Fans don’t just watch football, it’s massive social currency
Football viewing is changing. Sky Sports’ audience has evolved from 10.8m monthly viewers on TV to 19.2m fans following our TV and digital channels. 80% of Sky Sports viewers use their phones when they’re watching TV and, with millennial fans, football has become the second-highest performing programming on YouTube.
Now people don’t just talk about football in the pub, they use social media to celebrate the highs and rant about the lows of the game with fellow fans, as the action happens.
The goalposts have moved, with both social media and TV playing an important part in millennial’s lifestyles. Therefore, we needed an idea that would embrace the merit and use of both, transcend different platforms and take our football coverage into a higher league.
Unite the worlds of TV and social media, creating an immersive branded content viewing experience for fans and brands
With unrivalled access to footballing content and talent across TV and social (through the acquisition of social-viewing powerhouse Diagonal View), we developed the biggest YouTube football watch-along to date. A new, immersive experience that would allow fans to join their favourite football pundits in a live conversation, alongside the live linear action.
We wanted to give a brand the opportunity to really engage with football fans, and with odds and outcomes being so integral to the football conversation, we had the perfect format to develop with a forward thinking, innovative brand – step forward Sky Bet.
We invited a revered panel of pundits from the world of football (Andy Cole, Emilie Heskey, Luis Garcia), entertainment (Alex Brooker) and social media (Josh Denzel, JaackMaate) to participate in a panel show that discussed every game in real time across the 33-week football season: The Football Social.
The show was aired live on YouTube, using the comments section and live social media feeds to enable fans to watch and talk about the game. As the game happened, the panel selected fans’ commentary, and made it part of their conversation, giving wannabe millennial pundits their moment of fame. With our unrivalled access to Premier League matches, The Football Social also showed exclusive pre-game and post-whistle footage, like the lifting of the Premier League trophy.
But we didn’t stop there. Working with our brand partner, Sky Bet – we used our social feed to direct viewers to an online survey. With semantic analysis technology we could implicitly interpret fans’ emotions to the game and Sky Bet’s advertising, bringing the brand even closer to the viewers. The technology could decipher slang, acronyms, misspellings, and subtle nuances to ensure we got honest, unprompted, emotional responses; ultimately making the conversation between pundits around odds more natural, as you would down the pub with your mates. We could then change our tactics mid-game rather than waiting for the post-match analysis, updating ad formats and building in branded, on screen predictions that lined up with the panel’s chat.
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