Digital Media Cafe Blog Featuring Eurosport, Wimbledon & England 2015 – David Granger

June 18, 2014

In this week’s iSportconnect Digital Café blog we take a look at how tennis is serving up even more coverage of this year’s Wimbledon online, how rugby is using data to boost its digital strategy and, of course, we’ll have some football.

Just Can’t Get Enough? Eurosport’s World Cup Coverage

We start with a look at perhaps the most comprehensive and extensive coverage of the action from Rio.

Because, if you’re looking for indepth, extensive but still entertaining coverage of the World Cup, then you need to head over to eurosport.com.
The premise is that the site is a single destination for all fans. Not just to get the latest news, results and see what’s coming up, but also share their passion – and frustration. And it’s all available over PC, tablet and mobile. And there’s also a lot available, in a lot of languages.

The mainstay is a live hub which collates and aggregates content both produced by the Eurosport team and curated from Twitter, Instagram and indeed various other websites.

And, just to make sure fans don’t miss anything there are pages dedicated to the teams, groups, players and even stadia.

If you’re in the UK, German, Italy or Spain then you’ll also get the benefit of Chelsea manager José Mourinho’s insights via Europsort Yahoo! throughout the whole event.

Interestingly Eurosport have also launched companion websites to keep the most football hungry of fans satisfied. The “Data World Cup” is an innovative DataVizualisation project using a massive statistics database to compare teams, analyse players and enhance predictions. The “Best 11” gives supporters the chance to create, personalise and then share their dream World Cup squad, while “Work Cup” brings the traditional office sweepstake crashing into the 21stCentury as it allows teams to compete head to head at work and – brilliantly – challenge other companies.

Rugby’s Conversion to Data And Digital

Football is not the only World Cup in the spotlight at the moment. There are less than 500 days before the Rugby World Cup returns to the UK. And for the 2015 tournament the marketing is all about two things: digital and data. England Rugby 2015’s Marketing Manager, Zarah Al-Kudcy has said that Rugby World Cup 2015 is one of Britain’s most successfully hosted sporting events and that it provides a legacy for future sporting events in the UK and developing a strong digital and data communications strategy has put us on the right track to achieve key objectives in advance of the Tournament such as increasing the game’s appeal at all levels, making it the best Rugby World Cup ever and to achieve record ticket sales. Zarah will be a keynote speaker at this year’s Sports CRM Summit in Birmingham between September 18 and October 31.

Real-time Service: Wimbledon Highlights Online

Tennis fans around the world will be able to get shortform video highlights from Wimbledon via social media channels when the tournament starts on June 23. The All England Lawn Tennis Club will be complementing its global TV broadcast with real-time highlights across Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter thanks to technology developed by Grabyo. It will also distribute longer form highlights from each day on Wimbledon.com and on YouTube. It will be interesting to see the take up as this is the first time a major sports rights holder has delivered real-time video highlights to a global audience across multiple social platforms.

Athletes Getting It Right: Joey Barton

The Queens Park Ranger player has demonstrated an appreciation of the power of social media over several seasons now. He doesn’t hold back, a bit like his playing style on the pitch, but whether you agree or not with his assessment of everyone to former players to multi-millionaire businessmen, his Twitter feed and online spats make for great reading.


Having spent eight seasons in Formula One managing the digital channels for world champions Red Bull Racing, David Granger now runs Fact 51, a social and digital content agency.

David’s isportconnect-profile-widget

{jcomments on}