ESPN Cricinfo is offering more premium video inventory during the Cricket World Cup as it attempts to claim its “rightful position” in the online cricket market.
It is hoping to make hay while the sun shines during next month's Cricket World Cup by expanding its Match Point web show to a full-scale TV-quality outside broadcast which will be streamed on the site.
The series will be presented in two ESPN markets, those who have the rights to the CWC such as the US and those who don’t, such as Australia.
The series has attracted panellists including Michael Holding, Michael Bevan, Martin Crowe, Raunak Kapoor, Isa Guha, Jonathon Trott, and Ajit Agarkar.
For those not intimately familiar with the series or any of those names, it’s a cricket panel show presented on the ESPN Cricinfo site after a day’s play at the cricket, talking about all the googlies, wrong’uns, twists and turns of the day.
As thrilling as that is for ardent cricket fans, it attracts only a modest following and modest revenue for the site.
Instead of one show streamed per day, ESPN is aiming to do three shows during each match day of the World Cup.
Speaking with AdNews ahead of the announcement of the initiative, ESPN head of digital products and partnerships Lance Peatey said the series would be a full-scale outside broadcast, streamed live on the Cricinfo website.
“That is a digital media first in that it's not just live stream in a backpack, we are doing a full-scale TV outside broadcast and bringing it to the digital realm,” he said.
So you’re doing a live broadcast. That’s nice
While it’s impressive, that’s hardly the most compelling thing about the program. The impressive thing is just how much more inventory ESPN will have to play with.
“That does give us more inventory. In a digital sense there'll be the live stream itself, which will go anywhere from 15 minutes through to 40 minutes,” Peatey said.
All in all across the match days during the World Cup, there will be 108 opportunities for pre-roll, 108 opportunities for integration, and that’s before you get to what ESPN is planning to do around social.
“So there's the livestream component, which has a presenting partnership options etcetera alongside it, but, needless to say, Match Point will be clipped up into VOD [video on demand], and that will be on Cricinfo afterward,” Peatey said.
“So if we have one of our key experts say something insightful or controversial, we'll certainly clip that up cricinfo and push it out through social channels as well.”
Peatey will be secretly hoping at least one of the panellists proves to be a loose cannon, in order to give it more opportunities to clip up moments of controversy.
While it doesn’t have the rights to the CWC in Australia, it does have the rights to Match Point all around the world.
Essentially what it means is that from an internet show which is sometimes only presented once a day, ESPN has taken the premise and given advertisers 108 opportunities to run pre-roll, not including any additional inventory which is available through additional clips or social media posts.
“The targets are tough to quantify, and I can’t at this stage put a number on the number of streams. Suffice to say that with Cricinfo’s video streams ... exponential growth will be expected across the video pre-roll streams,” Peatey said.
He's putting some bullish targets around its inventory.
“This will be selling at very high premium CPMs, the premium CPMs in market for sport are $50 plus...so we expect that. If you were buying in for spot buys on that, the match point initiative is drawing at least that,” Peatey said.
The drawing board
However, all of this and the “exponential” inventory created because of the push wouldn’t be possible without the support of major partner Destination NSW.
“When we started having discussions a year ago, we realised we needed something to really give it that initial push,” Peatey said. “We had these properties sitting within digital and we started to think about how we could exploit them.”
Eventually, the team struck upon the idea of doing an outside broadcast. It adds to the complexity of production, but provides an opportunity for an advertiser to be in the background. In this case, Sydney.
Destination NSW decided to sponsor the initiative from ESPN, given cricinfo is being pushed out to key tourism markets including the UK and India.
“We’re really able to expose NSW to the world,” Peatey said. “So it was really a natural fit for us and for them to showcase Sydney during the CWC.”
That “other” cricket site
Rival cricket website cricket.com.au has been making a lot of noise lately about being the number one cricket site in the Australian market.
The site, run by cricket Australia, has being going head to head with Cricinfo for cricketing eyeballs, and therefore cricketing dollars.
It’s something which has rankled ESPN.
“By the end of this, we’re going to have a massive story to tell. It’s really going to us in a position locally for cricinfo to be in our rightful place as number one cricket site in the market,” Peatey said.
“There’s some competitors that are making a lot of noise at the moment ... [cricket.com.au] is doing a great job, they’re focusing on us. From our point of view it’s flattering to be the benchmark, and to have them consistently reference us as someone they want to be like”
However, the latest Nielsen numbers put cricket.com.au ahead of Cricinfo for the first time ever on a monthly basis.
Its total unique audience hit 1.08 million, up 46% from a year ago. Not that cricket.com.au was taking Cricinfo's lunch.
“No. All the data we have doesn’t suggest that for a second,” Peatey said.
Despite the bullish stance, ESPN felt the need to respond in October to the claims put into the marketplace by Cricket Australia.
“We did respond to their claim about being number one in market previously, around October. We generally don’t like to respond to those things, but when the facts aren’t the facts, you can’t let that go,” Peatey said.
“Rolling up MyCricket into your overall number to compare to ESPN Cricinfo ... is that really comparing like for like? We’ll let the market judge that.”
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.