• by Jon Last , Columnist, Yesterday

Maybe it’s because I'm a market researcher, or because I’m one of those people caught between the simplistic definitions of two generations, but a popular topic of late is how to deliver sports content in the most inclusive way.  Hopefully, we can all embrace the marketing mantra of “meeting customers where they are.” But what if that has increasingly become many different places, depending upon who the customer is?

Case in point:We recently completed some research with sports fans about their relative appetite for frictionless, high-tech delivery of a particular sports-related experience, relative to a more old-school, high-touch solution.  The results were demonstratively split down the middle, somewhat driven by demographics, but still far from a one-size-fits-all solution.

But those preferring legacy delivery tend to represent the more lucrative, short-term opportunity for the property. On the flip side, our digital, high-tech natives present greater future and lifetime customer value, but that only goes so far in an environment that makes decisions based on the present.  And therein lies a great present-day sports marketing dilemma, particularly when it comes to sports content delivery.

It’s a hugely important topic, as the highest-profile sports properties continue their exploration of building disparate pay walls around various iterations of content.  I don’t always have the answer, nor do I always have access to the solution. 

And I’m not alone.  In our research, we found that the average sports fan (if one exists) subscribes to just under three different steaming services. True to my earlier comment about the demographic chasm between enthusiastic versus reluctant tech adopters, if you are under age 45, you average more than three subscriptions, and there is a linear decline the older you go.  So, sports marketers are going to need to make difficult decisions regarding their distribution of media rights.

But beyond the commercial considerations comes the larger issue of meeting the customer on comfortable ground. To that discussion, I can certainly cite recent data that demonstrates a growing frustration among everyone regarding the growing challenge of sports content fragmentation.  Back in the “Stone Ages of the late 1900s,” the solution was cable television channel surfing, which is hardly a possibility these days.  So another great mission to accomplish is finding solutions that allow for easy and seamless content curation -- and ideally, consolidation. 

Strap yourself in.  As the great Ferris Bueller (an icon from that same Stone Age) once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”