How to Create Digital Offerings that Click with the Mobile-Native Generations
During my last years working in the sports industry, I realized that many organizations struggle to connect with the mobile-native generations. Many of them lack a coherent digital strategy and, in particular, a clear vision for their digital offering. With this whitepaper, I want to help them to formulate this vision. In order to get there, we will first look at the bigger picture and see how the digital entertainment market is changing. Then, we dive head-first into distilling the success factors that make digital offerings resonate with GenZ and Alpha.
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Professional sports are competing with a number of entertainment offerings that have grown exponentially in recent years: streaming services, websites, newsletters, gaming, etc. - consumer choice is virtually endless today. Individuals that grew up in the mobile age, the infamous GenZ and Generation Alpha, have completely different media consumption habits than older generations. Digital Platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, or TikTok are all more relevant to them than TV.
The sheer endless choice of entertainment options they have means that sports have to work hard to stay relevant. So far, it’s a losing battle. According to data such as this 2020 Morning Consult study, GenZers self-identify significantly less often as sports fans than older generations.
The same study found that 39% of GenZ fans are never watching live sports. Among Millennials, it’s only half that number. For mobile natives, clips and highlights on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok have replaced sports highlight shows on TV. Meanwhile, live games are struggling with shortening attention spans. Snackable content is increasingly important in order to reach the GenZ.
And in order to keep them engaged, you need to give them more ways to participate and influence their experience. Here’s how Marcos Gonzalez-Flower, Atos’ Global Head of Media Competence Center, put it in a recent piece about GenZ’s sports-watching habits:
Another consequence of the rise of social media and multi-platforms is that young fans, unlike their elders, are not satisfied with being confined to a passive role. Gen Zers want to become participants rather than consumers. They don’t want to be delivered a standardized feed where decisions have already been made for them.
Conversely, live game attendance, an important pillar in many sports organizations’ revenue mix, isn’t your average young person’s favorite activity. Meanwhile, digital consumption - i.e. paying for subscriptions, in-game content, and NFTs - is an everyday routine for most digital-native individuals.
These trends are not going to reverse. Here’s my prognosis: Due to the internet’s global scale, many interest niches - from BBQ to sewing - managed to grow sizeable audiences and their own stars. This development is set to continue. As attention is a scarce resource and attention distribution a zero-sum game - there are only so many hours humans have to spend on entertainment - sports will never go back to the audience levels of the mass media age. For the same reason, the percentage of GenZ (and following generations) individuals who are sports fans will not get back to the levels of former generations.
And even if it would, the number of different sports they can follow easily is much bigger than it used to be. What’s good news for some is bad news for others: those who are used to mass audiences should be prepared to deal with dwindling audiences (though in the mid-term, some rightsholders might be able to offset this trend with international growth). Smaller sports, on the other hand, can grow significantly if they adapt well to those new conditions.
But audience size is not the only variable that matters (in particular, if you have the right business models in place; more on that in a bit). While the total sports audience size will likely be shrinking, the intensity of fandom among fans will increase significantly.
I use this term to describe the degree to which a fan can immerse himself in a given sport. Back in the day, even the biggest fan had only limited options to dive into his favorite team or player: live games, newspaper articles, and maybe a sports magazine or two. That has completely changed. The smartphone has become our gate to the world. Never before did we have the entire world at our fingertips in the way we do now. All the world's knowledge, information, and entertainment are merely a few taps away.
I’m a good example myself. I live in Germany and I’m an NBA fan. Back in the 90s, I could watch some games and summaries on DSF, a sports TV station back then. Then, for a long time, nobody was showing the NBA over here. When I found out about the NBA’s international league pass offer, it all changed. Suddenly, I was able to watch all the games. But that’s only the beginning. Around that time, the NBA internet started to hit its stride. A lot of incredible blogs and websites (RIP Grantland), NBA podcasts, and YouTubers came along and made it possible to really dive deep. Nowadays, there’s more quality stuff than I could ever digest. If I wanted to, I could consume NBA content 24 hours per day.
Obviously, not all fans want to immerse themselves to such a degree. That’s why I advocate adapting a model that’s popular in music, the fan pyramid. It exists in various forms but this version from Josh Viner is a good starting point: