Sports Sponsorship as a Service
When the call for submissions to the 2017 SXSW PanelPicker opened up, my friend Steven Kalifowitz at Twitter shot me a DM and asked if I might be interested in submitting a panel idea with him.
After a few days, we managed to sync up across a giant swath of timezones (NY to Singapore, to be exact) and discuss what we might care enough about to devote the time and energy needed to produce a panel that we would expect anyone to sit through. We both had ideas but neither had a set agenda in mind, so we really just started riffing about things we were paying a lot of attention to at the time. Twitter had been on a tear, signing live streaming rights deals with everyone from CBS News and Bloomberg to the NFL, my beloved Pac-12 and other sports rights owners and both of us had all the thoughts about potential future implications from those and other digital sports rights deals. It quickly became clear we had found the general territory for our panel, now we just needed to hone in on our sharper point.
As we continued to talk, we started talking about the stark contrast between the world of digital ads, especially on platforms like Facebook, Google or Twitter where the targeting can get so granular, vs the majority of the sports world that still used broad sponsorship models (e.g. “The official beer of the NFL”) and offered very little opportunity to drill down and target subsets of the larger sports fan audience. We also talked about trends like sponsor logos finally making their way to the big U.S. sports leagues, starting with the NBA in 2017. As sports rights holders look to grow their revenues, is it safe to say that adopting more Google-esque models to ad monetization are an inevitability? How might that change the sports experience in stadium and at home/anywhere that someone is watching a particular game or match?
These are the sort of questions that Steve and I are setting out to answer with our panel, SSaaS: Sports Sponsorship as a Service, which is currently seeking your vote in the 2017 SXSW PanelPicker. Help us join the conversation at SXSports with a vote today.
