As upfront season gets underway, media companies are seeing more interest in sports than ever.
The major media companies expect to see 40% of upfront volume going toward sports, according to Peter Lazarus, NBC Sports’ EVP/advertising sales and partnerships. That’s up from around 25% over the last seven years, and Lazarus expects that market share to reach 50% within the next two years.
NBCUniversal kicks off the week next Monday from Radio City Music Hall, and the company is already 95% sold out across all its properties in the second and third quarter. It’s also coming off a sold-out Kentucky Derby (that event happened to have its best audience since 1989, albeit with the help of out-of-home viewing and streaming).
“Demand is strong. Conversations are strong. We’re seeing more and more people move into sports,” said Lazarus. “As we march toward the upfront, we see all the narratives being about live events — big-time sporting events — all the things we’ve been talking about, but it seems to be amplified right now. Sports is the only place to reach big, live audiences and hit those reach numbers with any immediacy, and brands seem to be prioritizing this in ways we haven’t seen before.”
This includes categories that have traditionally shied away from big sports. “We’re seeing more female brands using sports as a vehicle, and we think that will continue to grow. It’s not only a movement in women’s sports — it’s women consuming sports,” said Lazarus.
That includes the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, which Lazarus said will have over 50% of its broadcast be women’s sports.
“We have Big Ten basketball, and we were really proud to have Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking game on Peacock, which drove almost 1 million viewers,” added Lazarus. “We’re starting to have this great roster of women’s sports, and we use our platform On Her Turf, and you’re going to see that come to life again, both in the Olympics and beyond.”
Peacock will also play a large role in the upfront, which Lazarus described as a “huge differentiator.”
“We’re seeing our share of live viewing, things like ‘Sunday Night Football,’ double as a whole,” he said. “We’ve seen Peacock grow almost 5x what it was, and a lot of that’s attributable to our exclusive [NFL] game.”
David Beckham was always a sports marketing icon, but after starring in and co-producing a breakout Netflix documentary last year, his next role may be as a media titan.
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday afternoon, Beckham shared his perspectives on brand building alongside Authentic Brands Group CEO Jamie Salter, whose company reportedly acquired a 55% stake in the Beckham brand for $269 million back in 2022. Throughout the conversation, Beckham reflected on his club, Inter Miami, and its landmark signing of Lionel Messi, as well as the success of “Beckham,” which was co-produced by the retired soccer star’s Studio 99.
Beckham said it took him the better part of a decade to warm up to the idea of such an intimate project, and that he originally signed on for very personal reasons: “I just did it purely to have everything from my career and my life all in one place for my family,” he noted.
Beckham also explained that launching Studio 99 was a natural evolution following his retirement. “I’d spent so many years making content for different brands, to then — at the end of my career — being part of a few other documentaries that our friends were making, and actually really enjoyed it,” Beckham recalled. “So I thought, ‘why not?’ … Build our own studio and then make everything in-house, which is something we’re very proud of.”
The production company was recently commissioned by Disney+ for a doc on the historic feud between Adidas and Puma.
Beckham was humble when asked whether his eponymous doc can take any credit for Netflix’s surging subscriber numbers, but Salter bragged on his behalf: “They definitely did not give us enough,” he said.
FloSports has been experimenting with how it presents its 25 sports and over 300 partners, eyeing changes not just for its subscribers but new viewers by offering content outside the paywall, writes SBJ’s Jason Wilson.
The strategy resulted in 2023 being a landmark year for FloSports, a premium streaming service with almost 1 million subscribers (80% of whom are on annual plans). Last year saw more than 1.5 billion video views and a 54% boost in engagement with content, along with viewers taking in 2 billion live-event minutes across 24,000 events, a 17% increase from 2022.
VP/Content John Turner joined FloSports in 2022 and has helped with this new effort. At its core, the strategy is a customer-acquisition push and building awareness of what FloSports offers — but it’s also about meeting viewers where they “live,” as more audiences turn to YouTube and TikTok for their viewing needs.
“We have this strong contingent of loyal fans who are paying us directly to access tens of thousands of games or matches or races. Most are specifically interested in these specific verticals. But we just have this large catalog of live sports,” said Turner, who has had stops at USA Today and Sporting News. “We’re constantly experimenting with ways and models to get our sports in front of new audiences. We really just want to build awareness and engagement.”
Turner said FloSports has found its greatest success on YouTube. Part of this is because YouTube is better for longer content than TikTok or Facebook. But it’s also because YouTube is a different beast. “It’s part-search engine, part-TV programming and part-social media. So you get people who are a little more inclined to sit and watch something as opposed to, ‘I just gotta keep scrolling.’”
When it comes to other platforms, Turner said a TikTok ban “feels like a political nightmare for anybody who wants to garner the votes of Gen Z,” while the decline in users and engagement on X (along with other issues on the former Twitter since Elon Musk took over) results in FloSports “not going out of our way to program for X.”
FloSports is also viewing the Olympics as an opportunity to not just draw in future viewers and subscribers for its significant offerings in sports like swimming and track and field but also as a way to promote its recent acquisition of Diamond League media rights.
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