Fox Sports Rushes the Web

Fox Sports chairman David Hill believes the Internet is following the same evolutionary pattern as television. “When TV was in its infancy, it was basically run by the engineers,” says Hill. “Technology innovations were driving it, until finally the programmers began to take over. And that’s when television took off.”Hill believes that for the past 10 years or so online media—particularly sports sites—have been overly controlled by techies, or engineers, as he calls them. And because the programming executives have for the most part gone along with this, just about every sports Web site looks the same or offers the same basic content and design.“All of these sites, including our own, are dominated by highlights of games from the night before and interviews of players talking about games that already happened,” Hill says. “Everything is past tense.” And most of the sports sites feature a preponderance of sportswriters, rather than television sports commentators, he adds.While these sites do have some prognosticators who, via video, are discussing future games or longer-term trends, Hill believes there should be more cross-pollination of TV sports commentators on FoxSports.com. He also wants to inject a little more irreverence into the commentary to offer viewers a distinct destination.In April, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch authorized moving FoxSports.com from under the Fox Interactive Media umbrella to Fox Broadcasting Group, and gave Hill oversight of the overhaul of its look and functionality. (The move predates last week’s news of cutbacks at FIM and its subsidiaries.)Hill is now putting together a plan to evolve it to reach more users and offer greatly expanded original programming. And he plans to immediately target men at work, who, research indicates, are viewing sports sites heavily during the workday. According to Media Metrix, 76 percent of users visiting sports sites do so during work hours. Fox’s own internal audience measurement data appears to confirm that 50 percent of FoxSports.com’s audience visits during lunch breaks.Hill may not be a tech guru, but since taking charge of Fox Sports 15 years ago, he has made numerous changes to the network’s on-air sports telecasts. He introduced the Fox Box on NFL telecasts, the onscreen constant score and clock graphic with real-time stats fed into it directly from the stadium scoreboards. He instituted surround sound audio and an audio mixer that can open and close field mikes wherever the play is. And for baseball telecasts, he introduced the diamond and catcher cams.While the revamp of the site and its content production will primarily be done in-house, Fox is expected to invest several million dollars in the project, according to sources familiar with the initiative. No one at Fox would comment on that number.But the changes do have Murdoch’s blessing. and Hill, a fellow Aussie who Murdoch brought in to run Fox Sports when it was created in 1994, has broad license on the tweaks he believes will draw more users.“We’ve made several strategic changes in our digital businesses recently, one of which was to return responsibility of FoxSports.com to the network it represents,” Murdoch says. “David has consistently demonstrated his creativity and innovation through his career at News Corp. I’m confident that his determination and resourcefulness will give FoxSports.com a fresh, dynamic look.”FoxSports.com is already one of the top online sports destinations, according to Nielsen Online, averaging about 13 million unique users a month, second only to ESPN.com (which averages 20 million unique monthly users) among TV network-affiliated sports sites.“FoxSports.com is not broken,” Hill points out. “We are in a good place right now. But we need to bring more innovation to the site. Right now, most content on sports sites is past tense. We want to make it more forward thinking.”Currently, while just about all of the Fox Sports Nascar commentators do video reports on the site during the racing season, the only other Fox Sports TV reporters doing extensive online video are Ken Rosenthal, who is a field reporter for Fox baseball telecasts, and Jay Glazer, a former New York Post columnist and now senior National Football League writer for FoxSports.com (he also appears weekly on Fox NFL Sunday as the network’s NFL Insider).While most of Hill’s ideas are currently in the development stage, he is already touting one show he wants to produce for FoxSports.com, involving former NFL star Tony Siragusa, who is a sideline reporter on Fox’s Sunday NFL telecasts. A 12-year NFL veteran, Siragusa, nicknamed “The Goose,” has the type of boisterous personality that Hill thinks will stir up football fans. “Tony Siragusa will become an Internet star,” predicts Hill.But Siragusa is not the only on-air personality Hill wants in heavy rotation on Fox-Sports.com. “We have some good people floating around here,” he says. “There are no rules for the Internet. The possibilities are endless.”Hill is pondering the production of an online show with his Fox NFL Sunday studio team of Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson. “Their preproduction meetings could be taped and shown,” Hill says. “They are hilarious.” He could also team up on-air commentator Daryl Johnson, a former Dallas Cowboys running back, nicknamed Moose, with Siragusa the Goose. And Hill says former Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick, currently a commentator on Fox Sports game telecasts, is also in his sights to do some type of show online (even though Billick does not have a nickname ending in “oose”). FoxSports.com currently offers about four hours of original video per day, a scale that Hill hopes to dramatically expand. Once his on-air talent is entrenched on the FoxSports site, Hill plans to slot promotional spots on each of the Fox Sports TV telecasts to alert viewers of the online programming and drive them to the site. Hill says he hopes to also beef up the fantasy sports area and “down the road” wants to offer more video coverage of sports at every level, including high school.Clearly most of the programming Hill and his Fox Sports production team creates will target male users, which make up 63 percent of the FoxSports.com audience. But there is also a need find a way to get more users to visit the site regularly. Per a Quantcast audience profile of FoxSports.com users, 41 percent are regular users, while 58 percent are passersby. That compares to ESPN.com, which has 47 percent regular users and 49 percent passersby.Jeff Husvar, general manager of Fox Sports Interactive, now under the supervision of Hill, has witnessed up close Hill’s guiding hand. “We’ve discussed more ideas in the past 30 days for improving the site than we did in the past year,” he says. “And David also brings us more access to the sports leagues because of his relationships with the various commissioners through Fox Sports. And that access is important.”Husvar said the site redesign will roll out beginning in September, in conjunction with the start of the National Football League’s regular season. “We are going to introduce the redesigned home page first, with some new features and then roll out the other templates,” says Husvar. “Our goal from the technical side is to make the site easier to navigate.”Hill says the entire redesign and inclusion of new video content could take up to a year to be fully implemented.On July 1, FoxSports.com will launch a revamped community platform, changes that were in the works prior to Hill taking oversight. The platform will offer improved functionality on existing features that make it easier to find, connect and share with other sports fans. Updated blogs, message boards, personal photo galleries, member-uploaded videos, groups, user profiles and status updates—similar to those currently offered by popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace—are also part of the retooled functionality. The platform will also offer connection features with the ability to allow users to search for friends on other social networks.While Hill will concentrate on programming, Husvar will oversee the site’s ad sales efforts. “Our goal is to better align the digital and broadcast sales teams over a period of time so they can more effectively sell inventory across both platforms,” he says. “To begin offering online content more closely tied into the broadcast side and its talent is a huge opportunity.”Right now, Husvar says, only about 15 percent of overall digital ad sales for FoxSports.com comes from integrated digital/broadcast packages. But he says the site’s digital sales staffers have already begun making calls with Fox Sports broadcast sales people.Husvar says Sprint is currently the largest advertiser on FoxSports.com and Fox mobile. Other major advertisers on the site include Ford, General Motors, Toyota and Nissan, as well as insurance companies Allstate and State Farm, along with several movie, fast-food and telco clients. The site also recently did a $1 million ad deal with Hooters that involves not only ads on the Web site but also in-store promotions.While media agencies have yet to be formally pitched on the revamp and proposed content expansion, interactive buyers are open to the cross-platform possibilities. “I think David is right that most sports Web sites at their core are the same,” says Michael Hayes, executive vp and managing director of digital for Initiative. “What can separate them is the video commentary they offer. If they can create polished video content, this is certainly something our clients would consider sponsoring.” Among Initiative’s online clients are Hyundai/Kia, The Home Depot, Dr Pepper, Bayer and Lionsgate.The quality of Hill’s new Web programming will be a key factor for advertisers looking for a place to park dollars online. “Fox Sports is good at producing content so leveraging with the Web site makes sense,” says Jon Hsia, digital director at MediaVest. “The more quality content a site can produce, the more attractive it will be.” Andy Chapman, managing director of Mindshare’s interactive buying unit, says offering viewers more information that can’t be squeezed into a sports telecast is always a plus. “Any of our advertisers would be open to looking at opportunities like these,” he says.But Hayes cautions Fox to not put this new video content behind a paid firewall, which would limit the number of users exposed to it. “They would benefit more and get more money from advertisers by making the content available to more users rather than trying to charge for the video content,” he says. And Chapman says Fox has to price the advertising for the new content reasonably. “Many sites want to charge flat rates for custom content without giving user guarantees,” he says. “We don’t want to foot the bill to pay for content development and not get a good return.”Hsia says that while individual Web video programming will be looked at for sponsorships, most of his clients will probably prefer tying in sponsorships with on- air advertising as part of bigger, integrated, multiplatform deals.Chapman adds, however, that if the programming is right and the pricing is right, clients would likely be open to considering Web-only sponsorships, in addition to integrated Web and TV buys.Online sports and recreational Web sites take in about $500 million a year for display advertising, about 6 percent of all ad spending on the Internet, according to Nielsen Ad Relevance. So the potential for growth or capturing a larger share of the overall Web pie seems possible with the right offering, and Hill thinks he and his team will come up with it. “We are going to make it up as we move along, and see what works and what doesn’t,” says Hill, in his trademark direct manner. “But the way of the future is going to be to get more broadcast content and broadcast talent online. This is a huge business opportunity. We want to make the most of it.”

Performance Marketing

Fox Sports Rushes the Web

John Consoli

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John Consoli