The seeds of innovation

Today in NYC, there's another sports business conference. As seen by the graphic above, there are quite a few of them each year. Leaders in the industry are determined to chart the future of sport by picking through the different topics and potential areas of disruption as sports' digital transformation accelerates.

As technology changes the sports industry – from how we watch games, how athletes prepare and how leagues are planning for the future – our lineup of top executives will break down the fundamental shifts taking place. - Cynopsis Sports Summit

Where does sweeping industry change occur? In the boardroom? In the R&D lab? At the creative agency? At a conference? 

We rely on conferences and leading market research companies like Gartner, Forrester, Nielsen, and comscore to measure the pace of change and tell us what to do. They measure and tell us how consumer behaviors are bending, which technologies are being purchased, and which vendors and products win and lose. It's certainly telling that Nielsen just doubled down in sports by acquiring measurement company Repucom. Why acquire Repucom now?  As the article points out, the global spend on sports sponsorships has nearly doubled since 2010, increasing from $35bn to $60bn. Live sport represents one of the best ways for marketers to reach their audiences.

At Stattleship, we're preparing for a time when this digital transformation makes social media the undisputed champion for consuming sports content. We know that Facebook, Twitter, and any other future social platform will rely heavily on digital sports content to engage with consumers. And we know fans are eating sports content up.

When platforms like Twitter become a dominant way for sports marketers to reach consumers, they will need quality content and lots of it. When marketers realize they can fill the conversation gaps in the graphic above easily with quality content, they will want lots of it. 

Over the past few weeks, our sports content platform has evolved significantly to take a photo like this one that most publishers use on social media today:

And in real-time apply the correct branding, style, and live sports data to create a shareable social moment like this:

There will be a time in the near future when topics at sports business conferences confront the reality that their big dollar sports sponsors want solutions for social media that scale. They will still care about the number of times their stadium signage is viewed, but they will also care a lot about how many ways their brand message can be shared and measured across social media. Twitter will show us this year how real this demand is. 

Twitter will also sell pre-roll video ads ahead of NFL highlights for all NFL games, not just the Thursday night games, a batch of highlights it sold last year as well. The NFL is giving Twitter 90 highlights per week in 2016, up from 75 in 2015, Derella says. He declined to comment on deal terms for these pre-roll ad packages, but two sources tell Recode that Twitter made about $20 million selling four pre-roll ad packages last year at roughly $5 million a pop.