Wishing a Happy New Year to Seven League's clients and friends

On behalf of everyone at Seven League I would like to wish a very happy and successful 2023 to all of our clients and friends across the global sports industry.

It will be our second full year as IMG Media’s digital agency. When we put digital at the forefront of IMG Media, which was already the world’s most prestigious sports agency, it completed our end-to-end offer, creating a unique service for sports rightsholders.

We’re excited to keep delivering that service to sports teams, leagues and governing bodies the world over.

Seven League’s mission is to be the sports industry’s trusted commercial partner in web2 and its strategic guide to web3.

Everything we do is done with this mission in mind - we’re leading our clients strategically into the next phase of the internet while driving commercial returns for you in the here and now.

Selling more tickets this year than the year before, or having more social media followers, or driving more broadcast viewers, all matter in the here and now. Very much.

However, if that’s all the sports industry thinks about, it will discover in 5 years that the audience is getting irreversibly older and less engaged, while other sectors steal its customers.

That was the thinking behind the message we published way back in 2020 with our Third Age of Sport manifesto. It becomes truer every year.

Being part of IMG enables us to offer the full solution to this challenge - from strategy, to digital transformation, to content and paid, to commercial return. Our digital content studio leverages the very best of IMG’s Stockley Park production hub; our digital commercial service is one and the same with IMG Media’s commercial partnerships team.

IMG itself sits within Endeavor, which enables us to partner with our colleagues from Endeavor Streaming, Endeavor Analytics, 160over90, and much more, to help our clients.

All of which is about us - we prefer to talk about you.

One of the reasons Seven League hasn’t entered agency of the year awards since I became CEO in 2020 is a fundamental belief I have that agencies should be in the background, powering their clients, not on the stage. It’s about you, not us.

It comes from something I learned a decade ago from legendary tech figures like Chloe Sladden and Katie Stanton, when I was leading sports for Twitter. Chloe used to say that Twitter’s global media team should never be on the red carpet, always ‘in the truck’ - whether that meant literally in a production truck at a major event, or wherever else we could help make things work behind the scenes.?

Being part of Twitter’s global media team, assisting behind the scenes to help make things work for sports rightsholders, prepared me for agency life.

It’s also why you will never hear us self-appointing ourselves to reshape the sports industry in our own image. Our role is to deeply understand tech and consumer trends and help the sports industry navigate its way through that rapidly-changing landscape.

Reaching and engaging more audiences, and monetising your digital presence, while preparing you for the second half of the 2020s when consumer behaviours will change faster than ever before.

We support, coach and empower your internal teams - we don’t lock them out and replace them from within.

In order to provide this unique service, we continue to get bigger, better and more diverse at every level of our business.

We promise our clients we will hire carefully. We bring in industry superstars like Bindi Ghai, Sunil Singhvi and Dan Chirwa but we also promote from within - 14 internal promotions in 2022 including up-and-coming talents like Emily Bowe whose individual talents are recognised by the industry.

The care we take in only adding quality, and not being driven by volume of headcount, means that Seven League clients always get the best service in our sector.

We’re well set for the new year and buzzing to get started. We hope you had a chance to read our Digital Trends Report for 2023. We look forward to speaking with all of our clients - existing and new - as early as possible in January, to diagnose what YOUR digital strategy needs to be, and then work alongside you to implement it, and make it a success. It won’t be a cookie-cutter solution - you know that about us.

Tech never stops changing, and therefore sports audiences never stop changing. So we never stop moving. We’re ready to go for 2023 - we know you are too. Happy New Year to you all, and let’s get it.

Lewis.