How One Company Streamlines Reaching Regional Sports Networks' Coveted Live Audiences

Even as cable providers slowly cut ties with regional sports networks, RSNs are still prized by advertisers because they offer something few forms of media still can in 2022: Regular exposure to live highly-engaged, local audiences. Home Team Sports, a division of Playfly Sports, aggregates inventory for every RSN in the country and its platform lets advertisers purchase media for every MLB, NHL and NBA game, as well as Big Ten and Pac-12 games. Playfly Sports is a leader in the high school, college and professional sports multimedia rights space. Its divisions offer esports services, sponsorship sales representation, digital content creation and more. In recent years, RSNs have faced an existential threat with the rise of streaming and waning viewership, leading some distributors to sever partnerships with networks. Despite this, Home Team Sports' revenue and upfront spend are on the rise—even after a fraught 2020 sports season—indicating that advertising spend on RSNs could be impervious to distribution struggles (at least for now). One national buy for a local audience To connect with regional audiences, brands typically would need to buy sponsorships on an individual basis on each RSN. Home Team Sports obviates this by making it possible to make one national buy across regional networks. In the past 10 years, the company has sold single market, multi-market and national (network) ad spots. The Home Team Sports model allows advertisers to buy a New York audience watching a Knicks game, a Philadelphia audience watching the Sixers or a Chicago audience watching the Bulls, said Michael Schreiber, founder and CEO at Playfly Sports. Playfly Sports acquired Home Team Sports, which was previously a Fox Sports division, in March 2021. “We’ve been able to propel local sports to record levels of advertising at the same time as the regional marketplace is seeing distribution struggles with some of the regional sports networks or seeing flat-ish to down ratings in certain categories. We’re actually seeing significant growth in advertiser interest because of this passion fan interest,” said Schreiber. TV providers like Comcast or Dish are increasingly dropping and devaluing regional sports networks because they're expensive to include in channel lineups Last year, Comcast dropped Madison Square Garden Network (MSG), resulting in audiences in New Jersey and Connecticut losing access to Knicks and Rangers games. Comcast's Xfinity said in a statement that “95% of all customers who received MSG over the past year did not watch more than 10 of the approximately 240 games it broadcast.” Similar issues are plaguing the broader industry. After buying 21 regional sports networks in 2019 for $10.6 billion, Sinclair Broadcast Group later wrote down its purchase by $4.23 billion. In the face of this, Home Team Sports' revenue has steadily increased sharply. It saw just a 2% revenue increase from 2017 to 2018, but the next year, that number catapulted to 17%. “That was the first year of explosive growth from our upfront commitments, when we showed through research and insights how the audiences, who watch their favorite teams night after night on the RSNs, consistently beat prime-time entertainment programming,” Craig Sloan, chief operating officer at Playfly Sports told Adweek. The company's revenue increased 15% from 2019 to 2021, even as the 2020 season sent sports advertising budgets plummeting. "We're going to actually sell out all our [basketball and football] inventory," said Steve Tseng, evp of sales partnerships at Pac-12 Networks, a regional college sports network, noting that linear advertising on the network, much of which Home Team Sports manages, is up at least 10% since 2019. Some of this is due to limited inventory with fewer games, but Tseng says non-linear partnership deals, which are struck at the network level, are also on the rise. New brand partners like Campbell's have recently come to the table. "We would never in the past have had a deal with someone like that," said Tseng. "But they believed in the college space, the West Coast, and the retailer channels out here were really important to them. So we were able to strike a deal where they promoted around football." Closer relationships with agencies Home Team Sports began working with holding companies and agencies to participate in the upfront cycle while the marketplace was recovering. It now works with all of the major agency holding companies, and 84 of the top 100 spending brands are in the company’s portfolio spending on regional sports networks regularly, the company says. “We had to build the reputation that we delivered because we are the only ones set up like this in the business. There are local TV stations—broadcast stations—and there are national single-feed networks, and there’s nothing in between,” said Sloan. The platform allows advertisers to customize creative by market, resulting in a viewer in one region receiving a different ad than a viewer in another which makes it possible for brands to advertise local offers. One of the company’s agency partners, Dentsu, said RSNs are becoming more important for its brands holistically. “Our clients have seen the importance of sports in tentpoles, if you will, on their brand plan. And we look at planning differently. We’re not just planning from a daypart level, or a station level. We're planning with ‘where are the eyeballs going and consistently staying, and are our audiences there?’” said Cara Lewis, chief investment officer at Dentsu International. If Dentsu wants to do a national buy, Home Team Sports will send the agency a plan nationally across all their RSNs. If the agency wants to buy specific RSNs, or a certain number of RSNs, the company supports that, too. “I think it's much easier to be able to do that than to have to go to a bunch of different local stations to buy the inventory you have to buy,” said Lewis. Upfront spend is increasing across categories The company says it’s now the largest aggregator of adults 18 to 49 in prime time. Its broadcast upfront spend increased 40% on the year compared to last year, and its calendar upfront increased 14% in 2022 compared to 2021. This amounted to a combined 36% increase in upfront spending on the year. In the most recent period, sports betting led growth. Between upfront and scatter spending, the category grew 250% from 2020 to 2021 due to expanded state legalization and increased RSN adoption. Home Team Sports expects the growth in this area will continue into 2022. The company has seen growth on the year across several upfront categories including non-endemic advertisers, or those who aren’t traditionally known for sports advertisements. A few of its accounts in the CPG category, for example, experienced 50 to 300% growth in total upfront spend from 2019-2020 to 2021-2022. Clients in its financial category overall saw 90% growth during that period. The quick serve and fast casual client category also experienced 40% growth, due partly to multi-advertisers and multiyear deals, the company said. “That model is what’s growing the business in those regional categories because we’re getting national dollars to come in and [getting] those major blue-chip advertisers like a Walmart, and like an AT&T and an Apple to start spending on those fans,” said Schreiber. Sports Streaming Rights Prove Valuable in Period of Disruption