Not All Attention Is Created Equal – Especially In Sports

If you’ve spent enough time working in advertising, you know that a few things are true about marketing to live sports audiences. One, fans are passionate, and they’re paying attention in a way that’s the envy of brands. But on the other hand, they’re not there for the brands – they’re there for the game, the race, or the team. Addressing that tension was the subject of one of Infillion’s panels at Cannes Lions, “Winning Attention From Stadium To Screen,” moderated by Andrew Dawson, SVP of Client Partnerships.

“Sports are emotion,” Dawson said. “They’re unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen – that’s the beauty of it.”

But that attention is unpredictable too, and it gets even more complicated when you consider that fan attention isn’t the same across every sport. What happens when a game that was supposed to be thrilling gets dull, or a team’s performance starts to lag over the course of a season? Those are the questions that the Cannes panel tackled.

“What will not be surprising to anyone is that live sports are one of the highest quality, highest quality attention places for a brand to advertise, especially at scale, and the data is borne out by that,” said Jordan Weiers, senior director of partnerships and business development at attention metrics company Adelaide. (Infillion announced a partnership with Adelaide during Cannes, bringing its AU metric to our TrueX and IDVx interactive ads.)

Weiers had also dug into a key fact: Some sports score higher on Adelaide’s scale than others, and even within those sports, attention levels can dip if something changes. “Perhaps unsurprisingly the two sports that have the highest attention that we found were WNBA and also the Premier League, which I guess is probably not surprising given the cultural impact that we’ve seen…I know at one point when Caitlin Clark was injured, the Nielsen ratings went down.”

Rising sports, fresh opportunities
The WNBA and Premier League aren’t just top attention-grabbers – they’re also both sports leagues that would not have been considered fully mainstream among U.S. audiences a decade ago. There’s also MMA, F1, arena golf, and more… all presenting new but potentially risky opportunities for brands because it’s uncharted territory.

“You have to be thinking of the audiences of today and the audiences of tomorrow, and I think that’s where some of the up and coming live sports environments can be really interesting,” said Kalli Chapman, VP and head of paid media at Prudential, discussing the company’s strategy across both longstanding competitions like the Rose Bowl and rising sports. “It really just depends on the outcomes you’re trying to drive and the role that it can play in the portfolio. I don’t think there’s many brands that would still shy away from something that’s up and coming.”

Jordan Pories, creative director at Coinbase, talked about how the company recently started sponsoring the Formula 1 Aston Martin team, and said that what’s most important is to make sure you’re all-in – because the fans are. “What’s important “is treating it and acknowledging it [like] ‘this is our Super Bowl,’ he said. “These outsize [opportunities] when you’re getting a lot for a little, you’re also getting them to be a fan of you…Treat it like it’s as big as everything else.”

Why audience fragmentation can be a secret weapon
One thing that might concern some marketers about the rise of “new” sports is that, simultaneously, there are fewer big sports events that just about everyone watches. The common wisdom is that the Super Bowl is the last one left, which is the rationale behind why the cost of advertising at the Big Game seems to be getting ever more stratospheric.

“We hear [about] media fragmentation so much, but as marketers we also want choice, so do you want choice or do you just want the same thing that you’re going to buy over and over again?” said Jeremy Cornfeldt, president of agency Tinuiti, which worked with Infillion last year to bring an augmented reality experience for Liquid I.V. to both major and minor league baseball stadiums.

“There’s no one normal person out there,” Coinbase’s Jordan Pories said. “If you’re not being weird and you’re not trying to fragment I think you’re making a mistake.”

One key detail here is that that fragmentation can apply to the same sport or the same game, but across platforms or devices. Cynthia Clevenger, SVP of B2B marketing at Tubi, related how this means that marketers need to even think differently about the Super Bowl.

“We simulcast the Super Bowl this year – the most streamed Super Bowl ever – but it was a very different audience that we had on this platform,” she said. “It was an audience that was there for much more casual viewing, maybe for the commercials, and maybe they were at work and watching it on their phone.” But then viewership spiked, she said, when Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance came on.

That’s a key lesson: Fragmentation across platforms means that sports events can be watched by audiences that might not have been able to tune in otherwise or might be interested in cultural moments more so than the game itself. This gives advertisers fresh opportunities to reach those audiences – and get better insights about them in turn. “I think fragmentation can be a gift,” Clevenger said. “I think it helps you understand the consumer much much better. Cross screen technologies, cross platform technologies; being able to see that gives you so much more insight.”

These insights and new technologies also mean that you as a brand can keep up the dialogue with fans post-game, which Liquid I.V. did when it used Infillion’s geofencing technology to retarget fans on streaming platforms in the two weeks after the game.

“There are so many different places where you could be advertising, especially when you’re looking at reach,” Adelaide’s Jordan Weiers said.

So, while platforms and audiences may be fragmented, new technology makes it easier than ever to not just reach individual fans, but to continue reaching them. That’s something not even the most iconic Super Bowl ads of the ‘90s could do.

Brands can’t be fairweather fans
The panel was in resounding agreement on the fact that brands won’t capture sports fans’ attention if those fans feel like the brand is being forced on them, or if the brand’s commitment to the sport or the team wavers when things aren’t going well. A brand that wants to reach fans should stick around like one.

“What we try to encourage our clients to do is not overthink it too much,” Tinuiti’s Jeremy Cornfeldt said. “There’s drama in it. Embrace the drama…You’re still going to get that viewership, people are still going to be tuned in, they’re still going to be emotional, and if you can tap into that in some way, shape, or form that’s still going to benefit the brand at the end of the day.”

“It’s not just about the sport, but about the fandom around it,” Tubi’s Cynthia Clevenger said.

“The worst thing you can do is do your job too well and forget to be a fan,” said Coinbase’s Jordan Pories. “You have to be there, winning and losing.”

Want more insights? Infillion did a deep dive on how sports fans are changing and how it can boost your brand’s strategy. Download it here.