5 TAKEAWAYS FROM THE BROADCAST CONTENT SUMMIT

Last week we journeyed up to Manchester’s Media City, home to many of the UK’s biggest broadcasters, to chat about two of our favourite topics - social media and sport!??

After a couple of quick stops to pay homage to Old Trafford and grab a photo-op with the iconic Corrie sign, we landed Sat dock10 studios for the Broadcast Sport Content Summit, hosted by Broadcast editors Jake Bickerton and Max Miller

Packed with sport brand leaders and broadcasters, the summit provided a chance to look at the big media trends that are impacting the world of sport, from a fan, broadcaster and brand standpoint. ?

Here are some of our top takeaways!??

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WhatsApp – social media's best kept secret?

One of the most striking themes which echoed throughout the event was the huge uptick in the use of WhatsApp by sport teams to engage with their fanbases.??

It's no secret that the platform X (Twitter) has fallen out of favour with many brands, which, paired with a lack of anticipated enthusiasm for Instagram’s counter platform Threads, has provided an excellent opportunity for WhatsApp to thrive. ?

WhatsApp’s social platform approach allows users to follow a channel within their app, in which their favourite brands can share video, picture and text updates much like they would on X or Instagram. The added bonuses being there are no character limits, followers can download the content directly for themselves and click on links within the captions?

Matthew Quinn , VP of Media at Liverpool Football Club noted that WhatsApp is now one of the highest referral platforms to Liverpool’s site and has provided a huge opportunity to connect with fans.?

According to the Hootsuite 's 2024 Social Trends report, brands rank WhatsApp as the #3 platform they feel most confident in delivering ROI.??

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Women’s sports audiences are on the rise and vastly under tapped?

“Women’s sports are fashionable right now, but we’re not seeing that translate into investment” - said Ish Kalia , Co-Founder and Creative Director of Vibrant Television. Ish is part of the team behind ‘Big Kick Energy’ - a pod committed to building community around women’s football, hosted by Suzi Ruffell and Maisie Adam. Suzi and Maisie’s approach centres around accessibility – with candid and fun conversations between a die-hard footie fan (Maisie) and someone who’s just finding their feet (Suzi) and isn’t afraid to ask the simple questions that many new fans are afraid to (like...what’s the off-side rule!?). ?

The team leading the way in overturning brands’ reticence to invest in women’s sports are the Women's Sport Trust , who presented an in-depth report showing the huge audience growth figures across broadcast and in-person in the last two years. ?

With research showing record-breaking broadcast reach in 2023, with 46.7m people tuning in to watch women’s sport on linear TV, brands who aren’t ready to get involved are missing out on huge audiences.??

The world of women’s sport also provides in-routes for brands that will likely never have of engaged with the sport sector to reach new audiences. Charlotte Tilbury’s partnership with F1 and Clinique’s Women’s Rugby World Cup campaigns are great examples of this. ?

The future of podcast is visual??

It’s likely that all of us will subscribe to several podcasts, and loyally listen to a few at the same time every week. One of the fantastic things about podcasting is its accessibility, creating one is (fairly) easy. Drawing in an audience however, and then keeping them engaged is much harder. ?

With the proliferation of new podcast content every day diluting the market – leading podcast producers Lucy Lavery of talkSPORT, Francis Kelly of Two Circles, and Ish Kalia of Vibrant Television discussed video and podcast visualisation being the future of podcast success. Lucy Lavery shared that visualisation is in fact the first thing her team thinks about when developing new podcasts. ?

Podcast visualisation not only provides fantastic content for promotional purposes across digital platforms, but also opens up new revenue streams through brand engagement and paid views on platforms such as YouTube.?

We can’t ignore the impact of AI??

Of course, you can’t discuss industry trends these days without touching on AI, and sports broadcasting is a sector that stands to benefit from AI integration. ?

Liverpool Football Club’s Matthew Quinn noted one of the benefits of utilising AI is to allow their creative talent to focus on areas that add more value while automating tasks that don’t. He emphasised the integration of AI not being synonymous with loss of jobs, but instead with the opening of new opportunities to be creative and develop engaging content that can transcend tribal football fanbases. ?

From a digital perspective, Buzz 16’s Scott Melvin commented on the revolutionary aspect of AI to generate vast quantities of social content in minutes but stressed the importance of human involvement in terms of quality control. The need for human input and overview was echoed by Fiona Wood (née Staines) of Little Dot Studios , who mentioned the strength of ChatGPT4 to run data analysis but its inability to pick up context. ?

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The 'cut down for social’ approach is dead – platform-led content is king!??

Our very own sport content aficionado Jon Dyson n took to the stage to discuss the importance of social integration with traditional broadcast platforms to build fan communities and reach sport audiences.??

With many fans using social to keep up with their favourite teams and sport news, often using their phones as a second screen while watching live broadcast games, the discussion turned to how to best create content knowing these audience behaviours. ?

The resounding takeaway – mirroring broadcast content across social is ineffective and the days of distributing the same edit cut down across multiple channels are fast dying.??

With this knowledge in hand, brands should be considering how to produce platform-led content that is complimentary to that of broadcast, offering their audiences a different way to engage with the game, their fan community and the conversation. ?

Jon comments, “when we develop multi-platform campaigns for social that hinge on a central piece of content, such as a YouTube series, it’s important to remember that we aren’t just creating cut downs for Tik Tok or Instagram to push viewers back to YouTube. We’re creating audience-led and platform-specific content for each channel in order to keep audiences on that platform.”??

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If you’re interested in hearing more about Formidable’s work helping top sport brands, broadcasters and teams connect with culture, get in touch via [email protected]??

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