to activate in exciting ways and help build up our events and the sport. It’s not just about slapping on a logo.”

Star Sports is an ICC Official Partner alongside the likes of Coca-Cola and MoneyGram.

For OTT Pioneer Dorna Sports, Broadcasters Still Remain Central

Ahead of iSportConnect’s Digital & Data eMasterclass on Thursday May 20th, Jay Stuart speaks to Gorka Llort, Director of Digital Strategy & Content at MotoGP for Dorna Sports, about how Dorna is evolving their OTT offering in the latest ‘In Conversation With…’

As more and more rights owners explore and embrace OTT, one organisation in particular stands out as a genuine pioneer − Dorna Sports, long-time owner of commercial rights for the sport of motorcycling and its flagship MotoGP series, which enters its fifth round on the track at Le Mans in France this weekend.

In a market where direct-to-consumer services that have been around for five years are already considered venerable, Dorna launched MotoGP on OTT almost 20 years ago.

You might think that being in the OTT market for so long would bring about a weakening of the relationship with traditional broadcasters.

You might think that being in the OTT market for so long would bring about a weakening of the relationship with traditional broadcasters. Quite the contrary. Indeed, a lot of the energy Dorna devotes to its OTT options is aimed at helping its broadcast partners and they have focused on becoming better at doing just that.

“Broadcasters are our main partners,” says Gorka Llort, Dorna’s Director of Digital Strategy & Content. “The money they pay us and especially the distribution their channels give us make them the foundation of our business and as such they are the first consideration in shaping our content strategy.”

That said, there are two particular points to bear in mind about broadcasters.

First, MotoGP has limited TV airtime. That’s not because the broadcasters don’t want to show the series but because the events only take place for a few hours every two weeks during the season. Second, the broadcast partners in any given territory change over time.

“The distribution their channels give us make them the foundation of our business and as such they are the first consideration.”

These two factors make an OTT service indispensable as a complementary offer. The key to making it really work is having a large volume of content. MotoGP has tons and tons of content of different kinds.

This enables Dorna to layer its OTT offering. There are three layers of OTT (delivered with the help of connectivity partner Tata Communications).

One is available for free, the second requires users to register and the third is behind a paywall for €140 a year.

The paid option offers the live race content – and MotoGP’s live race content is in itself massive in volume. Dorna, which does all its own production, has 180 cameras at an event. That means all the things happening on the track at any given time are being covered. No broadcaster can do that with a single feed.

“We’re lucky,” says Gorka. “If you watch a football game on TV you don’t miss anything. If you watch one of our races, you’re only seeing a small part of what’s going on.”

All the competing riders in MotoGP have at least two cameras and most have three or four and that also goes for the two support racing series, Moto 2 and Moto 3. The OTT subscriber has access to more than 60 continuous feeds, mostly of content never shown on TV.

The pay package is not available in Dorna’s most important broadcast markets, where Italy (SkyItalia), Spain (DAZN) and the UK (Sky) retain exclusivity. In other markets,

All the OTT options and the data they deliver enable partner broadcasters and brands to run targeted campaigns. “It’s all about lead generation,” says Gorka, who will be taking part in iSportConnect’s Digital & Data eMasterclass on May 20 in a panel in the session Content: The Multi-Platform Challenge.

OTT also provides continuity from season to season. Dorna has over 50,000 videos in its MotoGP archive. That means fans don’t need to lose their connection to past seasons when live rights move from one broadcaster to another.

OTT is only one component of Dorna’s highly evolved digital operation, where long experience as a result of adopting digital early has paid off. “What we have learned to do over the years is monetise content,” Gorka says.

“Digital means less people doing things and more people thinking about things.”

“Our digital team looks at every potential piece of content in terms of its value and we fine-tune specific content for each platform. That means making decisions. We don’t just pump everything out as soon as it’s available. We look at why, for example, we might want to hold back something and use it on TikTok after the race. If it’s three in the morning in Japan, it makes sense to wait until the next day. It’s all about extracting value from everything we have.”

One size does not fit all. That’s a big difference between broadcast and digital. As Gorka puts it, “Digital means less people doing things and more people thinking about things.”

Gorka doesn’t expect the fundamental fact of their primary importance to change in the coming years but the market will evolve of course and one of the shifts will be that more broadcasters will have their own OTT services. At present out of the 80 that have MotoGP rights about 10 already have them. In 15 years it will probably be 70.

From the beginning, Dorna has been constantly adjusting its OTT offer.

To sign up to our Digital & Data eMasterclass, taking place between 2-5pm on Thursday May 20th, please follow this link –

eMasterclass Series: Digital & Data