The world of sports is preparing for the future

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On the third day 2017-04-06 of SportAccord convention, the second part of the plenary conference on Innovation in action was held. The conference ended with a short presentation on the future of technology by Craig Howe, CEO & Founder, Rebel Ventures. 

The goal of Craig Howes company is to change the digital from cost to revenue for the sports industry. He used a simple analogy to explain the current status of technology in today’s world. The world is a mobile planet with 66% of all digital consumption happening on mobile phones. App’s are the dominant species, because 90% of the time on mobile is spent in apps. Social apps are on top of the food chain as proven by the fact that 35% of all time-spent on mobile-apps is social. Of these social app’s Facebook is the king. Recently video has been taking over the world of mobile. User-shared videos on Snapchat and Facebook have been growing fast. 

Technology is always changing. Television has been evolving from being a live-event into on-demand and real-live content. Today everybody can be a broadcaster. People don’t even watch TV anymore; they watch their cell phones. Today technology has become a race for time spent online, with the biggest contenders being Facebook against YouTube. Currently people spent an average of 21 min per visit on Facebook, but 40 minutes on YouTube.

To get success with digital marketing, companies should give their fans a reason to follow them across different channels. Storytelling in sports needs to be redefined. Different content should be produced on different channels like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube.  People underestimate the time it takes to keep track of online content. Companies should take their time to develop a viable strategy that makes sense for the company,

Craig Howe’s talk was followed by a panel on Technology – Friend or Foe moderated by Charmaine Crooks C.M., Five-time Olympian, and President, NGU Consultants Inc.. Panel speakers included Jay Balmer, Co-Founder & COO, Session Games, Inc., Mariel de Haan, Head of Digital & Managing Director, Penceo, Roham Gharegozlou, Founder & Managing Partner, Axiom Zen and Craig Howe. The panel discussed the threats and problems by letting technology dictate the direction of sports. How can we best exploit the technological change without letting it dictate and take over the world of sports?

Mariel pointed out that most sports companies don’t understand the media and are not aware of the time spent creating proper and strategic content for virtual platforms. Roham added that sport always has been creating some of the best entertainment content and still is, but they are not harnessing this in their social media strategy. 

”Cat videos are more popular than sport”, he laughed. 

Jay mentioned that social media is not just used as a platform for content creation and sharing. The world of sports is also benefitting from technology through the opportunities for better organisation. Private consumers can through apps and platforms organise their own sport endeavours. Content creation is even about letting the consumers share their own experiences with the professional organisations through their self-produced video clips. 

Regarding the content created, it should not only be about the live-events themselves, but the experience surrounding these. It’s about enhancing the experience of sport-consumption. Let consumers be a part of the athlete’s life, when they train, when they cook and so on. 

Jay draws on his experience from the big data he collects from his company’s mobile games. They try to create games that keep sessions short, so that people don’t get bored and keep returning for more. He wonders whether this could be used in sports, creating short videos that makes fans come back for more content. 

One of the biggest problems of technology is the security risk. What if somebody hack into your database and steal all your collected data? The best companies can do is to hire a security-expert to protect their virtual technology. A lot of Sport companies are still a bit conservative in the way they share their content. They still believe that their products should only be available if people pay. In today’s virtual world free content can lead to revenue if used in the proper way. If sports companies embrace the new advances of technology, they might strengthen the sport industry. As Jay said in the end of the panel, it might be time for the world of sport to get some new friends.