The sports world is in a flap – major media players are citing studies left, right and centre that show declining engagement in sports viewership and participation from every marketer’s golden target – the millennial (those born between the early 1980s and mid 1990s.) The story of doom and gloom spouts statistics such as ESPN’s loss of 10% of its subscribers in the last three years and how the 2016 Rio Olympics drew the oldest television audience since 1960.
Millennials still engage with sports, in fact they may do so more than their parents and grandparents. We just need to serve them content in a way that is fit for the millennial, the digital native, the hyper-connected, the socially aware, the conscious consumer.
Firstly, we must address the medium in which the audience engage with sport. The latest OzTam Multi Screen Report shows that young people just simply do not watch television anywhere near as much as they used to. The data claims that over 65s are watching 135 hours of live television per month whilst teens are watching just 20 hours. Television audiences are greying.
If millennials are watching television, they are staring at their phones most of the time. Nielsen's recent Millennials on Millennials Report confirmed just this, as millennials scored an average ad memorability of 38%, 10%points lower than the 48% viewers 35 and older. Why? Because they aren’t watching the television ads, they are looking at their other devices. We need to increase the speed of shift to millennial-friendly platforms and follow the eyeballs.
Secondly, sports stars are now idolised differently than how they were in any previous generation due to the access that is now available to athletes – with thanks, of course, to their social media accounts. These days, how they are as a person outside of their sport makes a huge difference to how they are received as a player. Millennials are absorbing this kind of information and making the connection between themselves and the sporting world in a different way. If anything, they are more engaged with sports stars than their parents and grandparents ever were because of this.
The access millennials have to athletes is more intimate than ever before. New age sports fans are evaluating athletes not only on their athletic ability, but how they are as a person. Our sports idols now have unprecedented influence, though with this also comes the ability to see this influence sink just as dramatically. Take Israel Folau for example. The man is one of the all-time great Wallabies, but his opinions on the LGBTQI community is something that has been hugely controversial and has seen his personal brand drastically affected because of it. Millennials are seeing past his performance metrics and engaging with, and responding to, his personality and beliefs.
These lead on to the last point – the content millennials crave is different, but it doesn’t mean it’s less valid. Young people are increasingly ignoring the content themes that have for years, been thought of as the holy grail of sports, e.g. scoresheets and statistics. They are heading to alternative platforms and content providers to go beyond the standard sports experience. Personalities are bigger drivers of video-viewing than performance metrics. At 20FOUR, we find our best performing content features big sports stars but puts them in a non-sport related or humorous context, such as AFL star Phil Davis’s Tinder Takeover.
If we connect with millennials and engage them with suitable sports content that is relevant to their culture and social awareness, and make sports stars continually more accessible and deliver them sports content in a way that fits into their digitally-savvy lifestyle – we could just have the biggest cohort of sports fans ever on our hands.
Sam Rix is the growth marketing manager at 20FOUR, a sports social content platform that produces authentic personal and branded content to create genuine connections between fans and athletes.