Building a league from scratch: SA20 and the future of cricket

23:31Chris Stone:Ellie, I'm just curious, do you have a type of persona that you're seeing come through with your international audience in particular? Is it very, I don't know if you were able to get this sort of a little bit of insight but is it a very expat audience that you're seeing consume is it just general cricket fans in international markets who just want more obviously the competition has made changes over the first few years to be a bit more domestically focused which I was going to ask Graham about in a second but just curious is there any particular traits you see on that international audience that you think is specific or unique yeah and at this point we've only really sort of started focusing on learning more about that audience into this season and and a big focus and planning for going into season five is to deep dive into that further so um you know the focus has been relentless data growth um so growing the database as much as possible and understanding about that domestic audience we're now at that phase where the international audience is consistent and sizable enough that we then start to look more closely into that.

24:40So in terms of demographics, you know, they skew male, for example, but outside of intentions and motivators is something we're really looking to deep dive into going into next season with an audience segmentation strategy. So understanding that true global audience opportunity for growth so that next year and moving forward, marketing and partnership conversations and activations can be much more deliberate and tailored to motivators and behaviours. There's a lot that we can take from demographics and location, but that only gets you so far. So as you sort of said, really diving into those personas to understand why they care will allow SO20 to communicate in a way that resonates with them specifically.

25:26but what we have seen across the board is no matter what market we're talking to the sort of vibes of SA20 and the party and the atmosphere is something that everyone really engages with so when we're split testing messaging against those groups you know it's very clear already that that's a motivator that's coming out regardless of where these fans are and it's really important that you do have those threads that carry through your your database otherwise you're you know saying five different messages and trying to hope that that will land with someone. So a lot of the key sort of brand messaging of SE20 and the reason that it exists, I guess, is really resonating globally, not just locally in South Africa.

26:08Chris Stone:And Greg, the question I sort of threaded through, the question to Ellie was about the focus more now of domestic. From what I read earlier, there's been a focus on ensuring there's a high quality of domestic players involved with the competition, as we've seen in many other competitions in T20, they become very much internationally focused products. You've been focusing more on domestic, as you pointed out earlier. Could you just talk us through that dynamic of how you've been able to get that balance of being more domestically focused with your players and talent? And have you seen that turn into more domestic interest as a result?

26:44It's probably layers to this conversation, but if we're just sticking to the player group here, I think when you build the product initially, being able to attract five, six high-quality international players per team, it kind of gives it that first reference point in South Africa to say, oh, people are serious. There's some big players coming out. Then you also have the commitment to have the national team players always available for SA20. So those kind of two pillars sort of set an example of saying, well, the best cricketers are going to be on show all the time. And I think that really, that authentic and that we're going to get world-class cricket in South Africa was an important pillar up front.

27:22And I think something that I learned from the IPL over many, many years is, you know, how the strength of the sort of local player has really helped build that product. I mean, we've seen their national team now, they could probably put out three different teams that could compete globally with the talent that they've produced. The investment in the youth, kind of, you know, the rookie or the under 23 program, which we've done as well. You know, that's, and the other key pillar for us, we launched a schools program now for girls and boys. We've got over 700 schools involved. So in terms of that talent pipeline opportunity, we kind of saw that, you know, introducing that kind of rookie thing over time, the rookie player and under-23 players, a great introduction to kind of a high-quality global league.

28:06And we've seen it work already with young players really getting global opportunities now very, very quickly. And then I think for the league to develop, you have to, and for it to remain highly competitive, the improvement of the South African player has to grow. And I think we've seen that every year. And this auction now, we carved up after Season 3, forcing the teams to go to a larger auction, having to rethink some of their strategies and so on. We really saw the South African player benefit from that auction now. The price tags that they were getting after Season 3 were massive. Over a million dollars for a five or six week tournament.

28:48You know, so you could really see the focus of a global franchise building in South Africa, recognizing the South African talent and then investing in it. So I think over the three or four year cycle, we've actually been able to achieve what we thought were going to be key pillars of growth on the cricket side. and then you know for us on the fan side i mean ellie always touched on the data but i mean i think being really intentional at what you want to achieve there you know as i spoke i said you know cricket was fading in south africa so we needed to initially revive the cricket fan but most importantly if we were going to grow in this country to 60 million people how do we attract new people to the game so every decision we made around marketing our in-stadium experiences what we were how we were going to go about attracting people back to the game trying to sell a game a day, which I need to tell you, with a very challenging ticketing area for South African cricket, it had to be a really key focus.

29:44So the amount of people, when I walk around stadiums now that have never been to cricket before and are there having a great time attracting kids back to the game, I think was key. So the entertainment side, so cricket was always going to be a core thing, which we've touched on, but then the sports and entertainment element that we brought into our stadiums, the big investment into kind of music, fan experiences, working with our partners. I think we've been able to revive corporate South Africa and have really got behind us in South Africa with a couple of global partners, but also working with them to make sure that everything's fan-centric.

30:17So every one of our partners, not just about a commercial delivery, they all invest in an activation that is fan-centric, whether it's a car giveaway, a catch-one-handed experience. So everything around the whole event is driven to make the fans experience better. And then ticket pricing, we, you know, and this is where I'm grateful for the franchises because it's an element of their revenue that they could, you know, as the league gets more successful, they really could, you know, play with. But they've been really good at making sure that it's affordable for a family of four to at least attend three out of the five games in a four or five week period in area.

30:53So a couple of key pillars to get right to help build the product and then hopefully grow from there.

30:58Nick Meacham:I actually want to take things back to the beginning. Ellie, you were talking about setting those core foundations and how that sets up the future. In those early conversations, because you mentioned you kind of were wrapping things up August, September, the season starting a couple months after that, you have to move quite quickly. Ellie, Graham, the conversations between you guys were talking about building that core. Was there anything that you guys said was it's a non-negotiable, it's a must-have versus this might be nice to have? you know you're figuring out sort of on the fly how you're going to build the core foundation of this or you know were there things graham you told ellie we must have or were there la things you said to graham you've not considered this but i would strongly recommend it when you're building that core were there any things that you were like these are non-negotiables must have if we're going to build this out from the beginning i mean ellie you can come and hear more but i just think you know when you when you when you're speaking to a company like in crowd for the first time and obviously you want to you have this dream of saying okay well we don't have any legacy let's bold digital you know you can imagine in three months before the tournament launches you've got to trust the people that that are the experts in the field i think the key for us is you know putting in the work but also being intentional about what your goals are and being very clear and i think you know as i said you know we were very clear on what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to go about it and then you know found the right partners in ellie and team and you know they really guided us on a lot of those elements so ellie please come in here and i can chat after Yeah, I think we really wanted to keep it as simple as possible, knowing that there were not a lot of people at SC20 and not necessarily people whose background was digital data, you know, that kind of marketing angle, which was why they, you know, trusted us to support them with that.

32:38So fundamentally, as sort of linking back to what we've already said, you know, we made it three sort of core pillars of delivering great fan experiences, driving direct revenue from fans and ultimately creating new commercial assets. Those were the three core pillars for year one and still stand now to take forward. And I think reassuring that we take a roadmap approach rather than trying to do everything at once was hopefully quite reassuring, given we didn't have much time. from a non-negotiable you know we need a shop window so a web platform that captures both fan attention but as importantly data I think we sort of really probably over egg the importance of driving that first party data collection from the off and not sort of just waiting for you know ticket sale data to come through and that being your database for next year so really focusing on you know competitions and very light touch gamification and data capture forms in its simplest format to make sure that we had as much intel going into next season i think particularly as we've kind of only got six weeks to really capitalize on that how do we make that peak as big as possible and get the most out of that you know there were discussions about you know should we get build an app because typically you have web and app come together particularly in this sort of day and age but you know we sort of outlined there's no rush in building an app and we're in season four in SA20 you know we still don't have an app but we really wanted to prove what that play value proposition was first and if we didn't have the data and didn't have the behavioral insights to make those decisions that's a huge expense that would have sort of just happened and probably not been a success this year for the first time we've done sort of full mobile ticketing which is an obvious USP for an app we've done this via an online portal where fans have to create an account on the ticketing site to be able to redeem a ticket that someone shared with them and so what we're starting to do is stress test some of these value propositions and features in the market before sort of saying to SA20 commit a load of budget to this thing and you know it'll solve all your problems so we've worked really collaboratively in sort of creating these proof of concepts and SA20 have given us so much trust to sort of guide them and support them in that way.

34:56And I think we set really clear KPIs and measurements from the off to hold ourselves accountable, but also to sort of prove whether things were working or not and allow us to collaboratively sort of adapt and pivot. And I think the two sort of non-negotiables were that shot window that supported revenue conversion through signposting to ticketing. And also sort of those measurement KPIs to support sort of whether data growth was successful, whether the activity that we did worked or not. So I think those are probably the two most important ones that I think we got right for season one.

35:39Nick Meacham:And in terms of just growth, are there any things that you guys learned from there? You know, obviously, Ellie, you guys are the experts. Graham, you'll have done your homework. Was there anything that you had to pivot from quickly or anything that you are like standout learning from season one or even season two to season three? Just what are maybe some of the curveballs that came your way early on or things that you have decided, hey, this worked. We want to take it even a step further. Do you have any kind of examples of either of those? Well, I mean, look, Ellie will tell you more along that journey.

36:07But, you know, in the beginning, she had to work with me mainly. So post-season one, we actually employed a digital team in the office. So I think it improved the working relationship for Hueli. But on a serious note, I think also that first season, there were only so many things you could get to. I think obviously building the base has already spoken about, making sure that the core infrastructure was right, that there was a bit of thinking behind what we wanted to achieve there. But most importantly, you needed to make the event a success. If you didn't get people in the stands, you didn't see them having a great time and the cricket wasn't of good quality, we wouldn't be sitting here having a season four conversation about how much we've grown and all those pillars were put in that have all grown and developed into one of the most successful sort of franchise leagues globally.

36:56So I think for us, it really was just about making sure that season one was a success. And then season two, you sit down and then you start thinking, okay, so what are the next big triggers to make sure that we keep growing, we keep developing? And I think one of the biggest investments we made early on was getting the things that Ellie said right. For us, that would have been an easy, easy thing to overlook in season one where we had all the stuff going. But getting that core infrastructure for data collection and understanding our fan and allowing our fans to engage with us more often I think is something that I look back and say, sure, I'm glad we did that.

37:33Yeah, I think the other thing was we were all trying to get to the best that we could. And over several seasons we had challenges. with things like single sign-on, for example, very well-used strategy for data capture and sort of seamless fan engagement. But we had some challenges from a technical perspective of how that integrated with ticketing platforms. But that wasn't just, okay, we're going to do nothing this year for data capture because this won't work. It was what's plan A, B, C, D, E, F and G that we could go through. to come up with ways that we can still stay true to the objective we're trying to hit and make steps forward.

38:20So again, the sort of destination might seem really far away, but taking those small incremental steps means that we learn a lot. We're not starting from behind the curve and we're in a really good position. And, you know, SSO is now in place and everything is flying, which is fantastic. but you know we had a number of SSO accounts already that we could create via you know the website only which meant that we start weren't starting from a base of zero and actually those funds reap the benefits as soon as that's then integrated across the full customer journey so even the setbacks don't mean that you don't have to do nothing I think that was sort of the thing that we took from this and everyone's resilience and keeping sanity with tech has also been very impressive from the C-20 size.

39:06Chris Stone:I've definitely been through that experience with SSO as well for us. And it caused definitely some frustrations from all stakeholders. I'm curious now that you're in year four, Graham, and one of the big things we see across the global sports industry is this focus around being some sort of media business, entertainment business, producing content alongside the core live product. I'm just curious how you approach that today. Have you got a team in-house creating content for you or do you use third parties? And what's the focus for them? Is it just highlights? Are you doing more storytelling around the competition?

39:44Chris Stone:Because obviously it's so seasonal. It's a short window where you need to maximize. No doubt Ellie's keen to get as many data points from that content consumption as possible. So just curious as to what you're doing today in terms of around that media output piece. Yeah, look, I think it's a bit of both. We have an in-house team now that obviously builds this project out during the season. And we have some third-party people that we employ that come out and form part of the kind of contracted team for season. So it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think one area that has been amazing has been the content that gets produced in our stadium, through the fan experiences, through the live game.

40:21Obviously, it's impacted by your broadcast deals. Where can you clip and how do you clip and what tech do you use for that? and where are you able to push and where do you have to rely on your broadcast partners? So those are all contractual elements, I guess, that come into these discussions. But I think we've seen significant growth. I think we're up about 116 % on video views this year and 150 % in audience growth. So the content is being consumed. I always look at the amount of content that comes out between the franchises and us in the season. It's actually incredible. I mean, and it's a great way to just sort of engage or consume with Betway SA20.

41:01Nick Meacham:I know you mentioned you do have to rely on those broadcasters, but, you know, one of the things I talk about is an American, you know, kind of the use of those highlights, for example, with the American sports. They don't always align to those time zones. So I understand that there are things you have to do with your broadcasters, but because you are looking at that international growth, is any of that content you're creating, the non-traditional content designed for different markets? It's just taking into account that you are doing those different markets and maybe not everyone can tune in live.

41:29Nick Meacham:I know there's some crazy people. You know, Nick mentioned how many times he stayed up late to watch the Ashes, things like that. But I usually, if the Bengals play on Monday Night Football, I watch them on Tuesday morning. You know, do you have any content strategy around that at all? We obviously, we work with our broadcasters in terms of, you know, after live, you know, on their own platforms, you know, how they're going to replay, what are the channels, you know, like, for example, Supersport have a very strong premium. you know, to drive a premium subscriber. We have some teared down games in South Africa, but then post live, you know, what is the strategy?

42:00Are we going to be more on entertainment channels? Are we going to be, you know, on your base channels? You know, how many times post are we going to see highlights? What's the clipping, you know? So just using SuperSport as a broadcast example, we do a lot of work with them on that to make sure that it gets consumed. Then obviously for our content teams, you know, we use a clipping tool. We have access to live clips. Then there's content in and around the fan engagement element. And I think if I had to ask my digital team, they wouldn't want one broadcast deal. They would want to be building the own D2C markets, promoting YouTube strategy.

42:34At the moment, they restricted a little bit to kind of highlights, and certainly in South Africa, and then promoting dark markets, which are obviously areas where we don't have broadcast deals and so on. So it's that interesting transition phase in global sports, where people are starting to own more and more, building that direct-to-consumer product, but also focused on... I think for sports, traditionally, you've never really focused on building that business element. It's been build a product, find a broadcast partner that hopefully pays you well, and then you can just carry on running the event.

43:08But I think the whole transition of the business mindset now going forward has to change. So it's conversations that the team would have had countless times with earlier in terms of starting to maximize. you know and then on socials you know we try and work out obviously the meta platforms are the kind of the ones that everyone will talk about but you know we've had to have a TikTok strategy because in Africa TikTok is an area where things really get consumed at a great scale so if you're looking to introduce new audiences engage with people with your product you have to have strategies around all these different platforms and how you maximize them.

43:42To add to that just from a monetization perspective of those assets you know obviously YouTube strategy that Graham mentioned um and and monetizing through um ad pre-rolls etc and and those types of things um but i think also leveraging digital assets into those commercial partnership conversations has been a really sort of key uh work stream in the last few years so you know year one um as you probably imagine traditional contracts of partnerships are quite loose and woolly around digital and like the value of those assets and what you get and um over um sort of immediately we sort of spotted that there's a need as a utility grow to you know categorize those better so we created sort of the matrix that supports them in both the value categorization of assets across digital but then also helps the team to both um manage the sale of those and also execute and then report back on the value so thinking you know not just making content for content's sake which actually you know in year one and two you need to because you need to grow that awareness and you need that that volume to get through the algorithms and you only have so long that you're I guess relevant in the cricket calendar so we need to capitalize on that but actually now making a really deliberate view of you know let's focus on what works well so you know the clips that Graham mentioned you know particular player angles you know the content flies with one-handed catch which is a sort of betway activation as well which always is helpful but any other content series being created you know what's the intention of them how does it serve SA20 but also a commercial partner to make all of that content creation you know drive ROI fundamentally for the league as well as sort of engagement with with fans great I'm curious taking a step back

45:31Chris Stone:now from SA20 and talking more wider cricket you've been you know one of the world's best ever captains in cricket in all forms of the game there's a lot of talk around the future of of of cricketers as it stands with the different forms the three different key forms of one day test and t20 t20 has obviously grown from strength to strength of the back of IPL and alike and your league has grown year on year as well what do you see the future of those three those three different code do you think it's really just all about t20 now and test match cricket will struggle to get that cut through in this new world we live in where attention is even all the more difficult to grab um i know there's obviously exceptions to that or do you think that you might we might see a resurgence in test cricket uh at some stage because you obviously talked about some of the challenges earlier that south africa was facing itself around the popularity of the game so what's your view on those three different forms moving forward yeah i mean look i think if we asked chris what he thought about playing a five-day game he probably uh coming out probably have a what a five-day game and you still don't you might still not get a result and sometimes those are the most exciting ones as well people hang on for a draw but uh look i think it's always a tough one because you know i captained over 100 test matches you know test cricket is kind of the core of my career as well.

46:58So it's something you always want to see strong. I just don't think Test cricket is going to grow. It's going to stay what it is. I think it's going to be a five or six team nation format. As long as the teams are competitive you will still enjoy watching England, Australia or South Africa play India and so on. The top nations. I think people will tune in to watch highly competitive cricket with top nations. I think it's certainly obviously more traditional markets like England that will remain strong Australia you know you can imagine it'll be strong there I think I heard a quote from Owen Morgan the other day where he said he doesn't think if T20 started that cricket would actually be as strong from a viewership and a growth perspective than what it is now because I think one thing it has been able to do is to introduce the youth and to grow the game into new areas and I think that is such an important thing when you're trying to build a future of your sport.

47:57How do you engage the next generation of fans? How do they engage with your products, your sports, I think is so key. And I think ultimately if we had just relied on Test Cricket, I think we would have lost the growth of the game. So I think going forward after the 27 World Cup in South Africa, there's a new rights cycle, There's a new future tours program in the game. I think you're going to end up with four or five tier one franchise leagues that run throughout the calendar, maybe potentially Club World Cups going forward that are hopefully built in a way that can really attract new teams from other parts of the world into the future.

48:43How the ICC package and sell their rights going forward, I think is going to be a very, very interesting thing to watch and how that impacts bilateral cricket. I think that next four-year period is going to be, I think we'll see big shifts.

48:56Nick Meacham:Just to wrap things up, I'll be on my soapbox a little bit. I think Nick will probably have an opinion on this, but I wanted to go back to your answer, Graham, you gave about sort of the content strategy and how you guys are thinking about things and sort of the evolution of the sports business world, which I think is kind of where we at SportsPro feel we're at. And I think to your point, Graham, sports probably used to largely be B2B. You'd sell your media rights to somebody. You'd sell your sponsorship to somebody. and really the only direct-to-consumer aspects of that were selling tickets and maybe selling food and bed at a game, maybe some merchandise, but that's all changing in the relationships.

49:27Nick Meacham:And I'm sure that's where L.A. and N. crowd come in, helping you build those direct-to-consumer relationships with your fans so that way it isn't just relying on your big sponsorship partners, your big broadcast partners. You are trying to build that more one-to-one. So I guess for me, it's positive to hear that you guys have already built that from the outset with that mentality because I think that's probably where Nick and I see sports sports may be perhaps struggling as they haven't maybe necessarily made that shift from that B2B or sorry, that B2B mindset to more that D2C mindset. So it's great to hear the story.

49:58Nick Meacham:Like you said, in crowd certainly playing a part in that, you know, Nick, I don't know if I've done a good enough job on my soapbox, you know, talking about that, but that answer you gave there, Graham, that was just the one little thing I pulled away from that comment as we're wrapping things up. Look, Chris, I would say that it's very, it's always interesting, as you point out

50:13Chris Stone:to us to hear the journeys of sports properties and how they're evolving along the way. It's interesting on that, the comment that Graham made around what the ICC is going to do is Sanjog Gupta is now chief executive, and he's actually been on the podcast in his hot star days. So they've got a media rights expert coming in there. Obviously that is why they are so focused on that as an issue moving forward. So it will be interesting to see how that all plays out. But look, it's been great to hear the journey and we definitely look forward to following how the league wraps up for this year and indeed the ensuing years and how it evolves.

50:49Chris Stone:I have one final question though for Graham is what have you found more difficult, captaining your country or launching a launch competition in your own country? Look, Nick, I think in both, you have to build a good team. so i think you know in my time in south africa i think we were able to kind of build playing for south africa we built one of the best teams you know understanding how to be successful i think is also very important i think some some really key strategy key key people have really got stuck in and and i think we've been fortunate that because of that we've been able to make some good decisions i i remember i was reminiscing with my cfo she came from a big property fund and I interviewed her and employed her on the same day in the three months.

51:34So, you know, I think being able to get your core team right, I think is such a big and important thing as a kind of first step. And then just being really clear on what's important to you and the strategy going forward, I think is important. So I think, you know, that's been great. I think, you know, the other thing that is important for your viewers to know that in South Africa, it's not like there's huge competition in the broadcast space. We've got a broadcaster, which is a public broadcaster. They don't really invest huge money in sports. So multi-choice and supersport has really propped up sport in South Africa for a very long time.

52:11It's not like the US with this huge opportunity across multiple platforms. You have to take a business mindset to these things. And with the digital age and how kind of corporates and big businesses can advertise on digital platforms now, you need to be able to offer more for your partners. You can't just be the old generic type of thinking. So I think Ellie and her team and also us being really clear that that was an important strategy was really a huge asset in helping us kind of get to where we are now, that we understand our fan more, we engage with them more, and then we have the real pillars to grow.

52:48So, yeah, hopefully in the next week to 10 days, we see some cracking games and get some nice clips of hundreds and last ball finishes. And then, you know, we can hopefully smash it and have a beer and catch our breath again for next year.

53:02Nick Meacham:Well, Graham, Ellie, thank you for joining us for this episode of Streamtime Sports. For those that are listening, if you catch this pod when it releases on Wednesday, make sure you look out for the weekend to watch the final. Look at your local TV guide. I'm sure it'll be on, you know, Graham just mentioned he's got his international broadcast partner. So, you know, Graham, for you having had this conversation, I will absolutely make time to go watch it for you. Thanks very much, everyone. Thanks. Thanks, everyone.