What’s your name and position within the organisation?
I’m Neil Stephens and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Sportskred group.
I’ve worked in digital media for about 20 years, starting out in search engine marketing, social media and influencer marketing before moving into tech.
Give us a brief overview of Sportskred as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
Sportskred is a technology business that helps rights holders, and their athletes monetise their social media.
Our tech was built to solve one problem which is that most athletes and rights holders lack the time and tools to successfully monetise their social.
Our approach to sponsorship in a nutshell is to provide the tools needed for rights holders and players to create a new sponsorship asset by combining their social media channels to create a vast audience of fans.
This creates an entirely new asset of immense value to sponsors while generating new revenue for both the club and their athletes across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
What approach makes Sportskred’s strategy/model unique? What is your USP/differentiator?
While many rights holders have a sizeable social media following, their players or athletes have a far more effective social audience from a sponsor’s point of view.
On average a player’s audience (based on our own data) is about 11x more engaged than that of their club, and when you add them together they create a significantly larger audience than a club or federation’s social media following.
Sportskred tech allows rights holders to combine these audiences to create and manage an influencer marketing network of their players or athletes across Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
While there are solutions out there that provide one aspect of making social media a valuable sponsorship asset (e.g valuation), Sportskred is the only end to end solution that provides everything in one login to enable rights holders to create an influencer campaign, value it, deliver it across multiple athletes’ social at the touch of a button – and then track its effectiveness.
And we’re not looking to ‘disrupt’. Quite the opposite. Our tech has been built to bring everyone into the process and make it easy and more profitable for all. For example, we have built a clear role for agents into the platform to enable they can set levels of control and stay connected via an app.
What are some recent clients you’ve worked on campaigns for, and how do these campaigns speak to wider new and emerging trends in your business area?
While 2020 was a challenging year to launch a new product (our rights holder product was launched last March), Sportskred has already been adopted by a number of rights holders who are using our platform to create player lead social media sponsorship a key aspect of their sponsorship portfolio.
These include Movistar Team, Real Sociedad, and the Canadian Lacrosse League, and we’ll be announcing some other significant partners in Q1.
Worthy of mention is Fenerbahçe, as the numbers at the top table of Turkish football are huge. The Club’s official Instagram is 5.9M, and players Instagram combined is 28.3M.
With Sportskred, Fenerbahce now manages a massive social media audience of 34.2M and have campaigns lined up for two sponsors.
This is a club embracing the fact their players social media is of greater value and making it a central part of their sponsorship portfolio.
How has the role of athlete as an influencer grown and evolved in recent years, and what impact has this had on brands and marketing?
Although influencer marketing is not new, it is surprisingly untapped in sport. There are of course athletes as celebrities, but they have in the main already achieved a level of success and an enviable financial position.
But thousands of individual stories of grit and commitment are unfolding every day on social, creating real bonds between athletes and fans.
Social has enabled any athlete, with even the most modest audience to earn funding, and this in turn has created a long tail of media inventory that can be aggregated by brands to deliver far more effective campaigns than with one or two established athletes which are more stage managed.
Strictly from a media perspective, 50 athletes with a following of 20k each should outperform one athlete with a following of 1M.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work?
I’d say for us there are 3 big trends:
- A more rapid shift towards digital sponsorship. This is manifest in the fact we are not only a lot busier but also working with more people in rights holders with ‘digital’ in their title than we were in 2019.
- A social network in Tiktok that provides an alternative to the Facebook Inc dominance on influencer marketing.
- The growth of players social massively outpacing that of their clubs and federations.
How that affects us is largely positive, Sportskred now fully integrates with Tiktok the demand for our tech is much higher.
• What has been the impact of Covid-19 on athletes and how they interact with fans via social media? Has this created opportunities for Sportskred?
The obvious impact has been the nature of the content that athletes have been putting out to entertain an audience (and often themselves).
Athletes have seen a huge rise in audience in 2020 and this rise is largely down to a dearth of live sport, so their personality, interests and home life have come to the fore. This has attracted a bigger but also more varied audience that is attracted by their character as well as their sporting exploits.
How do you measure marketing effectiveness? What metrics do you use – and how is your approach to this evolving?
A lot of social metrics are quite problematic as they lack nuance for sponsors.
For example, if someone likes a sponsored video of an athlete test driving a new e-car does this mean they like the athlete? the car? the style of the photo?
Influencer marketing is a channel like any other. If its effects are demonstrable, then brands keep pumping money into it.
We wanted to provide a deeper level of understanding as to how a particular bit of sponsored content moved the dial for the sponsor, which means we need to provide analytics that go beyond what happens on the athletes’ social page alone and provide click data.
To help sponsors understand the value of their sponsorship beyond video views and likes, Sportskred generates a code that they can add to their website to understand how many people visited them as a result of the sponsorship.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Yes. Happy new year everyone. 2021 is going to be great.