Sports Leagues Are Creating Digital Experiences for Fans

Key Insights:In a pandemic, tracking ROI isn't an exact science, so marketers need to get creative.Brands don't always need to buy inventory. Sometimes they can make their own. Minutes into a hockey match between the Las Vegas Knights and the Colorado Avalanche, fans were treated to a special reminder from the stadium’s speakers: Concessions would be all you can eat—as long as fans remembered to stock their fridges. The stunt was a reminder of the bizarre reality facing professional sports leagues during the pandemic. Innovating on the fly and working with brand partners to bring fans into a digital experience is the new normal. With professional football the latest league to kick off its season, the NFL has had plenty of time to pick up a thing or two from its peers in other leagues. Not everything is seamless, though. Shifting the NHL and its marketing partners into the late summer was a “major jigsaw puzzle,” said Keith Wachtel, the NHL’s chief business officer and evp of global partnerships. For example, a brand like Bud Light might have no problem shifting creative from the winter to the summer, but a winter-proof tire brand might. But that didn’t stop the NHL—the first professional league to announce a restart during the Covid-19 pandemic—from signing Little Caesars, Nestlé and digital men's health clinic Roman as new corporate brand partners for the Stanley Cup playoffs. “I think we clearly showed that we were leading the way in a lot of areas of return to play, and the market saw that,” said Wachtel. To replace raucous courtside fans, Michelob Ultra pitched and sold a virtual fan experience to the NBA. Teaming up with Microsoft to host and project nearly 300 fans per game—including celebrity cameos such as Lil Wayne, Scottie Pippen and Shaquille O'Neal—across a digital screen that extended the length of the court, Michelob let lottery-winning fans cheer and jeer digitally during the league’s playoffs in an enclosed campus in Orlando, Fla. While cementing itself as the league's official beer sponsor, the partnership also gave the beer brand an opportunity to target the NBA's younger audience, specifically outside its stronghold in the Southeast. Already, the Ultra Courtside experience has racked up nearly 10,000 average web visits a day and has earned more than 680 million impressions since July 30, according to Michelob's internal tracking. It's also the third-most-mentioned NBA-related brand on social media. Calling the partnership a "smashing success," Ricardo Marques, vp of marketing for Michelob Ultra, and his team had to act fast when talk of basketball's return began. "Agility, more than ever, is super important. Being able to deal with ambiguity and building with ideas that aren't necessarily fully baked. Being able to live with that is extremely important," said Marques. "We evolved into this new vision." With such an unprecedented season, Marques doesn't know yet whether the virtual experience will be brought back next season. In fact, with the league's pause and restart, tracking the return on investment for a partnership is trickier than ever. “Even in a normal year, calculating ROI is sort of the holy grail for every brand, and nobody has mastered it," said Matt Balvanz, svp of analytics at Navigate, a sports marketing consultancy. "It's such a crapshoot right now; we'll have to almost figure this out when the seasons expire." While only playing a little more than a third of a normal season, MLB announced a day before the season’s first pitch a partnership with Google Cloud to help run the league’s stat tracking system and a deal with Sony to help fill stadiums with artificial noise. To that effect, the league unveiled an app called Cheer at the Ballpark, which lets fans influence the in-stadium cheers, cues and volume with a team’s scoreboard operator tracking in-app activity in real time. So far, the app’s been a hit, racking up 60 million impressions by the end of August and averaging about 200,000 reactions per game. “We’re not going to have people at the ballpark, so we’ve got to find a way to recreate that experience,” said Chris Marinak, MLB’s evp of strategy, technology and innovation. The app isn’t sponsored yet, although Marinak jokes that because of its success, the league could explore the opportunity. “It just came together organically last minute as we were getting ready for the season. We were focused first on creating something unique for fans rather than something that’s attractive to a sponsor,” he said. Going Digital Still Brings Fan Engagement With several NFL teams announcing that they won’t be welcoming fans into their stadiums, the league is still “full steam ahead” with its plans to play through the entire season, Covid be damned. Anheuser-Busch has been in “constant communication” with the league, according to vp of sponsorships Nick Kelly. “We’ve already established a plan to activate our sponsorships with today’s challenges in mind,” he told Adweek in July. In April, only a month after the first onset of the pandemic in the U.S., the NFL took its entire annual draft virtual, inviting fans into the basements and living rooms of the league's coaches and top prospects, and brands leapt at the opportunity. Verizon provided the internet service, and Bose sent headphones to team leadership. While Courtyard by Marriott had to step out of the sponsorship, Lowe's stepped in to become the draft's presenting sponsor. In the end, more than 8.4 million viewers watched the virtual draft, up 35% from the previous year, making it the league's most-viewed offseason event.

Sports Marketing News

Sports Leagues Are Teaming Up With Brands to Bring Digital Experiences to Fans

It's all part of adjusting to 'the new normal'

Ryan Barwick

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Ryan Barwick