Different sports, different digital rules

Finding moments of engagement for fans watching live sport

Finding moments of engagement for fans watching live sport

By Katie Wishlade, Partner, Wilson Fletcher

I’m well known for my love of watching, and consequently talking about, sports. Every year I invest probably weeks of life watching sport — I’ll spend most of evenings between Christmas and New Year watching the darts, most Saturdays in February and March watching the Six Nations, most May Bank holidays watching the World Snooker Championships final and am literally glued to the television in the summer months with the tennis, golf, athletics, cricket and Tour de France.

Live sport is one of the few remaining appointment-to-view programmes. Fans build their lives round schedules, and rightly so. Obviously, the thing that is so magical about sport is that it’s live and absolutely nobody knows what is going to happen. It’s simply not the same when you know the result and, even if you have gone to the effort of shielding yourself from the result, the fact that someone else knows spoils the magic. We know from working with BT Sport that this plays out in the data. Only a few fans watch the full match live replay — most just skip to the clips of highlights. What’s the point in a replay when you know what happens?

A lot has been written about the role of data in providing an extra layer of entertainment. I love an interesting fact as much as the next person, but I do wonder whether the role of this entertainment layer during live sport varies depending the characteristics of the sport itself: its duration, intensity and game format. In particular, the importance and role of second screens, split screen and even multi-screen modes can vary greatly.

Cricket, for example, typically goes on for almost a whole day with breaks for lunch and tea. While it can be an incredibly gripping game to watch, the play is fairly intermittent with gaps between balls, overs and innings. Similarly with golf, there are gaps between shots, and there can be a minute or two between snooker shots. The NFL has taken this intermittent nature to a whole new level. The average NFL game lasts 3 hours 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes! That’s supplementing play to the extreme.

Gaps in play are an opportunity for the digital layer to engage the audience.

Of course, these gaps provide plenty of time for advertisements — the average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks, containing more than 100 adverts. However, in addition these gaps also provide a significant opportunity for the digital layer to entertain and engage the audience — whether that be through replays, punditry or data analysis.

On the other hand there are definite occasions when the sport itself is the only entertainment that you need. Short, intensive sports like boxing, football or rugby can provide non-stop entertainment and in these moments the role of digital changes, to simply empower people to enjoy the live experience no matter where they are.

There are other factor that come into play too, such as whether it’s a sport where multiple battles are going on at once. Take Golf, F1 or Moto GP, for example — in these sports the digital experience can allow people to follow favourite players or drivers whilst keeping an eye on the performance of everyone else.

The role of digital experience should be to adapt to the characteristics of sport itself as well as the characteristics of the fans. A key part of this is knowing when to enhance the live experience and when to get out of the way of the fan who’s trying to watch the game.