Tuesday: A Big Day in Women's Sports

 

Women’s sports had a lot going on Tuesday.

The activity on the playing surfaces was actually a bit limited. The WNBA played three games. FIBA held a couple of Eurobasket group stage contests. The WTA’s grass court season continued with early round matches. The National Women's Soccer League and Athletes Unlimited had offdays.

The action occurred in my inbox and LinkedIn feed.

Alyssa Meyers reported in Morning Brew's Marketing Brew Newsletter how Disney Advertising had announced a new initiative called Level Up. It invites advertisers to make a blanket buy across women’s sports content on ESPN platforms. Disney Advertising President Rita Ferro’s department is looking for a minimum spend of $5 million for an advertiser to participate (though they will offer some flexibility in the total dollars and allocations). In order for that size of expenditure guarantee to make sense for the client, it strikes me that they’ll need to see some value beyond just getting a bunch of 30-second spots in game telecasts. At least two additional components might need to be present.

One is that advertisers might want Level Up to act as a “Women’s Sports Upfront,” in which brands commit a certain amount of dollars all at once because they can get favorable rates and placements. One thing I heard a lot about at SXSW this year was how companies wanting to support women’s sports through their ad buys need more inventory with which to do so. When you’re chasing limited inventory, locking in sufficient quantities of it at decent rates makes sense.

The second has to do with one of the reasons one would support women’s sports specifically in the first place: because you want the audience to perceive you as SUPPORTING WOMEN’S SPORTS. A brand that participates in this program wants more than just the same quantity of eyeballs they can get with a content-agnostic media buy. Fans who care deeply about women’s sports tend to spend to support the brands who seem to share that affinity. Some of that will be apparent by virtue of seeing one’s advertising running in, say, a live game broadcast. But a brand may also seek to capture earned media value from their commitment. Participation in custom content and events were also named as options for Level Up participants. Those assets could be useful beyond just their audience traffic if they help with a brand’s positioning.

I read another article on Tuesday, too. This one, from SportsPro Media’s Josh Sim, contained some stats about the United Kingdom gathered by their Women's Sport Trust, although I’d like to think they potentially reflect preferences in other countries, too. They found that 62% of women’s sports fans consume their sports content live. But they also found that “58 per cent of committed women’s sports fans want more non-live women’s sport content available” and “47 per cent find it difficult to find non-live women’s sports content.”

In the U.S., ESPN’s networks, through their various documentaries, pre- and postgame shows, and robust websites have probably done their part to reduce the number of women’s sports fans who find it difficult to find the non-live content they want. But will they need even more? In some ways, the success of Level Up will depend on having sufficient inventory, both live and otherwise, to fulfill promises to the buyers who join in.

I attended one of the above-mentioned WNBA games Tuesday evening. The Dallas Wings defeated the Atlanta Dream and the home crowd enjoyed it. I’m sure those who watched the TV broadcast on the local regional sports network, Bally Sports Southwest, did as well.

I joined my friend and collaborator Nancy Lieberman at the game. In addition to doing a lot of work with her eponymous charity, I’m also working on a documentary about the Hall of Famer’s life and career. We’ll eventually place it with an ESPN or their competition. We’re positioning it to maximize multi-platform inventory across her rich story. Custom content, events, earned media, and more will be in play in the creative process right from the get-go. Another article that came out Tuesday, this one written by Fuse CEO Louise Johnson for the Sports Business Journal's website, suggested “it’s time for women’s sport to stand on its own and benefit from bespoke activations tailored specifically for women’s sports fans -- creatives take note.”

Some of us are taking note, and, therefore, today’s developments encouraged us. Somebody’s going to need more inventory.

Rush Olson has spent two-plus decades directing creative efforts for sports teams, broadcasters, and related entities. He currently conceives and executes content projects through his companies, Rush Olson Creative & Sports, FourNine Productions and Mint Farm Films. Through MFF, he’s at work on biographical documentaries about Nancy Lieberman, Sidney Moncrief, Pudge Rodríguez, Ed Belfour, and Bob Lilly as well as a show about the The College Gridiron Showcase.

Subscribe to @MintFarmFilms on YouTube to see excerpts from upcoming documentaries.

Why Curiosity Matters For Sponsorship

Success in the sponsorship game hinges on a few factors.

You should have a basic knowledge of the sponsorable property (don’t let someone sell you fourth quarter rotational signage in an ice hockey game).

Like we see in the Progressive Insurance commercial, you should master the skill of opening a PDF document.

And in a non-virtual world, it probably doesn’t hurt to own a business suit that fits reasonably well.

But in the course of discussions with some valued colleagues yesterday, I identified another crucial, yet perhaps undervalued, quality that enhances sponsorship for brands, properties, media, and all others.

Curiosity.

While on a Zoom call with Chris Baylis of the Sponsorship Collective and Heather Clifford of the Vertical Challenge, I suggested that one thing I enjoyed about speaking with Chris was that he was curious. He always wants to know how to make things better and why something worked or didn’t. He then suggested the quality has merit in sponsorship seekers, because you need to desperately want to discover how to create a package that works superbly for a potential client.

I do a lot of interviewing in the course of my work, a task for which curiosity becomes a basic prerequisite. Those skills matter in sales, too (including selling sponsorships). You need to understand your customer’s businesses as deeply as possible to solve their problems for them.

In sponsorship, it wasn’t always that way. In my early days working for the Texas Rangers, I remember a sponsorship executive telling me that the customers who tended to sponsor the club were those who had executives who loved the team or the sport. He didn’t have to dig into audience data. He just had to find Rangers fans in a nice suit.

The process in media was a little more rigorous, but still not great by modern standards. In another of Tuesday’s conversations, Lauren Allison of MVP reminisced with me about the old measurements of TV viewership via Nielsen diaries. I recalled buying billboards in neighborhoods we knew hosted an oversampling of Nielsen families. As a TV station promotion director, I was trying to game the system.

Curious people like Chris and Lauren make it harder to unload sponsorships based on imprecise reasoning. They do valuations to enable inquisitive brands to determine the actual value of that baseball package they just bought that included a sign in the bullpen, title sponsorship of the manager’s radio show, and a dozen baseballs autographed by José Guzmán.

Curiosity comes in handy on the brand side, too, not just the sales side. You’ve got to think about all the ways your company can benefit from attributes associated with the property. Can your sales team use hospitality assets? Could sports content built around DEI help your Chief Diversity Offer in her mission? How can you use specific activations to microtarget important audience segments? Lauren and I discussed silos within companies. Silos are the enemies of curiosity. And of maximally effective sponsorships.

For sponsorships to grow as a part of marketing mixes, the industry has to continue to seek new ways to implement and measure them. While I didn’t get to actually speak with my friend Sophie Morris yesterday, a post on her LinkedIn page brought me to a recent survey by the European Sponsorship Association. Their work indicated that confidence in the industry is rising as we (hopefully) begin to emerge from the pandemic, and noted “a significant majority of those surveyed acknowledged that sponsorship needs to evolve.” You don’t evolve or innovate without the desire – indeed, the drive - to actively do so. Sophie and her partner at Millharbour Marketing, Manu Cendron, have mad curiosity skills and it shows in their research and sponsorship consulting work.

As a matter of fact, when I’m in London, Manu and I tend to be especially curious about pint glasses filled with different varieties of stout.

So curiosity matters in the planning and evaluation stages of sponsorships (and also at the pub, apparently). But it’s also at the heart of what makes sponsorship work, because a huge part of the job of sponsorship is to develop curiosity in the people most important to all of us in the industry: the audience. Whether it’s a logo on a press conference backdrop that drives someone to wonder what that brand is that they’ve never heard of or the video about DEI in sport that gets someone interested in the brand’s values regarding that subject, effective sponsorship makes fans want to explore and perhaps discover what’s at the bottom of that sales funnel. At that point, basic curiosity benefits the bottom line.

Thanks for reading this. I’d like to note that I would heartily recommend assuaging your own curiosity about all the people I namechecked in this article. They’re all really good at what they do and could make your sponsorship efforts better whether you work with a brand, property, media outlet, agency, or otherwise.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

MintFarmFilms.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports 

Virtual Victors: Fast Pitch 2020

Thursday night, EMBRACE Action won.

The North Texas nonprofit earned the People’s Choice Award at the annual Fast Pitch competition. That’s not unusual. The Dallas Influencers in Sports and Entertainment organization has awarded the honor, this year sponsored by sponsorship data firm MVP, every year since 2015. What was strange this year was the winner couldn’t take the award home with them.

Normally a half dozen charities make presentations in front of judges and an audience of sports and entertainment industry types. The panel deliberates and doles out monetary grants in amounts they deem appropriate to the quality of the presentations. The crowd gives out more money to one of the six via the People’s Choice balloting.

But 2020 has frowned on gatherings. And passing awards between undersanitized hands. But it has driven home the need for kindness and generosity in one’s community. DISE decided it needed to still have a Fast Pitch.

Maintaining a sense of normalcy has proven challenging throughout the pandemic, and few professions have felt its impact more than those involved in planning live events. Many have canceled their gatherings altogether. Others have looked for ways to host them virtually, but one can’t possibly exactly duplicate the experience of a prestigious, rollicking, or meaningful program via electronic means.

To make the most of what you’ve got to work with, it helps to start by thinking about what you would have aimed to accomplish had you held the event live. And then to think about ways to still achieve those goals and, if possible, add enhancements unique to the virtual world.

For Fast Pitch, we identified this list:

•          Celebrate charities who do good things for the community

•          Celebrate a prominent sports figure who has made an impact

•          Actually do some good for the community through donations and awareness

•          Bring DFW industry professionals together for networking

•          Provide value for sponsors

•          Show what a vibrant sports & entertainment industry DFW has and position it as a leader among markets worldwide

•          Have fun (and cocktails)

OK, I might have added the cocktails part myself. But I didn’t get any pushback either.

The nonprofits normally get two things from Fast Pitch: funds through grants and notoriety via getting to tell their stories on stage. The organization luckily did have some funds available for grants. They decided to select three charities, with the DISE Philanthropy Committee choosing from among applications.

Without presentations on a stage, the notoriety portion seemed trickier. Here’s where we decided to utilize the advantages a virtual approach supplies. We realized we didn’t have to limit ourselves to just a one-day event. A rich mix of online content might allow us to achieve an even broader footprint for Fast Pitch spread over multiple days instead of just one bang-up evening.

We wanted a heavy dose of video to mimic the energy of a live stage. Specific communication resonates better than general, so rather than simply run overview videos for each grantee, we would ask the nonprofits to each supply us with three stories of ways they had helped a particular person, neighborhood, or cause. We’d create scripts and videos about the stories and run them on DISE social channels leading up to a virtual finale event. We’d still award a People’s Choice Award at the finale, but instead of just having one night of balloting, we’d allow individuals to vote once per day for 10 days. We wanted the community to have ample time to explore these organizations and for them to rally their supporters.

Who should we have tell these stories? Our distinguished collection of narrators featured sponsor representatives, including The Marketing Arm, the Dallas Mavericks, Tony Fay PR, and MVP, along with DISE board members and our finale emcee, Julie Dobbs from The Ticket and The Mom Game. We hoped this social media-centric approach would add a level of engagement across multiple days, with likes, shares, and comments from the narrators, their organizations, the beneficiaries, and all of their networks.

2020 influenced not only how we recognized the charities, but how we selected them. All summer, DISE programming had addressed the erupting racial tensions. So the Philanthropy Committee members looked for organizations whose missions included both service to children and social justice. They found three excellent ones:

• After8ToEducate

• EMBRACE Action

• Youth With Faces

Normally at the Fast Pitch event, we have a headlining music act of the caliber of U2 or Taylor Swift. We needed to duplicate their powerful impact, but I had, unfortunately, misplaced Taylor’s number.

OK, we haven’t convinced Taylor Swift to play a Fast Pitch yet (although Downtown Doug did a nice set one year). But we still needed attention-getting content to supplement the charity stories. We decided we’d have board members Hunter Harvin and Quashan Lockett do a retrospective on the social justice in sports webinar series DISE had held earlier in the year in conjunction with Black Sports Professionals – North Texas and the Women in Sports and Events DFW chapter. It would be poignant, but we also needed some content that could duplicate the exuberance everybody feels during the one time a year when the whole industry gets together. We needed to be, you know, fun. Even without cocktails. Or Taylor Swift.

Luckily DISE President Carla Rosenberg saw the vision. She let my colleague Dave French and I record video of her in front of a green screen and she gave a great performance while we threw her footballs and stabbed her with a hockey stick (the referee would have assessed me a five-minute spearing major penalty and a game misconduct in a real game).

The fast-paced result proved to be exactly what we needed as an opening video. If DISE members hadn’t picked up on the vision before, they could now. And they were energized. They could now see that Fast Pitch was still gonna be cool.

We put a couple more talented board members to work doing fun videos promoting the People’s Choice Award and the online auction (presented by Polsinelli), plus a promo from Julie. We also got all the charity stories videos shot and edited.

Meanwhile, we also wanted to find a prominent local athlete to honor with the Heart of Dallas Award, presented by Southwest Airlines. Past honorees have included Clayton Kershaw, Emmitt Smith, Jamie Benn, Troy Aikman, and Dirk Nowitzki, so we wanted to keep that run of quality going. Luckily the board saw an obvious choice in a Dallas Cowboys Pro Bowler who had both talked the talk and walked the walk on social justice and community service this year: DeMarcus Lawrence.

Thankfully Lawrence accepted the honor, designating the Ronald McDonald House to receive $10,000 on his behalf.

We tried to make the virtual happy hour finale fun, with Rosenberg and Board Chair Kern Egan even proposing drinking games involving the evening’s sponsors, Andrews Distributing and Red Bull (see how I worked cocktails back in there?). Via SPORTFIVE’s bespoke virtual events platform, we did much of the affair live, with a few pre-recorded bits. I’m not going to tell you which parts were pre-done - watch Julie’s DeMarcus Lawrence interview and see if you can guess which it was.

We wrapped it all up on time and, at the end, EMBRACE Action won the People’s Choice balloting. Just like a deserving nonprofit does every year. And we felt like we got all our boxes checked in terms of what we wanted to accomplish with the virtual version of the event. Thanks to social media interaction and the chat window at the finale, we even felt good about the networking angle. All the same, we’ll be happy to put 2020 behind us and do Fast Pitch in person next year. With cocktails.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

RushOlson.com

MintFarmFilms.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports