January 22 – Digital sports consultancy Seven League has released the third annual edition of its ‘seven key trends’ report that focuses on key areas of impact it expects to see in the digital sports landscape in 2021.
The report covers a number of topics within digital and the wider sports marketing discipline, including social commerce, broadcast re-versioning, and clubs going D2C.
In his foreword Lewis Wiltshire, CEO of Seven League and Mailman EMEA said: “We have seen several years of digital transformation squashed into just a few month. Every conversations that would have been about broadcast was now about streaming. Every conversation that would have been about membership was now about digital membership. And so it continued.
“Whilst many sectors turned to digital platforms to reach their audiences, those platforms were also rushing to provide new product features as the world moved online. It will be a combination of all these factors that shapes consumer habits on digital in the next 12 months.”
The seven key (edited) trends the report identifies are:
1. WE ALL WATCH TOGETHER: Will fans watch sports videos socially or keep it to the second scree? A look at a year where we discover if fans actually want to watch sports videos socially, or if they prefer to keep this behaviour to the second screen. Does the tech and usability work? Is the content worth co-watching? Are my friends watching?
2. SPORT ADOPTS SOCIAL COMMERCE: Ecommerce will be part of a wider digital transformation journey. It requires a different set of skills to those within most sports organisations. It will be critical to curate a set of product offerings that fans genuinely want.
3. BROADCAST RE-VERSIONING: We will see more watch-along formats and versioning of live events as rights holders try to make their products more relevant to key demographics.
4. CLUBS GO D2C: Clubs will seek to carve out new forms of value, distinct from existing ticketing or membership models. They will experiment with different price tiers for international fans.
5. THE RISE OF AUDIO: There has been an explosion of technology that supports live interactive events, group chat and simply ‘hanging out’ together. We expect sports organisations to adopt text-to-speech.
6. THE GREAT FLATTENING: We will continue to see the established platforms looking more and more like one. Sports organisations may choose to leave particular platforms after evaluating the returns they are getting for the investment in each.
7. THE ERA OF THE MODERATOR: To make fan communities a success, skilled moderators will need both to encourage communication and engagement as well as ensuring that all communications and content in the community are appropriate.
Click here to see the full report.
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