If you do nothing, nothing will change
Alban Dechelotte of Riot Games at Host City 2019
As part of ESA’s partnership with Host City 2019, ESA Board Director Katie Traxton moderated a pair of panels on sponsorship, ROI, fan engagement and audience experience. Here Katie outlines the major themes and take-aways from the Glasgow event.
Talking; I like it a lot. Listening; I like it even more. Why? Because when you listen, you learn and there are few things I love more than learning.
Last week, I was lucky enough to get to talk and listen at Host City 2019 in Glasgow. I also learnt a lot. To be honest, until then I didn’t really know what Host City (a magazine and a conference) was about or why it was relevant to me. Turns out, I was missing a trick.
The topic of this year’s sixth incarnation of Host City was: innovate, reformulate, co-create.
As important as it is for a city to bring its unique culture to life when it hosts an event, true innovation comes through how that city works with its partners. Each new partner combination demands strategic, creative and operational reformulation to create something original, meaningful and authentic (apologies for the buzz word bingo, but it’s true!)
It then needs to be reshaped yet again, when the impact has been evaluated and you need to create something even better next time around. And not only create something better, but co-create it. From how we activate partnerships to how we work with talent, co-creation breeds resonance and relevance in a world with greater access, more communication (for better and worse) and more noise than ever before.
As a European Sponsorship Association Board Director, I was asked to host two panels addressing this very challenge at Host City 2019:
1. Fan engagement and audience experience, feat.
Esther Britten, Head of Major Events, UK Sport
John Langford, COO, AEG Europe
Alban Dechelotte, Head of eSport Partnership EU Esports, Riot Games
Russell Samuel, VP, Marketing and Creative, Viacom Velocity
Michael D’hulst, co-founder and CEO, Super League Triathlon
2. Securing sponsorship and delivering ROI, feat.
Nick Prichard, Global Alliances, Cirque du Soleil
Hannah Goodridge, Account Manager, Nielsen
Alex Burmaster, Director and co-founder, caytoo
Right up my street, or so I thought. My street it may be, but I quickly discovered I have lots of neighbours I still need to get to know. Host City not only shifted my perspective, but did so again and again as I heard from rights holders, media owners, venues, investors, specialist agencies and more.
Where Riot Games build reach and reputation by changing city with each live event they host, Super League Triathlon seeks building loyalty in the communities where they stage races by returning year-on-year. A road show in format, SuperLeague will have to consider HSSE in 10 different countries in 2020. In contrast, in its role as a venue owner (unlike with its festival portfolio) AEG Europe has the advantage of working in fixed places. Yet as tech and standards evolve, they contend with the challenges of retrofitting infrastructure no longer built for purpose.
Live action goes far beyond the physical experience too. Effective promotion, distribution and amplification make your investment work harder. The digital revolution, the on-demand and sharing economies all loom over us, equal parts guiding lights and forbidding strangers. Sometimes it can feel like simply to survive, let alone innovate, we need to be able to predict the future, especially if you’re Esther Britten of UK Sport, whose “role is to identify a long-term strategic programme of major international sporting events that we can bring to the UK [looking] as far ahead as 2030 or 2035 even.” No one knows what fans will want in 10 or 15 years’ time, so Esther and her team have to anticipate a future reality, building the innovation they expect will service future fans’ needs and desires into their event bids.
We can and must use data and insight to its full as Hannah Goodridge from Nielsen Sport and Alex Burmaster from caytoo explained. At WeAreFearless, where I work when I’m not moonlighting at Host City, we talk about ‘boldness with back-up’. It’s the back-up that makes marketing, sponsorship activation or microtargeting more effective by allowing you to be bolder in your creativity. Back-up that doesn’t just tell you what your audience is doing, but why they are doing it.
We want to know what makes them tick (and like to think we have a few tricks up our sleeve to figure that out), but there’s no silver bullet that can eliminate risk. Instead, we need to embrace the people we’re talking to in all their unpredictability. Viacom’s Russell Samuel recognises live experiences are moments of “self-identification”, which means we could be talking to hundreds, thousands or millions of individuals at any given time. How do we then ensure the eSports moments that Riot Games seek “when the crowds are screaming and the keyboards are shaking,” or the high-octane rush of “insane emotions” UK Sport see at the pinnacle of live sporting events?
We take a leaf out of Host City’s guidebook. To innovate, reformulate and co-create, we need to understand people. I can’t put it better than John Langford at AEG Europe “It’s in our very nature as human beings to connect and to experience things… Those real connections where you recognise people, you make eye contact with people…that’s the connection that I’m curious to see how technology replaces.”
And finally…did you know?
- The number of people who play video games is bigger than ever (more than a third of the global population). The gaming industry today is worth more than the music and movie industry combined.
- Super League Triathlon actively fights against single-use plastic, including eliminating its use of cable ties and using medals made from recycled bottle tops.
- All the food at the O2 comes from within a 150-mile radius of the venue, with 35% of all food consumed there at the moment being vegan.
- The women’s semi-final of the FIFA World Cup this summer will probably be the most watched TV moment of the year with 11.7m viewers. Even Strictly hasn’t beaten it yet.
- …or that six months ago Cirque du Soleil contemplated a significant sponsorship offer from a marijuana company?
Okay, maybe Cirque’s brush with Cannabusiness (in a territory where the drug is legal, I might add) wasn’t a strict need-to-know output from the conference, but it’s another nod to this rapidly growing industry that has been a hot topic at both SXSW and across the business world this year.
