I have just returned from Monaco and an absorbing few days at the Sportel convention cum media rights bazaar. Boiling it down, I can recollect three moments worth recording for future reference.
Moment one: a man joins me at my table in the crowded lunch area. He turns out to be Ukrainian (from Kiev) and he tells me his company recently acquired Champions League rights for the country.
It strikes me that the bubble economy for broadcasting rights from which so many athletes (especially footballers) have benefited over the last 15 or so years must be some way off popping if enough Ukrainians remain interested in the Champions League, in spite of the country’s tense current situation, for a local broadcaster to judge it worth handing over what is probably, for it, a tidy sum for screening rights.
Looking at the recent trajectory of the Ukrainian hryvnia against the US dollar and euro, however, I can’t help thinking, equally, that owners of some sporting media rights will find the Ukrainian market simply unable to afford the level of fees that they might have shelled out in the past.
Moment two: I was surprised to find that arguably the most prominent and best-located stand in the colourful, jostling exhibition that forms part of the convention belonged to the media house of a brand I associate with a canned drink: Red Bull.
On flicking through a thick catalogue of filmed content produced by the company, I was just as surprised at its range. Yes, there were items about the sort of adrenalin sports that Red Bull has come to be associated with, but at times it was like leafing through a picture album from National Geographic.
Irrespective of genre, much of the narrative appeared to be about people who a) had had the gumption to build for themselves exactly the sort of life they wanted to lead and b) were accustomed to exploiting all five senses and pushing themselves to the limit in pursuit of their goals. As far as I could tell, production values also seemed to be very high.
Thinking about this (and I haven’t discussed it with anyone in an attempt to validate the thesis) it strikes me that Red Bull is standing the traditional approach to using sport to help build a brand on its head.
Instead of acquiring expensive marketing rights for existing sports competitions devised long ago by somebody else, it seems often to be using its money to create/buy its own sports properties, be they contests or teams, and then unleashing the power of high-quality narrative to render them yet more compelling and, presumably, imbue them with, or at least highlight, the sort of values it wants associated with its core energy drink product.
As a brand-building stratagem, it seems to me flexible enough to hold potential appeal for makers of all sorts of consumer products from, I don’t know, razors to the Olympic Games. I wonder if others will be bold enough to give it a try.
Moment three: someone in a panel discussion made the point that the potential audience for digital content delivered via non-traditional devices – ie not television – could rise from 2 billion to 5 billion in five or six years.
This makes digital in the jargon a “tailwind business”, with underlying growth rapid enough to enable participants to take risks, to try things out, without betting the farm.
But of course, in a landscape as fast-changing as the 21st century sports media business, there are bound to be winners and losers. And amid the hubbub and hyperbole, I did discern a certain tension between property owners who have grown used to pocketing big cheques for exclusive live rights from traditional broadcasters and are understandably wary of undermining that value, and the new media gang, keen to make their content as compelling as possible, who are striving to convince the market that their various activities are complementary to the mainstream broadcasters and not potentially damaging to them.
“The biggest myth in our sphere is that digital rights undermine live rights,” opined another panel discussion participant.
That is all very well, but if your sport has grown rich, like football, by selling exclusive live rights to broadcasters eager to get their hands on content still capable of drawing a mass audience in an age of increasing fragmentation, you are going to think very, very hard – and make sure your broadcasters are entirely comfortable with what you are planning – before taking liberties with the model.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.