Turning data into content: How brands are winning in sports marketing

0:05James Donovan:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of Streamtime Sports. My name is Chris Stone, the community lead. And today we are over at Stats Perform. I'm joined by Johnny Whitmore from Stats Perform and also with James Donovan from Edelman. And they're here today to talk about their work on the Expected Jinx campaign between Stats Perform and Xbox. So one of the things we are going to talk today about is a project you guys worked on called Expected Jinx. But just to sort of kick things off, you know, we're in the sports world. Sports is very much superstitious space do you guys talking about jinxes have any particular superstitions either as athletes or as fans you know what are your superstitions

0:40Johnny Whitmore:and I'll go first quite the week for you to give me this question as I'm a I'm an Arsenal fan and a season ticket holder so superstitions really come to the fore for me this season but especially in the last couple of weeks I've got two two major superstitions that I follow the first one is that I wear the same Arsenal shirt or Arsenal jacket to consecutive games when we win and then as soon as we don't win that one goes to the back of the cupboard and something else comes out on continuous so luckily I haven't had to change too much this season but um and then the second one was was it was a new one I went to watch the Man City game away at Man City that we lost a couple weeks ago at a friend's house and then he invited me over to watch a subsequent game and I was like I'm just not coming I'm not I'm not going to watch another game in that environment I need a new environment for a new outcome so those are those are my two my mine aren't so excited um i'm an arsenal fan too as well sadly well not sadly this week but i'm less about the superstitions but in terms of the jinx i actually find myself to be quite a positive jinx in terms of going to games or watching i tend to be a positive influence on the results so it's amazing the amount of people you speak to about this campaign that have these superstitions that you you've never heard of before they've never mentioned them before and then they're so rigid on these rules but it's uh yeah so it's such an interesting thing to hear about you to budapest then i know i know find me

2:01James Donovan:a ticket and then i'll be there so i'm i grew up in a baseball family um my father played triple a so equivalent of like the championship football um baseball is a very superstitious sport but i'm a little bit similar to you james where i was a sunflower seed sure but also if i went up to bed and i was chewing sunflower seeds if i got on base i'm going to keep chewing sunflower seeds if i didn't, I'd then switch to bubble gum. And I would just go back and forth, you know, every game, depending on whether or not how successful I was in my most recent at-bat changed whatever I was consuming at the time.

2:31James Donovan:That's the beautiful thing about baseball is you can kind of, it's not like a tea break in cricket, but like it is totally acceptable. Just kind of eat while you play. Yeah. You got to kind of like that refreshed approach to things. But yes, I'm very similar to you. Like things are going well. My other thing is like when I'm watching football, when I'm back at home American football, my mom's a yeller. I'm not a yeller. I'm very much like into it so i will i will switch rooms like if things aren't going well if things are going well like i'll but if like it's not going well i'm like you i'm gonna switch rooms because clearly whatever tv i'm watching on is impacting the game without a doubt okay i'm a yeller for sure same definitely not a yeller not a yeller so guys today in terms of speaking about stream time today's conversation we're going to particularly looking at an activation that you guys ran together on your expected jinx.

3:18James Donovan:And we're going to talk through a little bit about that specific campaign, the ideation behind it, the execution, and then some of the findings you took from it, and then also kind of take a bit of a 30 ,000-foot view on things. In terms of the way data is growing, I think it'll be a perfect opportunity to talk about Opta in that sense, just how data is becoming a content play for people. It's also something that's generating commercial value probably in ways that it hadn't done in the past. But just we're going to be talking about the expected jinx throughout this perhaps james you just talk us a little bit through like what is expected jinx and sort of just some of the initial ideation behind that

3:52Johnny Whitmore:um yeah so um i'll give you a background but if anyone's going to talk about what jinx actually is i think it needs to be needs to be johnny so um uh we've worked uh with xbox for for nearly 20 years and um specifically on on the football side for almost a decade you know them especially given the proliferation of football fandom across EMEA and the increasing engagement with gaming and football games over the last decade. It's been a real focus for them. And so we've always looked to be a brand that can insert itself into football culture and try and do it in incredible ways. We partnered with Xbox on their sponsorship of the men and women's England teams of the French Football Federation.

4:34Johnny Whitmore:we've run a campaign called score more with xbox for the last seven years which is about engaging with players and fans of the eafc franchise or formerly fifa and even things that xbox do like their partnership with luke littler are actually um incredibly you know um held in in that football fandom we look at the work that sky sports did a couple of years ago what do they call it they called it uh football dartsmas there's a massive crossover between those two those two audiences So we're always looking for new and interesting ways to insert ourselves into that conversation. And someone came to myself in the Creative Protector with an idea around this insight of what does my team always lose when I'm watching?

5:19Johnny Whitmore:And we thought that was interesting, but we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just us who felt that, that it was happening in the wider space. So we went out and did some pretty extensive social listening and we found tens of thousands of comments across Twitter and Reddit and all of these sites where fans genuinely felt that they were having an impact on the outcome of a professional sports game through the place that they sat on their sofa or whether they were watching on their phone or all these really personal and unique stories. And so we thought there's really something here. But like any creative process, it's iterative.

5:54Johnny Whitmore:So the first version that we came up with, the first idea we came up with off the back of this was actually called the sacrificial fan. And our idea was to go out and find fans who felt that they were unlucky and then sort of pit them head to head over a period of fixtures, sort of a knockout bracket style to see who was the ultimate sacrificial fan. And we sort of wrote it up and we took a step back and we looked at it And we felt that actually whilst the manifestation made sense against the insight, we were going to have a difficult job in making this more broadly interesting for the football fan.

6:31Johnny Whitmore:You know, you might scroll past one video and watch about it if it's related to the fan of your club or if you're just interested in the superstition. But we weren't going to be able to drive sort of a longer term engagement with the program in that way. So we went back to the drawing board and thought about a bit more. And then we came up with this thought, expected jinx, expected goals is a well-known statistic now across most of football fans. The parlance has definitely grown around that in the past three to four years. And I only found out a couple of weeks ago, there was actually the team adopter that developed XG in the first place.

7:07Johnny Whitmore:so when we found that out we were like there's only one partner who we can go to to try and figure this out how do you how do you quantify superstition how do you how do you explore it and then and then how do you give it back to people in a way that feels tangible and so we had a conversation with johnny about could he quantify superstition probably one of the more strange requests that you've had from a potential partner one of our fun projects i have to say um So, yeah, I mean, we took that on, took the brief in terms of being able to kind of quantify a jinx. And ultimately, expected jinx or XJ is a statistic that we built together with Xbox and Opta to quantify or to test how a fan's viewing habits affected their team's results.

7:54Johnny Whitmore:So what you're able to do is essentially look over the previous 10 games. So it was a kind of West Ham fan, as an Arsenal fan. you were able to see how whether you watched at home whether you watched in the stadium or whether you didn't watch the game did you kind of positively affect the results did you negatively affect the results so were you the reason your team lost that game so it was it was a brilliant kind of play on the previous expected goals metric and the kind of expected metrics that are quite prevalent now in the sports analytics world but a really kind of fan-friendly idea and as you said like even talking to friends and family about this campaign and and telling them what I'm up to at work in the last few weeks and I can talk about being a jinx and you know all straight away people are already oh I do this and this is I'm I'm the biggest jinx and it's definitely something that resonates with fans I think I think you know you've got a great insight when you tell people about the campaign and they immediately come up with their own stories that they don't need to think about that hard about they tell you about what they do or how it works or a friend that they know who think I never watch football him because we always lose when he watches so we felt we're really onto something even with the initial conversations that we were having with with Johnny's team and some of the wider people within our organization.

9:04James Donovan:And I think that's an interesting set of details in terms of what the iterations this went through, where you had the sacrificial lamb one, I think, to your point, that is a really good perspective to look on. They're like, that might only be relevant for a certain fan group, whereas everybody has their superstition. So I think that's really insightful. Just to kind of hear the iterations of like, how do you go about creating essentially kind of a branded piece of content that's going to have that ability to have that long tail? um i guess narrative behind it so i think even nothing else just hearing that sort of how you went through the process to figure out how do we make sure that this is something that has specificity but at the same time it also has broad appeal i think trying to find that right balance is something that sounds like you guys have nailed on this particular one particularly as you've described kind of the the different ideas up until that final one that you went with

9:49Johnny Whitmore:yeah and and that was really important for us because at the crux of it we needed fans to get involved with us we needed to provide them with an opportunity to get some value out of it an xj score but in order to get that we needed them to take time to go to the to go to the tool to input their their specific watching um experiences um for us to be able to collate that that data pool ourselves and so we needed to be something it needed to be something that was going to provide that sort of value back to them and i suppose that value manifests itself not just in a data point the XJ score that they got, but then what that enables them to go and do, how enables them to talk to their friends about their level of jinx, their friends' jinx scores, informs the way that they talk about the fandom that they have and their engagement with someone that they love in football.

10:40Johnny Whitmore:So that was really critical for us. I think you see personalised stats becoming more and more prevalent in the industry in terms of the likes of the fanalytics on Sky Sports. being able to actually look at like what the fans or friends of people around you are doing so again again that personalized number for what how you individually influence your team was massive and then we developed that out actually afterwards in terms of being able to give personalized statistics based on what's your kind of win rate when you're watching win rate when you're not watching and personalized to every single fan which is not something that you ever see in the kind of current world of statistics so it was a really great insight to get everyone to engage

11:22James Donovan:with it like individually taking a bit of a step back james mentioned you know opta came to mind just given the the reputation that you guys have kind of a marketing sort of b2b question how do you sort of look at it in the sense that you have this really valuable asset that's that's opta this ip that everyone knows about but sometimes people don't recognize that that's a part of stats perform i mean i would imagine from like a fan perspective like that probably doesn't matter but like from a from an industry perspective just kind of that relationship between like there's opta the stats perform just where that comes for you from a marketing perspective how you make sure

11:57Johnny Whitmore:those two things are married up yeah i think stats perform are the company that their own opta as a brand i guess so it's something that through opta jo opta analyst more recently it's it's a brand that resonates with sports fans again talking to friends family that's the name that people associate with in terms of you said it when you came to us it's like the opta name holds weight in the football world especially with statistics so yeah as i say yeah it's not always the clearest thing but in terms of yeah that brand weight holds so much and yeah ultimately we're owned by stats performers and the but the brand itself of opta is is something that people trust in terms of they know the data is is you know reliable accurate and they see it on places like broadcasters sky sports the bbc and you know known broadcasters have used it for years so and um i think that was really important that credibility for us with the campaign because let's be honest superstition is is not that serious uh it sort of led us to the the more emotional and irrational side of of the fan experience and so fanatic right yeah so um so we felt that you know it was important for us to work with a partner that would bring a level of credibility when we're talking about about a non-serious and a less serious topic area than some of some of the others that you might go down from a from a sports marketing standpoint and actually the dichotomy between those two presented a real interesting opportunity in terms of creating something that was that was novel and that fans hadn't seen before you know fans are now i think quite versed in sports data and they utilize it in their own conversations and and they utilize it in it helps validate the views that they have around their team and around their sport we're we're we're sort of created something that validates their fan experience in in a similar way and also provides them with that ammunition for them to have that chat in the pub or have that chat to the to their mate who they sit next to in the stadium so and we felt that we were actually providing them something tangible as well in the way that opt to do for for sports fans every time you watch a game yeah and perhaps trying this or you can take

14:02James Donovan:us into how'd you actually build expected jinx you know what goes into and i think not only what goes into building the statistic but then on the flip side we've talked about this is something that's meant to be social something that is meant to be shareable so i'd imagine this is trying to take something that yes it's fun but it has its complexities but then you've also got to distill it down into something that is shareable and i think to the point james made also credible because like if it's just random numbers like i think we've all done these like what's your personality say about you and it's probably just something random generated where just it's that balance of there's clearly some methodology behind it with complexity it needs to be put into something that is simple and shareable and then james's point still has to be able to rely on the optibrand that like you know it isn't just some generator yeah yeah it's got to be it's the same of any

14:50Johnny Whitmore:metric that we build right there's a balance of insight and the simplicity of it so it has to be intuitive it has to mean something tangible so that was it was when we were going through the design process we had a few different ideas or different kind of routes to go down that we discussed um in terms of we could have built the most fancy model that would have taken into account you know how many late goals did you concede how many comebacks did they you make in a game and what individual moments affected the jinx as such but ultimately we decided to keep it really simple really intuitive and focused on basically a really complicated model in the background opt as live win probability but ultimately kept it a really simple number at the end so it expected jinx is essentially saying how many points you cost your team so it's a number that makes sense it's intuitive it's easy to explain to somebody that i cost arsenal six points this season or i'm the reason west ham lost the last five or six points yeah and so that's always a balance and i think you can't get a metric people have to believe in the metric people have to understand the metric to then be able to relay those stories and i think that's ultimately that there's the art there's an art of finding that balance are you able to wizard of oz pull back

16:08James Donovan:the card and just sort of kind of outlay what some of that was yeah so in terms of the light

16:14Johnny Whitmore:and probability model for the op to have. It's built off, I think, a team strength model of 14 ,000 teams across the globe. So you go down to the fifth division of Australian football, and it's amazing context. But ultimately, that's built by millions of data points over the kind of historical op-to-database. We take the recent form, historical form, kind of context about kind of squads going into the weekends and that side of things. So what we had is the win probability for every single game. So we talk about that kind of 10 game window that we looked over and say how many points we would expect a team to have got over that period.

16:53Johnny Whitmore:And then ultimately, depending if you watched it at home or in the stadium, made those adjustments to say, you know, did you being at the game? Did you cost them points or did you win ultimately win the game? So, yeah, powered by quite a complicated model in the background, but kept it really simple in the output.

17:10James Donovan:And how long did that take to actually build that out? Or is it more a matter of we have the data, it's just a matter of picking which data we want to apply with it? Like how long does that process go from getting the request and to be like, here's something we think that tangibly works?

17:24Johnny Whitmore:I think it was a longer process because it was a back and forth of the different ideas. Ultimately, we had to kind of proof test it as well in terms of the idea may make sense, but if everybody's watching every single game, you're not going to get very interesting numbers. So the one thing you guys asked for actually was having the differentiation between the fans. So actually over that 10 game window, you could have 56 ,000 combinations of results. So that's what we didn't want everyone to be the same jinx. We wanted that kind of unique score for each individual fan. So yeah, there was a lot of back and forth on the ideas, the outputs, the biggest possible fans and all sorts of complicated plots that we shared.

18:07Johnny Whitmore:There was, I mean, we even ran in the office a bit of a test to see how many results people could remember where they watched it. And actually beyond sort of a 10 game window, so about a sort of six to seven week window, people like, well, is that, did I watch that? Was that in last season or so? So we thought settling on 10 games was the right level. It also, you know, we're asking people to invest their time and attention in an economy where time and attention are a premium. So we needed to make sure we got the balance right between creating something that was engaging for people to participate in.

18:40Johnny Whitmore:They felt they were going to get something out of the back of, but we weren't going to have a lot of people who got halfway through the process. And then when this is taking too long and drop off and they don't get their score and you don't get the understanding of their viewing habits. So we sort of had to try and find that balance in the middle.

18:54James Donovan:Now, taking a bit of a step back, Johnny, just talking about data you referenced, maybe it was James referenced you in the last three or four years, you know, expected goals. has become a part of the dialogue when people speak. That's something that three or four years wasn't talked about. How do you guys adopt to see the evolution of the role stats play within sports, going from just pretty standard basic statistics to more advanced stuff? For me, I'm a huge fantasy sports player. So for me, those advanced metrics matter. He's like, yeah, maybe so-and-so didn't score a goal. But his XG is really high, so he's probably worth a transfer because the statistics say he's going to pick that up.

19:32James Donovan:I do the same thing with American football. You can do depth per yard of attempted pass that might say that he's due for a breakout. How have you seen the evolution of what fans are engaging with from a data perspective?

19:46Johnny Whitmore:That's huge. The modern fan is completely different to what they were years ago. I mean, even those metrics you referenced, you would be laughing about that 10 years ago. And it's been football or less so maybe in the US sports. But the modern fan is way more data savvy. They demand that insight. Ultimately, we live in a world where access is everything and fans want the same access that the clubs have these days. The pundits have on Monday Night Football in the UK. We've spent, I think we've been 30 years of Optus and we've built this football with the football in the Premier League 30 years ago versus now.

20:24Johnny Whitmore:And you can see that the state of data has completely changed. But ultimately, yeah, it's the fan wants something different now. And we can now really add depth and context to every conversation, every argument that you have for your friend about football. There's always a number that can back that up and create a discussion. Again, we've seen the Optum supercomputer this season, the predictions, all the pundits on Sky Sports debating the numbers in it. And it creates content. Straight away, you've got that discussion. You've got an argument. You've got shows dedicated to stats now. And it's just a conversation that you wouldn't have had 10 years ago and that you're now having with friends, with family who didn't even understand what I did as a job years ago.

21:05Johnny Whitmore:And now they're telling me about expected goals and it's on every broadcast that you see. So it's a completely different conversation these days.

21:12James Donovan:And then in terms of the value of it, you know, we used to, I think data would have been thought of data. Sorry, depending on which country. I want to switch back to my American-ness there. Just in terms of like potential commercial value, there's obviously we're talking about the sense of from a fandom perspective, but then the potential commercial value, because this is something like, you know, this is an example of where data can now be brought in, you know, as a business, how you guys are thinking about things that data is not just something that can be performance driven. in but this is also now something that could be commercially viable for other different types of partnerships just how you guys view that or how you've seen the transition of

21:48Johnny Whitmore:the value of data yeah again a huge change with you the biggest brands in the world now are coming to us um the likes of xbox and and stuff where they want that authentic brand association where whether it's taking optus brand or whether they've got a partner and they're looking to work with a club or in the world of sports and it's a it's an authentic natural way to integrate a partner into a sponsorship it adds that kind of natural but also live and repeatable um functionality so people again the modern fan wants to see data they want to see evidence they want to see something tangible back things up so we're seeing huge numbers of partners want to get involved and and add numbers and kind of that kind of evidence behind their campaigns so rather than just any kind of being an add-on association with a brand or sponsorship it's like you can create that authentic feel when when you're working together it's interesting i did a presentation

22:46James Donovan:at our sports pro ai event and i actually use the example of what you guys did with barcelona who remind me of who the um stanley so yeah and it was the best built goal and that was that example of sort of taking data real-time analytics to then create that into your point a repeatable output week on week that had tangibility it aligned with what stanley was doing as a business it aligned with the data that you guys had but it presented it in what is was a simple but yet interesting way and just sort of applying that model to each particular partner that might be

23:19Johnny Whitmore:coming on board yeah so that's the perfect example where stanley's somebody who aren't necessarily naturally associated with sports were able to build that into a data concept to the build up to a goal and rather than just having their logo on graphics we actually had the logo in something relevant and that kind of made sense and yeah i mean that was a hugely successful campaign for for barcelona ourselves and stanley i think for for brands and agencies like data has for a long time been a really important input into into the marketing marketing process i think that the the reason that the partnership worked so well on on this was that ops obviously bring that data credibility but data in itself is I don't think that inherently interesting to a broader consumer especially when we're talking about it to the level of detail that that Johnny was so the way the role that we have as uh as an agency is to bring sort of accessibility and entertainment to that data uh and make it easily understandable easily shareable you know how do you talk how do you talk about it in the pub and we think the XJ concept did that but also some of the voices that we worked with and media partners who have that credibility also in the football space.

24:35Johnny Whitmore:So we worked with the likes of Mark Goldbridge and Angry Ginch, who are sort of these authentic fan voices. Mark Goldbridge famous for being thought of as a massive jinx for Man United. So we thought he was a perfect fit to translate that concept and that thought that the fan has around their own jinx ability of their team into something that people can pick up and run with and used to infer their own fan experience, which I think is where brands and agencies get real value and fans feel like they're generating that value as well. I think as well, because you can get that unique aspect to it as well and it feels more natural in terms of like, Mark Goldbridge is this much of a jinx, but what am I?

25:20Johnny Whitmore:Or what's Angry Ginge? You can have that like, again, back to the personalization we spoke about at the start. You can feel part of the campaign by having a number associated with yourself rather than just more kind of a generic aspect to it.

25:32James Donovan:And speaking of the campaign from the brand side, you know, Xbox could work with many different partners, go many different directions. As they were going into this, sort of how, you know, why this particular campaign, what were the metrics for success? You know, what were they hoping to get out of it? Because like you said, you would have had the freedom, the flexibility to go in many different directions. You know, I'm an Xbox guy. I've played many FIFA, now EAFC, but also grew up on Halo. You know, there's multiple directions. Why specifically the sports angle and then sort of what the outcome was going to be other than just like, hey, we just want to create a really nice piece of content.

26:10Johnny Whitmore:So this campaign actually was specifically focused on driving more engagement with the EFC franchise. The sort of thought behind that is that if you find out that you're a jinx, we will give you copies of FIFA or FC points or Xboxes in order for you to not watch your team but play FC instead. And we gave away a ton of prizes throughout the campaign across social channels. Ultimately, through the tool, we ended up finding Xbox's unluckiest fan. There was a chap called Tommy from up in Liverpool. He was just brilliant. He was a normal guy, state agent, but he would basically throw away a Liverpool kit if they lost a game in it.

26:55Johnny Whitmore:and you have to go and buy a new one. So he was going through like 20 kits a season and his friends, we all knew him as the jinx. They wouldn't want to go and watch the game with him because they were worried that Liverpool were going to use. And so we managed to find this game. We've actually sponsored him through to the end of the season in terms of giving him an Xbox and giving him enough EFC points that he can play to his heart's content instead of having to watch any more Liverpool games. So, you know, the central focus here was all around driving engagement with FC. I suppose in terms of success metrics, we're always looking at things like how many people complete the calculation.