Sports Marketing Today: Clues from the 1920s

I recently attended the Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit and left with a couple of interesting observations.

While the headline partner, the Nine Network presented “The Neuroscience and Strategy of Engaging Fans” on the main stage, I chose to attend the session led by Liam Daly from Shout Collective on the “B stage” instead. And I’m glad I did. The springboard for his talk, “Rethink Sports Partnerships Beyond the Live Window” was a simple statistic: 62% of sports fans under the age of 40 spend their time consuming sport outside the live window. Despite this, a disproportionate percentage of advertising investment occurs during the live game. His point: reaching and connecting deeply with this now highly lucrative segment can be achieved at different times and through different media, especially via podcasting.

Image by Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit, Liam Daly, Dylan Buckley.

The conversation around sport has always been important to sports fans; it helps elevate a pastime to a passion. Traditional media has long recognised this, from sports-talk radio, to panel-TV, to the back pages of the paper. However none of those formats has had the power to go as deep as podcasts, or as big as long-form docudramas like Drive to Survive or The Last Dance. These two new sports-marketing channels are driving spectacular fan (and in some cases, non-fan) engagement. The recent shift in attendee numbers and demographics at various Grands Prix and the explosion in popularity of the NBA are testament to this.

While a Netflix series has incredible power to captivate and entertain, podcasts have a unique power to stimulate the mind and drive action. Our time at A-W developing the advertising for The Australian’s internationally acclaimed podcast, The Teacher’s Pet, really drove this point home. Good podcasts are mentally nourishing; they go deep. When listened to rather than watched, they capitalise on the theatre of the mind in a way radio hasn’t since the days of serials like Blue Hills. In many ways, these new formats are capitalising on conventions of the oldest electronic media, with soap operas (so named in the 1920s for their FMCG sponsors) creating loyalty in fans that sometimes spanned decades. Listeners formed relationships with these characters; there’s an intimacy in listening to voices, particularly through headphones, that simulates a kind of dialogue, an active listening experience. It’s why the reader of your Audible book is often as important as what is written.

It should come as no surprise that 75% of today’s 18-29 year olds say podcasters are more influential than social influencers. This is, in large part, reflective of trust, and that trust is built on the credibility of the presenter and the quality of the content. The challenge for brands wishing to attach to that credibility and quality is to do so without compromising either. Liam demonstrated a couple of excellent examples of this (from McDonalds and Mitsubishi), but he was clear to point out that this is a difficult and important balance to strike. I would like to think that brands wishing to engage younger sports fans outside the live window are up for the challenge and that we will see more high-quality integration to the benefit of all parties, ensuring quality content continues to thrive. Lest we all just pile in with a bunch of lazy content and kill the golden goose.

My Top 3 Deep Podcasts: