It’s simple business, once you have a mature product you look to either expand the reach of the existing product or create a new product. Sports is no different. In a world filled with cord cutters, digital television, and endless content, to compete, ESPN and Fox Sports have turned to one of the oldest and most global sports around to enhance their portfolio options for American sports fans.
Soccer has always struggled to fully catch hold in the United States against the likes of the NFL, MLB, NBA, and even Nascar. The MLS is continuing to grow, but is still seen as a minor league compared to the English Premier League or La Liga. ESPN saw this as an opportunity to expand its brand through a new/old sport and broadcasted every World Cup game on its family of networks in 2014. This year it will be showing the Euro Cup which features a World Cup esque tournament with only teams from Europe invited. Fox Sports on the other side will be broadcasting Copa America which is the World Cup of the Americas and is hosted in various sites across the United States, this year with the final being at the iconic Soldier Field in Chicago.
Some data I put together last for Adobe Digital Index shows that the push for Soccer to grow in the states may finally be working. The growth in share of buzz from the United States, for Champions League, more than doubled since 2014 when ESPN led a charge to push soccer on American fans hungry for summer sports.
With soccer interest growing in the United States, how does a premier league like the NBA compare with its global growth? Every year the NBA playoffs go head to head with Champions League for global sports supremacy. According to a report I did last year for Adobe Digital Index, of the American sports, the NBA is definitely the most international with 39% of its social buzz coming from outside the United States. Of course the U.S. is not much of a soccer country, but on a global stage, few things can compete with Champions League or the World Cup.
When you look at just the athletes, soccer definitely dominate the global stage. Lionel Messi, the multiple time FIFA player of the year, has more than 3x the mentions that LeBron James has during a peak time of the year for both.
Also, 7 of the top ten followed athletes on Twitter play soccer including #1 Christiano Ronaldo who has 90 more million fans than LeBron James and scored 3 spots higher on the Forbes highest paid athletes list.
ESPN dominates sports coverage, but the battlefield for the next big thing is happening on the soccer pitch against Fox Sports. Gone are the days of soccer being on ESPN the Ocho with each brand putting day long coverage for each event. With the buzz growth, continued expansion and rise of Major League Soccer within the United States, and push for new ad dollars by major sports networks, it’s only a matter of time before this new (old) product takes hold. Soccer will begin to competing for athletes and ad dollars in the United States, and the data shows that it may not be too far off.
The post The Fight for New Sports Ad Dollars Starts on the Pitch appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.
from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/fight-new-sports-ad-dollars-starts-pitch/
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