Sport and New Media Conference 2010

This inaugural event in the digital calendar for Sports professionals took place last Wednesday at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester.

The introductions by SportBusiness told us that Manchester was chosen to host the event because the sport industry in the North West employs 100,000+ people, has a £6.5bn turnover, and the North West represents 40% of the Premier League. In addition to this Manchester has a huge digital community.

Our very own parent company, GyroHSR, has an office in Manchester, so we are regularly making trips to the North West. For this occasion, Bluhalo had 3 representatives, Simon, our Account Director who has had lots of digital sport experience most notably with Liverpool FC; our Founder and MD, Spencer, who still surprises me with the number of people he knows, and me, Laura, a relative newbie in digital sports, but quickly making up for lost time!

Attendees at the conference included BBC, Eurosport, UEFA, Chelsea FC, Adidas, SkySports as well as ComScore, YouTube and BT.

So BBC kicked off with the Head of Interactive BBC Sport & Formula 1, Ben Gallop, giving a great presentation on the way digital is being spearheaded by BBC Sport. Watch BBC Sport for developments, exciting times to come, and many fantastic things already happening.

For example, you can watch Formula 1 from a different camera depending on whose car you wish to follow. Also, no longer will you only watch the Olympics events chosen by someone at the BBC. The BBC plan to cover every single hour of the Olympics in 2012 – great news!

Ben sees the Olympics as a perfect time for us as a nation, occurring just as digital becomes mainstream. He likened it to the increase in TV watching for the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

The day was a mixture of presentations, panel discussions and networking which were rather focused on social media. Of course, we imagine most brands to be using the social media tools being discussed already, but perhaps not, and for those still making first steps it would have been very useful.

The discussions that interested us most were those that touched on Web 3.0. The ability to hold your phone up to find your way around Wimbledon using augmented reality, for example.

The commercialisation of sports videos was interesting; David Kerr from Eurosport said that the smaller sports still do better when packaged with the more mainstream sports. However, other speakers felt that the niche sports had an opportunity to charge subscription from their supporters.

Alistair Hill, a senior analyst from ComScore did a great presentation on the stats of mobile usage to help attendees see where there were opportunities to converse with their audience. One of his comments was that mobiles are being used more for connecting people than searching. (Interestingly, Facebook is now more popular on mobiles than PCs) Of course, this is what telephones were traditionally intended for, so it makes sense when you think of it.

Alistair went on to say that although Facebook is more popular than Google on mobiles, having a 33% reach, as opposed to a 31% reach, the average page views are 640 per visitor, way over Google, showing facebook is taking up half of the total media time on mobile phones.

As the discussions continued, it was good to hear the general agreement that whatever you use, Facebook, Twitter and so on, don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it. It has to be useful and accessible to your audience.

Other comments worth taking home were that trends for the future would be people watching a screen, not a TV – Samsung’s internet on TV was mentioned. I was glad to hear I was bucking a trend as I personally threw away my TV a few weeks ago, I decided I could watch programmes through my computer when it suited me and save space by not having 2 screens. How 21st century of me!

The panellists also predicted watching sport casually on demand would increase (e.g. keeping track of a couple of minutes of test cricket during your working day). Watch out bosses, but at least there may be less ‘whole day skiving’ for the World Cup this year!

Personalisation is also predicted to increase, with geo-tagged or requested advertisements giving more impact to the user and more “bang for its buck”.

Closing comment that was made by more than one, was that the event should be re-named “Sports and digital” as new media was ‘new’ around 10 years ago. (Spencer probably tweeted this in the morning which meant it got a mention on the stage by the afternoon! That’s the wonder of social media)

So, I hope this has given you a little insight. There is a more complete, and a somewhat less opinionated agenda breakdown written by the lovely people I met from Braben PR on PR Week.

Laura Hannan
Business Development Manager
Twitter @bluhalolaura