Ospreys are pleased to appoint PumpJack Dataworks to lead its future in the transformation of how the club can best harness data surrounding fan engagement and commercial transactions with the club. This will focus on improving the fan experience and providing a platform for innovatory rights deals and developing new revenue generating models.
Paul Whapham, Ospreys Corporate Brand Director commented: “Bringing in technology firms like PumpJack is critical for us to be able to both innovate the commercial model of the club, deliver new and better experiences for our core local fans, and to continue to build paths to extend our club’s reach internationally.
“We are excited to deliver new data driven initiatives for our fans and our commercial partners. Our immediate commitment is to find best-in-class partners on a global basis to improve club engagement locally and to build a wider audience of Ospreys’ globally distributed fans.”
Nick Goggans, CEO of PumpJack Dataworks said: “We’re delighted to have the opportunity to work with an organization that is rich in tradition and local passion, but are also seeking new ways to immerse the club locally and provide authentic experiences for the fan both at home and internationally.
“We want to help Ospreys and their supporters better engage together and support the commercial growth of the club. This is a great case for evolution of the commercial opportunity that exists in Rugby Union both in Wales, the UK and internationally.”
iSportconnect is delighted to welcome on board Sandy Case as the company’s first ever Chief Strategy Officer.
Sandy will be heading up iSportconnect’s global strategy and forward thinking as the organisation strives to continue to be at the forefront of the sports business industry over the next few years. He brings a wealth of experience having held senior roles at Morgan Stanley, ASO, Benchmark as well as starting several award winning businesses within retail and health.
Sandy will be reinforcing the hugely successful consultancy arm as we welcome more unique clients and work to provide an even greater service to our current partners. Additionally Sandy will be leading on the development of a new global business concept.
In recent months, iSportconnect has adapted to the coronavirus pandemic by tailoring our service for those clients and hosting a number of virtual events, which gained over 18,000 attendees from more than 70 countries around the world, to benefit the global sports community. As well as this, iSportconnect has signed up a grand total of seven new consultancy clients in the last month.
Sandy Case, Chief Strategy Officer of iSportconnect, said: “I’ve been collaborating with Sree for several months and we have come up with some really innovative ideas to both grow and position iSportconnect at the heart of the industry and be a positive force for the business of sport. We have a new global strategy to implement and plenty of scope to grow the rest of the business. I love the idea that we can also be a little disruptive.”
iSportconnect CEO Sree Varma added: “I’m thrilled to be welcoming Sandy to our team as we look to develop the organisation further and go from strength to strength.
“iSportconnect continues to bring those within the sports industry closer together and provides unparalleled access for our consultancy clients. Rather than standing still we are constantly looking to better ourselves, and Sandy’s addition and ideas will be a tremendous benefit.”
About iSportconnect
iSportconnect was launched in 2010 with the aim of bringing together sports business professionals around the world in a sports business networking community enabling them to meet one another, find information and obtain access to a wide range of relevant services. The platform is now the largest global private network of sport business executives, where membership is exclusive and follows a strict door policy.
WWE today announced that Nick Khan, former Co-Head of Television at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), has been named President & Chief Revenue Officer, reporting directly to WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon.
“Nick is a seasoned media executive with a deep understanding of our business and a proven track record of generating significant value for sports and entertainment properties,” said McMahon. “While representing WWE at CAA, he was instrumental in transforming our business model by securing domestic media rights increases of 3.6x over our previous agreements. Nick’s management style and personal demeanor are perfect for WWE’s entrepreneurial culture, and he will fit right in with our exceptional management team.”
“I am very much looking forward to expanding my relationship with Vince McMahon and the entire team at WWE, and becoming a full-time member of the WWE family,” said Khan. “It’s rare to have an opportunity to work at a company that is not only legendary in what it has already accomplished, but also uniquely poised to enter into an unprecedented phase of growth and expansion across all lines of business. Our collective industry experience will enable us to extract maximum value across the portfolio globally while driving long-term shareholder value.”
Khan, a former practicing attorney, transitioned to International Creative Management (ICM) in 2006 where he launched their Sports Media department and represented the biggest names in sports broadcasting. In 2012, Khan moved to CAA where he became the Co-Head of the Television Department. During his tenure there, Khan continued to represent the top broadcasters while also representing WWE, the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Top Rank Boxing and others helping to negotiate billions of dollars in media deals on their behalf.
Watch a highlights reel from our recent iSportconnect eMasterclass Series as we adapted take our events to a virtual platform in recent months. iSportconnect will soon be returning as part of a new partnership with Eleven Sports for the ‘Talking Sport’ series starting on the 13th of August…
ELEVEN SPORTS is marking its fifth anniversary with a rebrand that lays the foundations for its ambitious growth plans. Under the new ELEVEN brand umbrella, the group’s ‘2.0 strategy’ will see ELEVEN expand its offering with a host of new content streams and plans to grow its digital ecosystem with the aim of democratising sports content for fans across the world.
Since launching in 2015, ELEVEN has been disrupting the traditional media landscape with a fan first, platform agnostic service that gives fans access to the best LIVE action whenever and wherever they want to consume it. To date ELEVEN has established itself as a leading sports provider in Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and Myanmar. The group’s portfolio includes top competitions like La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, the Premier League, UEFA Champions League, F1 and the NBA as well as a host of local sports rights in each market.
ELEVEN’s 2.0 launch will initially focus on the group’s European markets of Belgium, Portugal and Italy with additional territories to follow in early 2021.
ELEVEN SPORTS CEO Luis Vicente said: “Andrea Radrizzani, Marc Watson and the rest of our founding group launched ELEVEN SPORTS in 2015 with the belief that there was a market for a new type of sports platform that could deliver for fans in a more flexible, fun and accessible way.
“Over the past five years that’s what they have created, together with our 400+ amazing members of staff. We’ve built a global community of fans, a world-class portfolio of rights and a host of platform innovations that differentiate us from our competitors. We have disrupted the status quo to democratize access to the best sport content and delivered on our mission to be fully platform-agnostic and fan-centric.
“We are now the guardians of this amazing legacy and our ELEVEN 2.0 approach will build on the fantastic work that’s already been done. With our new ELEVEN 2.0 strategy, we’re going to accelerate our journey with thousands of hours of additional LIVE content every year, an innovative digital first and data led approach and continuous investment in Premium rights alongside new investment in Longtail and Newtail rights in virtual and traditional sports. We are convinced about the massive untapped potential in the new brand verticals we’ve announced and we are excited about the opportunities we can deliver for more sports, athletes and fans around the world, in a true spirit of co-creation and joint venture.
“More than ever, we are building the most varied, most dynamic content offering possible and a destination to serve all fans with the content they want, at the time they want and wherever they are. More than ever, we stand by the fans and for the fans”
With closeness to fans at an all time high in terms of necessity, StriveCloud’s Jente Vanhaesebroeck takes a look at why learning your customers’ lifetime value is critical to the fan journey and improving their loyalty.
Have you ever wondered who your best customers are? You probably should. As a general rule of thumb, it’s up to 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. What if by determining the lifetime value of your customers, you can secure their loyalty? Using gamification throughout the buyer’s journey can help you boost retention and engagement without additional costs.
And let’s be honest; who doesn’t want to save money? Sit back and relax, because we’re going to get into some data and unveil a couple of juicy gamification secrets behind true fan loyalty.
Here are some topics we’ll go over:
What is Customer Lifetime Value?
Will measuring Customer Lifetime Value boost loyalty?
“Retained customers also buy more often and spend more overall. To top it all off loyal customers are 4 times more likely to refer more customers to your brand.”
But who needs another metric to track? The reason it’s so valuable to measure Customer Lifetime Value is because of its direct link to revenue over time. Why is that important? Well, the old rule of thumb states it is 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Therefore every increase in retention has a major influence on revenue streams.
And if you think about it that makes sense. Because when you take Customer Lifetime Value and retention into account you are adding future value. In fact, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profit by 25 to 95%. Retained customers also buy more often and spend more overall. To top it all off loyal customers are 4 times more likely to refer more customers to your brand.
One principle that encompasses this well is the Pareto principle. This economic principle, better known as the 80/20 rule, states that 80% of the profits come from 20% of your customers. These are your best customers as they usually have a lower service cost and higher spendings.
HEINEKEN today announces its flagship non-alcoholic beer brand, Heineken® 0.0%, will take over the sponsorship of the UEFA Europa League competition when the tournament resumes on 5th August 2020. The partnership represents the largest ever single sponsorship deal involving a non-alcoholic beer brand.
Heineken® 0.0% is now available in 58 markets globally (34 in Europe). The UEFA Europa League represents a significant opportunity for the brand to reach a new and engaged sports audience, with a viewership of 550 million people across all live programming and an average of 37 million viewers per matchday.
The sponsorship will run from the resumption of the 2019/20 competition on August 5th, through to June 2024. Sponsorship rights include LED pitch boarding exposure, digital rights, team greeter, match screenings and ticket giveaways, all of which will be incorporated into the activation of the brand campaign, ‘Now You Can’.
HEINEKEN has been a UEFA partner since 1994 through its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League, in 2015 this partnership was strengthened when HEINEKEN began its sponsorship of UEFA Europa League. Heineken® 0.0% takes over from fellow HEINEKEN brand Amstel, which had leveraged the tournament for the last five years and will be shifting focus to platforms that have a strong local and regional impact in its fast-growing regions.
Hans Erik Tuijt, Heineken® Global Sponsorship Director, said, “Heineken® 0.0% has seen incredibly strong growth over the past few years, so we’re delighted to announce its first major sponsorship at a time when football is available to watch almost every day of the week. We feel it’s crucial to encourage responsible drinking and give consumers a choice.”
Guy-Laurent Epstein, director of marketing at UEFA Events SA, said, “We are pleased to welcome Heineken® 0.0% as the new official beer sponsor of the UEFA Europa League. This move represents the start of another great chapter of the longstanding relationship, between Heineken and UEFA.
“This exciting new sponsorship will begin immediately featuring at UEFA Europa League matches for the rest of the season. With the introduction of the UEFA Europa Conference League starting in 2021/22 season and Heineken’s commitment already confirmed for the next four years, we look forward to helping Heineken 0.0% establish its position within European club football, and as the biggest non-alcoholic beer sponsorship of its kind.”
SailGP, the annual global championship featuring the world’s fastest sail racing, today announced a partnership with brand advocacy leader Greenfly, and has deployed Greenfly’s software platform for media collection and distribution. The partnership enables SailGP to aggregate and curate photos and videos for easy sharing with its world-class athletes and teams, while enhancing the league’s central digital channels.
The pinnacle of the sport, SailGP currently features teams from Australia, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Japan, Spain and the United States, and is working to expand its social reach and storytelling capabilities prior to the April 2021 start of its postponed second season.
During each of SailGP’s two-day events, thousands of media assets are created via body cameras on the athletes, fixed cameras on each of the seven race boats, on-water photographers and videographers, helicopters and drones, and videos clipped from the live broadcast feed. The partnership with Greenfly will enable content collection and curation to be automated, with the ability to route and share image and video galleries with teams and individual athletes immediately after each race.
SailGP has recognized the importance of activating and supporting each athlete’s personal digital brand, growing their fan network, and keeping them updated and engaged both during and outside of the season.
SailGP CMO Tim Godfrey said: “This unique partnership with Greenfly helps facilitate and streamline content collection from so many sources, and easily and quickly get it in the hands of our seven national teams and more than 50 elite athletes. We’re able to not only help support each team and athlete to build their own personal audiences, but also create unique and engaging content for viewers and fans across SailGP’s digital channels.”
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, RedBird Capital Partners and Dany Garcia have been selected as the winning bidder for substantially all of the assets of Alpha Entertainment LLC, the parent company of the XFL. The XFL assets will be sold to Johnson, Garcia and RedBird for approximately $15 million, in accordance with the terms and conditions of the asset purchase agreement. The transaction is subject to bankruptcy court approval at a hearing this Friday, August 7 and, assuming that closing conditions are satisfied, is expected to close on or shortly after August 21. The sale auction previously scheduled for today will not occur.
Through this acquisition, the group secures the ability to option live entertainment intellectual property for further expansion across sports, live events and original entertainment programming.
“For Dwayne, Gerry and myself, this property represents an incredible opportunity. It is the confluence of great passion, tradition and possibility” said Dany Garcia. “Sports and entertainment are the foundations of the businesses I have built. Melding our expertise combined with our commitment to deliver exciting and inspiring unique content, has us all focused on developing the XFL brand into a multi-media experience that our athletes, partners and fans will proudly embrace and love.”
“The acquisition of the XFL with my talented partners, Dany Garcia and Gerry Cardinale, is an investment for me that’s rooted deeply in two things – my passion for the game and my desire to always take care of the fans,” said Dwayne Johnson. “With pride and gratitude for all that I’ve built with my own two hands, I plan to apply these callouses to the XFL, and look forward to creating something special for the players, fans, and everyone involved for the love of football.”
“It is a privilege to partner with Dany and Dwayne on the acquisition of the XFL,” said Gerry Cardinale, Founder and Managing Partner of RedBird Capital Partners. “Their track record in building dynamic businesses speaks for itself, and their vision and passion for developing the XFL as a world class sports and entertainment property will enable a new future for this organization. As their partner in acquiring and relaunching the XFL, RedBird will bring its own track record and experience in building world class companies in sports and live entertainment to help realize their vision.”
“We are grateful for today’s outcome,” said Jeffrey Pollack, XFL President and COO. “This is a Hollywood ending to our sale process and it is an exciting new chapter for the league. Dwayne, Dany and Gerry are a dream team ownership group and the XFL is in the best possible hands going forward.”
Garcia and Johnson are co-founders of Seven Bucks Companies, a multi-platform enterprise pioneering original content for television, film, emerging technologies and digital networks, and have been behind some of the most successful platforms in global entertainment. Through their joint enterprise, Garcia and Johnson’s work spans all entertainment and creative verticals involving investments, brand integrations, philanthropic endeavors, marketing, and film and television projects that are rooted in authenticity, passion and strong storytelling with a mission of promoting equality and inclusion.
Over the last twenty years, Cardinale has been responsible for the creation of several multi-billion dollar sports and entertainment companies in partnership with some of the most iconic rights holders in the world, including the YES Network with the New York Yankees; Legends Hospitality with the Yankees and Dallas Cowboys; On Location Experiences with the National Football League (NFL); and OneTeam Partners with the Players’ Associations of the NFL, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, United States Women’s National Soccer Team and Women’s National Basketball Association.
With supporter-less stadiums looking like it will continue to be necessary for all sporting events within the near future, Seyu take a look at how remote digital solutions involving fans will be key in driving sponsorship as new leagues begin in football and other sports continue to resume.
For more than a decade, social media and mobile technology have presented powerful communication tools for sport teams and athletes to connect with fans, and have also proven to be pivotal around the activation of brand partnerships. Now the movement towards digital is accelerating faster than ever before.
In recent months the broadcasters and clubs have relied heavily on archival and virtual content to keep their fans engaged. There has also been a market rise in the number of social-viewing activations of this kind, with some sports teams putting fans at the center of the conversation in a more deliberate way. As second-screen viewing experiences also become increasingly popular, such activations demonstrate how rights holders and clubs are attempting to capture digital audiences during live events by leveraging the users’ appetite for mobile content.
“Digital elements previously thought to be a comfortable, marginal feature of business now become a must-have road to take.”
As these solutions were extremely popular, many industry experts agree that the turning point is here: due to the pandemic and the constant restrictions, digital elements previously thought to be a comfortable, marginal feature of business now become a must-have road to take.
LESSONS LEARNED: YOUNGER AUDIENCES LOVE SECOND-SCREEN MOBILE CONTENT AND ACTIVATION
Resumptions to major competitions like the Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga, Italy’s Serie A and Germany’s Bundesliga have come as a welcome boost for broadcasters, with all four leagues attracting higher viewership during their return to play. The demand for quality sports content is as huge as before, but the way of engagement is rapidly changing.
Brand activations have played an increasingly prominent role so far, but with the cancellation of on-site experience the process turned almost entirely for digital and remote solutions. A recent study from the global sports marketing agency Octagon showed that these elements had a vital part in keeping engaged especially younger sports fans.
More than 82% of them between the ages of 18 and 29 have continued to engage in sports-related activities during the pandemic, which include everything from watching classic games on TV to following athletes on social media. The results of the survey also showed that 43% of this group claimed to be more loyal to sponsors that are continuing to promote sports during the pandemic compared to just 29% of those older than the age of 29.
The authors of the study highlighted that through sports sponsorships, the digital developments have created even greater loyalty among younger consumers to the clubs and the brands sponsoring the teams they love. With the absence of live sports digital content had the chance to step in spotlight ad show it’s magic, and those who adopted and continuously do so in this area, can earn permanent competitive advantage on the market.
WHAT REALLY BRINGS VALUE FOR THE SPONSORS: FAN-GENERATED, MODERATED, BRANDED SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT
The above facts are underlining that in order to keep revenue streams and cash flow alive, creative digital campaigns are crucial for right holders. With Seyu, clubs can expand their marketing portfolio with 8 additional commercial platforms, directly reaching fans in front of their TVs home or in pubs. Seyu partners can tailor their sponsorship strategies based on analytical reports (including ROI analysis) that we deliver for them by extracting information from fan selfies such as the popularity of merchandise, consumer behavior or even supporter chants likeability.
“If a fan can be involved through a selfie in the stadium wearing the new jersey of his/her beloved team, the marketing message gets more attention”
In the same time Seyu takes the risk out of user generated content (UGC) for sport industry partners and allows them to share moderated, high-engaging, fan-generated, branded social media content on their platforms.
BUNDLED OFFERS, CREATIVE SOLUTIONS WILL DRIVE THE MARKET IN THE NEW SEASON
Building on data and remote fan involvement will be especially important when introducing the new kits, as if matches behind closed doors will remain for the start of the season, the festive mood will be absent, and the demand for jerseys offering significant revenue may decrease. If, however, a fan can be involved through a selfie in the stadium wearing the new jersey of his/her beloved team, the marketing message gets more attention, sales numbers turn out better, and the club will able to bring real business value for one of their main partner, the kit manufacturer too.
DEVELOPING EMOTIONAL CONNECTION BETWEEN THE SPONSORS AND FANS
Another important aspect of Seyu’s service is that partners can display sponsor content throughout our service, accompanying fans every step of the way during the real-time euphoric, emotional experience of being displayed on the LED screens in front of their favourite stars around the world. The emotional bond that the fans unconsciously develop with the brands that provided them the experience of their lifetime, could hardly be matched by any other currently available marketing solution and conducted on a mass-scale like Seyu does.
Thanks to the emotions that supporters have with their photos, Seyu selfies deliver extraordinary organic social media engagement and reach. Our study shows that our fan photos deliver an average 320% more engagement than any other photos shared from the same sport event. These studies also provided us with the insights that 22k Seyu selfies generated 130k engagement in 18 months, thanks to which our partners reached an additional 2.6 million consumers via our channel on the Hungarian market.
