The anonymous fan problem: Why sports don’t know their audiences

0:05Nick Meacham:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone. I'm the community lead joined as always by our CEO, Nick Meacham. Now, Nick, one of the words that's going to get mentioned quite a bit today is anonymity, which makes me think of finding email with a C-anonymity. But we're going to talk about sort of strangers, anonymous profiles, all these sorts of things, Nick. But I do think there are a lot of bad things with social media. We talk about them at length. But one of the things I find really interesting is fans can now directly interact with athletes in a way that's never been done before.

0:37Nick Meacham:And speaking of anonymous, one of my favorite little things is when you think you found out that a professional athlete has a social media burner account. I think Kevin Durant's the most famous for having a burner account where he would kind of send comments to people that maybe were dissing his game, things like that. I don't know. Have you ever seen any of these burner accounts? Have you ever considered creating a LinkedIn burner account to really tell people what you think?

1:01Chris Stone:Have I ever considered creating a burner account? I have considered it on Twitter back in the day when I was using Twitter for a bit of fun to like, because I get told of this stuff with sports through sports program. Oh, I'd really love to share that. Maybe I could be cheeky here and create some sort of anonymous account publishing some stuff to disrupt a bit of the conversation going on the platform. But I I held back from doing that for, kept everything above board. But yeah, the Kevin Durant example is probably the best one that I can think of where the burner got found and he got held to account as a result of that.

1:33Chris Stone:But I did see recently at the, obviously there's everything going on with the World Economic Forum right now of everything you could possibly imagine around politics. The one person suggested every social profile should just be, you should have to be officially like authorized in the same way like a LinkedIn profile would. I was like, that sounds so ridiculously obvious. It blows me away. But I wonder how long it'll take to get to that sort of point. But no burners here, Chris. Not that I would admit to anyway.

2:01Nick Meacham:No burners. We're proud of our opinions and we will have those hot takes and we'll be accountable for those. So no issues on that one. But I know someone that I enjoy watching on LinkedIn, seeing his post, I know he also is very proud of his statements and stands by them. We've got two guests today. The first one is Ed Abbas, CEO of Display. And we're also joined by Joe Edwards, the marketing director at Display as well. And we're going to have, I think, some opinions thrown around because I mentioned the word anonymous is going to be used quite a bit today. And you guys recently released a report, your anonymous fan index.

2:31Nick Meacham:And there's some alarming findings from that in terms of anonymity with fandom and what that means for sports. So, Ed and Joe, I appreciate you guys joining us today to give some opinions on what maybe some of this data gap means for the sports organizations that are in our ecosystem. Thanks for having us. So, Ed, just to kick things off, you know, we've spoken with you before. You've been at our events at SportsPro before. But even Nick and I were talking a little bit beforehand. Display itself seems to have gone through a bit of an evolution over the last couple of years. So before we really dive into this fan index report, maybe for those out there that maybe aren't as familiar with Display or maybe knew you from some of the other work that you guys have done in the past, just talk really briefly kind of where you guys have been over the last couple of years in terms of your growth.

3:14Yeah, sure. Thanks for having us on this. that we'd really appreciate. It's good to chat stuff through. So, yeah, I suppose as the old adage goes, evolve or die, we realized that ultimately whilst we did lots and lots of really cool stuff for a number of years and, you know, we were very much famous for, you know, how could we get fan content into video that in itself, you know, it wasn't necessarily moving the needle for the people that we were working with. Great to do it and great to drive engagement. But as we've become more and more of a business that is thinking about how can we help the people we work with to monetize attention, that we had to evolve the business model of what we were doing.

3:51And if we wanted to be true to the things that we really, really believed in as well. So a lot of the work that's going on in the background at the moment and part of obviously this report that Joel talked in more detail about, it's about, okay, you know, we know that we live in a fragmented media world right now where content is distributed and fans are everywhere. I see that as a massive opportunity, but I know that lots of people are scared of that. And whilst I do talk in great detail about all the different opportunities for that distribution to connect with audiences, that I'm never saying that ultimately the legacy world that we've come from is necessarily bad either.

4:27I'm just saying it's just different now. And I always think about content, content marketing, content distribution, probably from that marketing perspective rather than from that media perspective in the sense of if you're a good marketeer, which I am long seen to be a marketeer. Joe's a good marketeer. I am definitely not. you have to think where your audience is and you have to create different segmentation strategies about where your audience is and ultimately how you get to them. So this thought process that Joe had come to with the Anonymous Fan Index was like, okay then, so let's start to quantify that and start to think if people agree with us was a starting point, but also then to see what kind of information we got out of that and what insights we can then deliver to the wider marketplace.

5:12because I think people are often scared, I would say, to talk corporately about these challenges. Like no one wants to go to their CEO and say, I only know about 10 % of my audience because it's career suicide, right? But I think if you can say it more in an environment which is controlled but anonymous, then we can start to maybe talk about it.

5:33Chris Stone:And that was the view of this. I'm curious, guys, when you were putting this together, how did you define the, well, two things really. one is what's what do you define and classify as a fan i mean we've all probably seen over the years uh let's say differing very variations of that from particularly certain premier league clubs that will tell you they have more fans than they do uh sorry more fans than they do people in the world um just curious on how you guys defined that to begin with i think that's obviously can take you in a lot of different directions where you draw that um that to the border i mean yeah so i'll probably take this one just quickly um i think obviously fandom has various different levels in it um in terms of you know hardcore fans all the way up to you know casuals um but i think ultimately the way that we were trying to define this was you have your known fans like people that are sitting in your database and that kind of thing and then everyone else and everyone else is typically somebody that's watched something or somebody that's kind of following your social media so we try to actually keep it fairly kind of black and white and plain around how we define that to be able to quantify things because obviously we can do quant or you can do qual and we definitely went with the quant to try and begin to look at how we can define the kind of lost opportunity I guess.

6:55Chris Stone:What was the dynamic of the rights owners you saw completing the survey? Was it skewing more sort of challenger brand challenger sports property was a quite a cross-section of organizations from top to bottom and and vice versa or how did you start find that mix balanced is the right word in that there's obviously more tier one uh rights holders than there are challenger rights holders so we kind of saw that through the report really but it's kind of a balance of the industry i would say

7:26Nick Meacham:i would just say just to really kick this off go download the report i'm sure when we we post this We can put a link in the podcast description, whether you're watching it on Spotify or YouTube. I know if you go find Ed or Joe on LinkedIn, they'll have posted on the link to it. But go find it, read through it. But I think one of the key findings I took from it, and like I said, is kind of an alarming figure statistic, or at least this is what I saw as the big synopsis, is that sports organizations only have identifiable information on 24 % of their audiences. I think that was kind of the average number.

7:58Nick Meacham:So to think of all the billions of dollars that have been spent on media rights, on sponsorship deals, on marketing, on your tech stacks to build all these things together, something around three quarters of fans, we don't actually know their information enough to do something actionable behind it. They're just a social media account, something like that. Is that sort of an accurate way to kind of put what one of the key findings was? And if that is, what is the opportunity or the scale of the challenges that represents, Ed? I was sort of looking back in my own sort of very long career from back when I worked at Burnley Football Club a long, long time ago when I was pretending to be a marketeer.

8:36And I think that was the period where, gosh, like 20 years ago where everyone was going really deep on CRM systems. And how do we start to have that one view of the customer, which certainly in my time that never happened. And I know for a fact having had lots of interactions with football clubs and sports organisations since, I think there's probably very few that even now would say that they have one view of that custom. And where Joe was touching on then about how would you define a fan, in fact, look, yes, it's watching it, but also saying, yes, I support that team or I support that particular club rather than just they've watched it, right?

9:14Because ultimately, I'll watch lots of teams that are not Burnley, but I only support Burnley. So we've got to be really clear on that. But I think I just, as you do, having worked with people that I've worked with down the years, and when you have different conversations and where they're not overtly telling you that they don't know this, you just know by some of the work that you deliver, when perhaps you're giving them insights that they don't have. And having done what I've done in the past, I know that, how do you not have those insights? Because I was doing this kind of stuff years and years and years ago.

9:43and I think we got to the point where internally anecdotally we knew a lot of this stuff but we wanted something to back up that that we knew this stuff and look right like any good research what you would hope is is what we've done what we've done this doesn't not does not stop someone else and taking on the mantle and you know what I want to delve into this more now I want to actually understand it might be your guys right you might decide to do something go you know what I like that particular thing we want to sort of we want to look at that in a little bit more detail great we're all for that because we we just wanted to start the conversation because i think yes there's always that sense of we want to get get across what we do is ultimately our our our future goal is to help people to through the the way we see through content to actually start off platforming people from those networks where they've been chasing reach but not necessarily chasing conversion you know being honest that's why we commissioned this this is that's why we decided to do this have you got anything to add jill i just say that i think it's also important to remember that there is value in anonymous fandom as well um you know you it's just that the revenue per per fan is a lot higher once you know them because you've got more opportunities to sell to them um so and you know i've worked for and in uh and around lots of kind of sports organizations in my career and there's a real kind of um levels of maturity in terms of technology and um data and uh like resource to make a lot of this stuff happen as well so um i think like ultimately you know the way that displays i guess trying to head uh is very much about how do we how do we help people uh that have got these you know massive amounts of reach um but stop treating those reach channels as reach channels and start thinking of them as acquisition layers like how do we actually start really driving um driving the funnel at every single touch point in every single way and i think it's about people realizing a little bit more that the kind of engagement tools that are around there around like these big reach channels they're not gimmicks they're not i mean they may feel like gimmicks to the fans in terms of it's a bit of fun to be had but actually there's a real need and requirement to be engaging fans in places that we don't know them to drive them back into um drive them back into the funnel basically reading

12:13Chris Stone:the report i think it's a really well put together piece of work so well done well done to you guys for putting it all together and some of the conclusions and the way you've presented things is really clear and quite poignant. I was reflecting on just the value of focusing on those anonymous fans because obviously people would say that the more you know your fans, the better off you'll be and that makes sense to a large extent. But at the same time, when I hear a lot from clubs and particularly football clubs, but also some major leagues is they're only focused on bigger, more followers, more eyeballs, reach, reach, reach to the cows come home through social media and they're gearing up their media teams and so forth to drive that because those big numbers allow them to sell more sponsorship deals at a bigger rate.

13:08Chris Stone:I remember even seeing a recent investor presentation from one of the more prominent investment firms. And the number one thing they talked about in terms of how to work out a valuation is based on our follower numbers on social media, which kind of blew me away. Obviously, you've got to work with what you've got. But I'm just curious on that sort of, I guess, conundrum or that challenge opportunity versus, okay, if we put all our energy, because resource is somewhat finite, right? Putting, pushing people and growing on social media and so forth is obviously there and what sports has been quite good at for some level because of its value in the eyes of a fan but how getting them to not be anonymous how much work and resource has to go into that is is there something that has have the clubs you're working with or the the leagues and rights holders you're working with are they are they able to really ramp up the amount of people coming from anonymous to known or is it still really tricky to get that balance right and make it worth investing resource away from just building huge social media audiences just as you were saying that i was thinking about like just just a couple of conversations we've had in the last couple of weeks and i think if you can get back from from this perspective for a long long time probably let's focus on football clubs right because i guess i guess i'm sorry joe i know you're not a football person but um for me i'll focus on football football clubs for this answer this question a long long time chairman of boulder director just didn't have the innate knowledge to understand any more probably than the reach figure so that's what everyone chased right But we know, because we've been sat in a couple of meetings, even in the last couple of weeks, where the board are now turning around going, well, all this investment and all this reach is fantastic, but where's my conversion?

14:48So when the board starts asking that question, then it's bound to filter down. I think for a long time, even till mostly recently, I just wasn't seeing those questions answered. And I was going to meetings saying this, but no one felt like they necessarily needed to do anything about it, even though they understood it was a problem, because no one up above really understood what the problem was. I can see the wheel starting to turn now, and we've not necessarily instigated that. That was just, it just so happened in the last couple of weeks that that's been the case. When that starts happening at board level, then you know that it becomes a problem, right?

15:21And they're under questioning, like, all this money we spent to drive reach and to, let's be honest, feather the nest of big tech to grow their networks. Where's our cut of the cake? Because we're not seeing that necessarily coming back. And interestingly, the big networks, because we speak to them too, are saying we don't understand why people have not been focusing on the conversion because we just assumed they would. I think in terms of the balance, I feel like I've been in sports for about 10 years and in agencies 10 years kind of prior to that. And I think I've seen a shift now into the need to kind of acquire more data.

16:00I'm not saying that social media networks are disappearing anytime soon although they they might be disappearing for under 16s in the UK pretty soon as somebody that wants to own a community around a topic or a sport or a club you need to get to know your fans and you're you're only going to know half the story when they're sitting out on social media and so I think a lot of the to try and answer your question around balancing resource against going for reach versus going for engagement is the never-ending challenge of any good marketing team, I would argue. I agree with Ed that I think the story has very much changed in rights holders around, like, there's a certain point where you're going, well, we just keep pumping money into media, and we've got to try and find a way to actually see some tangible results.

16:52It's a lot easier for the football clubs. They're all, you know, well, not all, but, you know, it's a popular sport, right? everyone knows that sport when you get down to some more the challenger brands actually they have to go down the engagement route because they just don't have the ridge and actually that's probably where you see you know a little bit more innovation in and around that engagement space rather than the kind of reach also just to add to what you're saying there as well because of the nature of what we've done for a long long time we've ended up dealing with media teams and contact teams and social media teams and the digital team that's not the social media team.

17:30And I had done this back when I was at the call first, where I was just doing sales and not running the business, where I would get in a meeting room often, and I would be introducing some of these people to each other because they didn't actually know each other in the same organization, where, again, me putting my old marketing hat on, which I've not got anymore, sat there thinking, why are these dots not joined up? Because it just feels the most obvious thing in the world that they should be speaking to each other and often we find ourselves when we've dealt with some of these organizations where what we are doing is ultimately a marketing process but we get lumped in with production and production are just producing content and when you talk about but this is a marketing mechanic oh that no that's those guys over there oh no they just interfere and then i can't make the content i want to make which like is madness but often as a vendor right you go well okay like Like, how much do you push it?

18:20Because you're always scared that the reality is if you push it too much, they don't want to worry you anymore because you're asking far too many questions. But I guess hence why I've been on LinkedIn and evangelized the last couple of years. I can't just hit it and say nothing because it frustrates me because it's waste ultimately if it's not being done in the right manner. And we want people to drive ultimate value out of what we do. Otherwise, we don't feel like we're being true to ourselves.

18:41Nick Meacham:Well, I think this highlights one of the – we've used the word conundrum a couple of times. I think it perfectly exemplifies this question. But one of the things further in the report was talking about what are the channels with which people have the largest time creating conversion. Well, the issue is it's largely broadcast in social media. So there's this conundrum that the two channels or mediums that are best for driving reach also turn out to be the worst when it comes to trying to then convert that into conversion. So you've got this conundrum, as you say, the reaching conversion. the two, you know, the things that you think might be a little bit easier, like signing someone up for a direct-to-consumer platform, signing someone up to a loyalty program, those things tend to be easier to get the information on, but they're also not the things that necessarily grow reach and finding that balance between the two.

19:28Nick Meacham:Because like you said, your report comes out and says that those two things aren't necessarily complementary and trying to solve, I guess, maybe that gap in between those two. Yeah, I think it kind of comes back to my, for not my first point but one of my previous points which was kind of about treating reach channels as acquisition layers so you're you're right that they're actually like social media channels are very very good at acquisition right but just for themselves ultimately um they're really really good at turning those audiences into revenue um and they'll happily obviously take all the content in the world from us um to help fuel that as well so i think ultimately like i said it kind of just comes down to like how do you treat these things as more acquisition layers you know how do you create the conversations that you need to be had how do you encourage fans and actually like the one of the other things if you you know social media seems to be on a bit of a downturn over the last few years in terms of engagement on platforms and you see more and more people going to, you know, private conversations rather than sharing everything about themselves.

20:36And I think actually as humans and as audiences, we naturally want community and that's the bit that we need to try and tap into in these reach channels is how do we bring community into these wider things? And that is one of the methodologies and ways that you're going to kind of attract those audiences. And then you work with those audiences. Once you've got more data, you can work to drive revenue. It's not like we're looking to try and take them straight from watching TV or watching again for the first time into buying a piece of merchandise or a ticket. You've got to spend some time bringing them into the community, helping them understand the community, helping them understand their place in the community, and then kind of feed in more kind of commerce and commercial propositions as you go.

21:26Chris Stone:innately um i think joe you pointed to the whole challenger sports side of things uh earlier and i think that's probably an important delineation as well because i i reflected remember uh years ago when um when volleyball world got bought uh invested into by cvc and they one of the first things they did is put everything behind basically a paywall into their platform and many people reacted to that particularly i have a lot of volleyball friends who are from volleyball and surprisingly most of them absolutely loved it because like before they didn't actually have access to the content in the first place whereas obviously in the top tier of sports particularly say football and other other major leagues in the u.s that content's already available quite readily in different places and therefore the ability for a sports property in this case it was volleyball world to build not only a platform that fans actually want you know that's a different thing to begin with but they actually getting access to something they didn't have and also um uh i guess yeah to be actively supported versus on those other platforms to build a relationship directly with the fan i should is what i was referring to that that isn't the same necessarily there is variations and levels of that for a tier one but not in the same way that if you're a challenger like you can't get visibility and real estate on some of these platforms because of you'll get pushed out by the bigger top tier platform so you have to build your own destination otherwise you'll never be able to build that relationship in the first place whereas i think i know my thesis is the tier ones the clubs the leagues etc that are getting the rights checks and so forth thrown at them or whatnot they can actually pick and choose their strategy a little bit more because people come to them because they've got they've got that huge reach and follower base so they can still turn that into some sort of monetization i don't know if that is something that you guys see from the conversations and the work you're doing Is there quite a divide of the importance, therefore, of knowing your fan, particularly at the challenger level?

23:19I think at the challenger level, I mean, even the report shows that at the challenger level, there's definitely more going on around that space. I still think it's important for the tier one teams. It's more of a conversation than it ever was for tier one sports. And yeah, I mean, I'd kind of tend to agree. I think there is a delineation there that you've highlighted. I mean, you look at, you know, we always look to the American sports, right? What the big American sports do, the NFL and the NBA. And the reality is they've got infinite possibility to distribute their content via lots and lots of media companies that will pay them as much money as they can.

24:00They still look to how do we do different types of distribution via creators because we understand there's a fan there that we don't reach over there. So if they're doing that, it should send a message to everyone else about right message to the right people at the right time like 101 of marketing right it's it's actually not rocket science when you think about it but again if you've got media rights people driving that agenda not then it's not necessarily linked into the overall marketing strategy then you only go a certain kind of way and actually it all needs to be it's in a lot of ways we've you think about the organization we've also fragmented down the years the media the marketing the social the digital like it needs to be brought back together again so there's one focus and there are some organizations starting to do that you can see by the way people are starting to hire now as well realizing that they're actually facets and going back to putting it back as as as one organization or one sort of department within the organization to make sure that that you're not all these things are not

24:57Nick Meacham:falling between the cracks the word communities come up a little bit and there's a few sort of buzzwords that we're hearing quite a bit so communities one of them democratization i think I've heard the word democratization probably a million times over the last 12 months. Authenticity, particularly now when we start thinking things like AI slop and things like that. There's all these kind of like words to sort of build brand loyalty and this idea of, I think, having more devoted fans and getting to know more about them. But I think we typically hear those words more with maybe some of the disruptors that might be the challenger sports or maybe the new content creators that are coming into the space.

25:32Nick Meacham:I think sometimes bigger media organizations can perhaps struggle with community or authenticity because the message is so it's so high up and it's usually really PRified and things like that. But in terms of getting more fan knowledge, what are you seeing from content creators or challengers that are doing a better job of building that community? Ed, when we spoke before this, you gave a really great example about the World War II podcast and how they created a community off of that. Just what perhaps should the larger organizations be paying attention to some of these disruptors and their ability to build those communities?

26:06Nick Meacham:Yeah, we were talking about where we go all hang because I'm friends with Tony, the founder of Goal Hangers as well. So I know quite a lot about that business and the evolution of it as well. But, you know, everyone sees the rest is football now and the rest is history and the rest is politics that are these massive, I mean, they're transcended podcasts now. They are, they're media entities in their own right within a larger business. But they started out with We Have Ways, which was their Second World War podcast, which was totally going into a bookshop and realizing that actually there was loads of Second World War books, but nobody had really done a podcast and sort of lent him to doing that.

26:39And as they started to do it, they realized that the fans of the podcast were creating these little groups across the country so they could meet up and talk about the Second World War. And the community drove how they started to think about the content they were making so much. So that's evolved now. And then they have Warfest every September, Neil Silverstone Race Circuit, which, you know, it was the first time I've been. and Tony, if you've told me for years, you've got 5 ,000 people were at this festival camping watching talks about the Second World War. You think about it, the most niche thing you could probably go for, showing that actually you can turn that into a big media business as it was.

27:18And that's that, right? And you could argue, because everyone looks at Golang, and oh, yeah, but Golang are huge. Yeah, but they weren't. They started out somewhere. They were a production company that started to dabble in podcasting, and then it just snowballed from there. But you look at the likes of what Mark Goldberg has done over the last 10 years, what Robbie Lyle has done over the last 10 years. They started out because they felt like there was a gap in the market to speak to fans in a way that fans expected to be spoke to, but more importantly, to be listened to so they could help to drive the conversation.

27:49And they now have regularly conversations with hundreds of thousands of fans on a daily basis that feels like a one-to-one experience, but the reality is there are hundreds of fans as part of it. And the big thing, and you can ask Martin that, you can ask Robbie that, and you can ask Tony, but they keep coming back to me. He's like, we build communities. We build things that people want to be part of because they know they get listened to and they know that they help to drive the narrative. So they feel like they're almost co-creating with us. I don't believe that tier one organizations can't do the same things.

28:21Like again, one-on-one marketing, listen to your customers. They'll tell you what they want. Yeah, even looking outside of sport, so yeah, authenticity is definitely the marketing jargon word, but just frankly, just keeping it real. And, you know, yes, I do think organizations can help build communities, but communities generally start organically from the bottom up. And actually, it's about identifying what those communities want. Outside of sport, so I don't know if you guys know a guy called DJ AG. but he's the guy that pulls up on the side of like King's Cross or whatever. Live streaming. And he's got like Alicia Keys, Stormzy, all these kinds of like incredibly famous music artists just pulling up because he's created something authentic around him.

29:14And frankly, like needing police involved to escort. I mean, I think Buck the Rhymes was there recently, which is, yeah, it's crazy. and it's in the middle of the street in London at like two o 'clock in the afternoon. And off the back of that, he's now launching his own festival, you know, and that's one single guy who's built a community up around it. So I think the point of what I'm trying to say is actually like finding that real thing that people care about is the most important part. And when we can talk about all these like engagement mechanics and all these kind of wonderful words that we all tend to use in marketing.

29:53Actually, the only way it's successful is if you create something that people want. And that's the key to all of this. It actually doesn't have to be that hard. You just have to know what your audience really, really, really genuinely want and what the community are talking about. Great stories that resonate with people. I'm going to throw another one in for there, create storytelling. But it's like these are all great stories to people think yeah that that feels authentic that feels real that feels like it's something that i want to align myself with it feels like that you have this there's some sort of mix i