Sport - and the mobile media opportunity

As I look outside this friday I notice that most of the snow that has been disrupting the UK is melting nicely, which means the disruption that has caused problems for UK sporting fixtures over the past week will be over and normal service will resume.  In the UK over 3 million men (not quite as many women I'm afraid) attend live football matches every month.  We know that sport is an incredibly valuable, and popular form of entertainment - the fact that the UK TV rights generate £1.7bn of revenue for the Premier league over the 3 year licensing deals is compelling evidence of this.

With high season ticket prices and a majority male fan base we'd expect that UK Football clubs would have some of the most advanced, and intelligent mobile media offerings available.   Surprisingly this is not the case.  If we look at the highest profile teams we see that they have only recently released mobile applications, and their mobile media offerings in the past have been limited to the syndication of goal alerts through mobile phone operators and terrible quality mobile video clips of goals - where it has typically been impossible to actually see where the ball is.

One of the challenges for a football club is to understand the new reality of rich, connected devices at every seat in a ground.  There is a huge opportunity to capture the attention of the fans who are at the ground for 90 minutes - and are interested in richer ways of enjoying the game - after all if they were after close up pictures of the game they would be the supporters who remain at home and watch the live coverage on the TV.

With the latest mobile phones it's possible to connect these mass engaged audiences in new, and novel ways, and to enhance the experience for supporters.   Was that a foul?  Why not poll the supporters while waiting for the video replay?  Man of the match?  Run a live poll throughout the match to let supporters share what they think.   Disagree with the referee - let supporters watch replays from all the different camera angles on demand.   

This level of increased engagement and attention creates opportunities for sponsors and advertisers - the richer the engagement of the fans, the more opportunities there are to communicate with them.

The world cup in South Africa this year is the opportunity for innovative brands and advertisers to experiment with new ways of engaging sports fans - whether at the live game, or watching live over broadcast streams - if you are interested in this come along to the mFootball event next week - I'll be there discussing opportunities for new media in football and other sporting events.