Shut Your Laptop List: If you're not "watching" sports, what're you doing?!?
If you’ve ever worked in communications, you know there’s always some email you get on a Friday that threatens your ability to shut your laptop and transition into your weekend with peace of mind. Every week, we plan to bring you an email to counteract that. While we can’t save you from every source of weekend angst, the Shut Your Laptop List should help you go into your weekly respite feeling smarter, inspired or (if we’re really killing it) chuckling a little. Let’s go.
Sports is having a moment. Ummmm. More like sports is having a decade. Scratch that. Sports is having a friggin’ half century. In the United States, being a fan of particular teams, for some, is like a religion. In many parts of the world, following a team implicitly represents part of one’s identity.
Summer 2024 so far is one of the most jam-packed periods of international sport in a while, and it’s only getting more frenetic through the fall. While teams from India and Pakistan just descended on Long Island to battle it out in a cricket tournament — the second most popular sport in the world — Europe is in the midst of the Euros soccer championship as the COPA America soccer tournament is just getting underway in the U.S. this week. And we’re just weeks away from the U.S. Open tennis tourney in addition to the 2024 Olympics.
Issalot.
Over the past 50 years, substantial commercial enterprises have risen up around the most popular players, teams, leagues and tournaments in the world. It’s no understatement that some leagues’ revenues rival the economies of many countries. Major Olympic sponsors are shelling out in excess of $100 million just for the rights to use the iconic rings in their marketing campaigns throughout the summer. That’s before purchasing airtime across NBCUniversal’s linear, streaming and digital surfaces.
The media business is entering a significant turning point due to sports’ supreme popularity. It’s become perhaps the most reliable way to ensure reach into a stable audience to whom ads can be sold. And consumer brands (plus some B2Bs) are beyond eager to tout their presence on the national or international stage…be it through slapping their name on a stadium, on a team jersey or on a player’s social media accounts.
So if you’re in brand marketing or just thinking through how the landscape’s changing, here’s the topline:
Sports are valuable enough to ruin entire careers
The turmoil that Warner Brothers Discovery finds itself in with its NBA rights at this moment is only perplexing if you don’t understand the value that sports command for broadcasters and marketers alike. The long and short of it is that WBD got too complacent — having held rights to show NBA games since the 1980s and shaped a huge franchise around the league — and the NBA decided it could create new streams of revenue by diversifying how its rights are spread among distributors. Suffice to say this could have a huge impact on hundreds of jobs at the TNT network. Charles Barkley could tell you better than we could how the fail is affecting morale at TNT. With WBD’s future with pro basketball unknown, the WSJ reports that the league is closing in on a deal with Disney (owner of ESPN), NBC and Amazon that could be worth $76 billion. And Barkley claims this'll be his trigger to retire from broadcasting altogether.
Streamers are no longer waiting their turn
Netflix has been tiptoeing around integrating live sports into its platform for the past few years. 2024 is the year the company goes beyond sports-related reality shows to really pull the trigger. They’re starting small(ish) with golf and that ridiculous boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.
But Netflix’s more front-foot stance on sports only portends way bigger sports ambitions across the streaming space. After all, Amazon is the streamer shaking up the NBA negotiations. And Apple picked up a 10-year streaming deal for MLS early last year.
Marketers need to get in or get left behind
Clearly, a nine-figure budget is not in the cards for every company or cause. And you will NEVER want to try to hijack those Olympic rings for an on-the-low marketing campaign. The IOC is always watching and they’re litigious AF. But that does not mean that the surging interest and cost-of-entry to play in the sports arena is out of reach. In fact, that means brands should be getting more creative to figure out where they fit into a sports dialogue, if at all. And sometimes, that’ll involve big dollars to sponsor an Olympian on the world stage, and other times it’ll involve creative explorations into emerging realms of sport. Some brands right now are doing super-interesting things to tie into the growing landscape of women’s sports, refugee athletes (i.e., the Nike campaign we recently called out), new leagues that are being set up to appeal to consumer demand and more. If you need some initial data and insights to start thinking through a partnership, sponsorship or other activation related to sports, here’s a resource that might get your creativity flowing.
The playing field (shitty pun) is only going to get more crowded from here, with sports continuing to hold the interest of people worldwide and other modes of marketing getting "squishier" in efficacy. While league bosses are generally staying out of the fray on social issues and advocacy, athletes, many coaches and some owners are now entering that arena too, which can bode well for meaningful partnerships.
