The NFL’s recent deal with Amazon has been hailed as a watershed moment for a variety of reasons.
The first and most obvious is that the deal covering ten Thursday night games remains without exclusivity as they are already part of a mainstream broadcast deal.
Secondly the amount reported to have been paid by Amazon to stream to it’s 60 million worldwide Prime customers is five times higher than the amount paid by Twitter for the same number of games in 2016.
Third, and perhaps most importantly we understand that the key element in securing the deal was the provision of an additional $30 million in guaranteed promotion of the sport across different channels.
Noisy
Traditional TV audiences are breaking down. Nielsen Sports reported last year that ESPN subscriber numbers were down 15 per cent on their peak of 100 million in 2011. That means that sport, despite strengthening its position as the main ‘gatherer’ of live viewing audiences are having to work harder to retain a share of voice in a massively noisy and crowded marketplace.
In a domestic marketplace both of this weekend’s big Champions’ Cup Rugby semi finals were broadcast exclusively on BT Sport and Sky Sports. So while newspaper and TV radio coverage was dominated by the games fewer people will have likely seen them than would have watched the Allianz Hurling League Final on TG4.
The financial rewards make that a trade off that is seen as worthwhile but the tightrope sport is walking by going down that path is that it will continue to retain its importance in people’s lives even if fewer of them are able to watch live.
It is possible that in taking the big money and focusing on the more die hard fans anyway who will take out an eir Sport or a Sky Sports subscription that they are only losing out on ‘vanity’ numbers of audiences that are merely grazing across sports but are never likely to be first in line for tickets to the RDS, Thomond Park or for the latest kits.
‘Must See’
But still they need to be mindful of keeping a hold on the marquee events being considered ‘must see’ events and that is where the additional promotion commitments come into play as being of value.
We have seen it in Ireland over the past twelve months with Lidl investing heavily in Ladies Football and a major part of their €1.5 million spend being in promoting the sport, and their close association with it across multiple advertising channels.
Similarly Vodafone with it’s Team of Us campaign around the Irish Rugby team have put the sport on billboards and into promotional areas where sport has rarely featured in previous times.
Guinness was credited with keeping hurling alive when it came on board as a partner of the All Ireland Hurling Championship and created iconic advertising images which raised the sport to a different level to that which it had been seen in previously.
Creating the link between sport and brands on the basis of it being a critical asset in their content strategies amplifies the ways in which sport in seen and consumed by the general public.
That’s the way it can stay ahead of the curve in terms of maintaining interest, engaging fans and keeping the ecosystem of sport and how it is funded to the fore.
