As disruptive as the pandemic has been for live sports, the possibility of ending the health crisis with vaccines has lifted hopes that 2021 will help to fill stadium seats and restore a less crowded calendar of televised sports. Higher fan attendance helps to support engagement with players and teams, while traditional schedules spread spots programming more evenly throughout the year.

“The pandemic created obviously a challenge because it shut down all content production. That included live sports,” Gibbs Haljun, total investment lead of GroupM’s Mindshare, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “With no sports, there was pent-up demand for it when it actually came back.”

The total cumulative audience of televised was higher than in the past, but sports leagues had to compete more directly for viewers. The National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League and NASCAR were among the sports organizations to resume operations. Their efforts to complete their seasons later in the fall made them more competitive with the National Football League and college football.

“You had some fatigue from fans when you had all sports on, all the time,” Haljun said. “There are only so many hours in the day that people can consume sports content, and continue to be interested.”

The constraints pushed marketers to be more creative in optimizing their media plans.

“When you look at integrated partnerships, the biggest challenge is time. The pandemic created the opportunity to pivot and compress the timeline,” Haljun said. “It’s not about saying, ‘no.’ It’s about saying, ‘yes, and…’ The reality is not every network, every client will be a great fit, but there are so many that are, that there’s always a solution.”

Looking for One-to-One at Scale

Reaching mass audiences amid a more fragmented media landscape is challenging, but there is a possibility for more focused targeting as people consumer media on a wider variety of devices, including smartphones and connected TVs.

“The multiscreen opportunity is great. It allows us to be more precise…and do things that sports hasn’t been able to do in the past couple of years,” Haljun said. “The challenge for all of us is to get something at scale.”

Addressable advertising, which lets marketers reach different households with different ads during the same show on linear TV, is still in the nascent stage for national broadcasters.

“I certainly don’t see a national addressable platform at the moment on Sunday Night NFL. It doesn’t mean it won’t come down in the future, but it’s not something that’s fully actionable at this point,” Haljun said. “We need to build an interface and a tool that allows us to really split delivery.”

Another key challenge for sports is its aging demographic, as younger viewers show less willingness to spend several hours watching a game.

“We need to figure out how to adapt different platforms that they’re utilizing, whether it’s TikTok or Snapchat, or even Twitter, for that matter,” Haljun said. “Youth want to interact with their friends at the same time that they’re viewing. The pandemic has created some challenges with that as well.”

This year promises to bring a return to traditional seasonal play for sports leagues that had scrambled to revamp operations because of the pandemic. The National Football League and National Basketball Association were among the sports leagues that implemented procedures to protect players, coaches and support staff from infection.

Fox Sports is among the broadcasters that faced adversity in providing live sports programming to fans, and giving advertisers a way to reach those audiences.

“We were happy for the most part about how the leagues and everyone managed their schedules,” Seth Winter, executive vice president of sports sales at Fox Sports, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Each of the sports leagues has done a wonderful job of dealing with the day-to-day health issues with which they’ve all been confronted.”

He commended the National Football League, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and NASCAR for overcoming challenges presented by the pandemic. Safety protocols limited fan attendance, and interfered with some of Fox’s marketing programs.

“With some of the challenges of not being able to execute on-site sponsorships in the manner in which we had originally negotiated, the advertisers very much worked with us,” Winter said. Fox still handled several activations, such as a launch for Hummer and Samsung’s 5G smartphones.

“The biggest challenge was moving inventory around as events migrated to different dayparts and weeks,” he said.

Fan Engagement

Live sports is one of the strongest genres on linear TV for advertisers seeking to reach a mass audience. While other genres of programming like drama and sitcoms face competition from streaming services, sports has endured in providing immediacy and excitement to fans.

“The sports genre is the best investment advertisers can make,” Winter said. “Live sports is probably the most predictable of media genres. There’s a rich track record of ratings and the deliveries of sports. There’s also an assurance of scale for most sports.”

Another key advantage of sports programming is the willingness of fans to seek out their favorite teams, regardless of viewing device. That’s an important distinction as people spend more time consuming media on connected devices.

“One of the philosophical decisions we made was to embrace a pass-through sales protocol for all of our network assets,” Winter said. “That allowed us to reach all of our viewers of a particular sport and users with one commercial messaging that we migrated across all platforms.”

Omnichannel Distribution

Fox Sports has embraced the omnichannel environment, which includes over-the-top (OTT) devices to connect TVs directly to the internet.

“With the proliferation of OTT devices … we have not seen much attrition in our viewership and our subscriptions as we had perhaps forecasted,” Winter said. “We’ve seen a kind of stabilization of the impact of cord-cutting to our viewership and our distribution. People find sports wherever they want to find sports.”

Advertisers also are willing to commit media dollars to live sports programming on linear TV, leaving little room for programmatic placements.

“The demand is so great from our linear sales team that there’s very little inventory. We don’t have a lot of programmatic inventory for sale right now,” Winter said.

Because younger consumers are more likely to consumer media on multiple devices, distribution is critical in getting their attention.

“Reaching younger viewers is very important, and that’s something that we and the leagues are very mindful of — that we find our content accessible on platforms that younger users and viewers are using,” Winter said.