The sporting connected TV opportunity marketers shouldn’t miss
Senior programmatic manager at Merkle, Marcus Wong, shares his thoughts on the growing need for marketers to target sporting audiences on connected TV.
We’re well into Australia’s summer of sport, the Australian Open has served up its first matches and cricket has been making headlines with its new TV rights deal with Foxtel, Kayo and Seven but marketers are perhaps missing the biggest opportunity of the season: reaching audiences when and where they are watching through programmatic.
While Australia’s “summer of sport” typically aligns with normal viewing activity, marketers must start thinking about audiences with relevance to space and time, and how fandom often drives audiences to watch their passions at the best time that suits them, and that is not always between 6pm and midnight.
The solution to this challenge that has arisen through the uptake of streaming, connected television and mobile devices, is using programmatic to drive tactical spend, shifting spend to both live viewing and on-demand catch-up.
Connected TV viewership grew 36% through the COVID-19 pandemic, with 8 in 10 Australians now having access to CTV across the country, according to data from OzTam.
The audience is there, and brands must be there too. Audiences tune into their passions wherever they are, on whatever device.
Look at the NRL’s 2021 Grand Final – it reached over 380,000 Australians across the country on BVOD alone, up 7 per cent on the previous year.
Cricket Australia’s new rights deal also represents a shift, with Seven for the first time securing digital rights to the sport, in addition to the linear TV rights, with its ad-funded streaming service, more commonly known as Seven’s BVOD offering, 7plus, to become the live and free home of cricket. If media owners have worked it out, marketers must start better utilising programmatic to reach audiences where they are, not where they think they are.
And the results are there.
An enterprise tech company’s partnership with an AFL team which leveraged geo-based out-of-home TV and LinkedIn were a critical element of cementing the company’s position as a data visionary for Australian enterprises, driving a pipeline opportunity in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars with another sport organisation.
This year, the Australian Open represents a similar opportunity for brands to leverage the sport from a programmatic perspective. While it is time zone positive, big matches can run late, with fans watching from connected TVs and devices from their lounge rooms, their beds, bars, and public transport. Formula1, which revs up in March, is another sport that reflects the opportunities of the connected TV and audiences watching on devices of all kinds.
Audiences are changing.
They are fragmenting. But content, is, to use a cliché, ultimately king. Where it goes, audiences will follow – no matter the time. Sport typically demonstrates this. It is time for marketers to be thinking about how different audiences consume content and placing themselves in the right context to make more meaningful connections with particular audiences.
Marketers, and their agency partners, must be thinking about when their target audience is going to be watching content today, how they watch content in 2022, not how they did in the early 2000s, and schedule accordingly.
This is an opportunity that does not just sit in the consumer space, there is increasingly a real opportunity for business-to-business marketers, with B2B buyers increasingly influenced by their B2C experiences.
With 64% of Australian decisions makers watching some form of sports on TV, according to Nielsen, the opportunity is clear. Tactical programmatic spend on connected TV can help marketers find these decision makers. Programmatic’s algorithm can be trusted to find the audience you are after, when they are watching no matter if it is at 3am or 2pm.
It is time to think about audiences with relevance to space and time. They are actively choosing when to engage and marketers must do so too.
Marcus Wong is a Senior Programmatic Manager at Merkle.
