New Strategies for Reaching Gen Z Fans with Niche Sports on FAST
Fubo’s Pamela Duckworth and Swerve Sports’ Christy Tanner say it’s time to throw out the old playbook and experiment with new niche sports and new engagement and programming strategies for reaching younger fans—and it all starts on social—as they recount their experience testing and measuring combat sports engagement on their FAST channels in this discussion with Ashling Digital’s Michael Nagle from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
An Unexpected Triumph for Fubo
Ashling Digital Founder and CEO Michael Nagle asks Head of Fubo Studios Pamela Duckworth how up-and-coming sports are impacting business at Fubo.
Duckworth shares that her team gets “pitched daily with these new sports that have come out of the woodwork.” She looks to Swerve Sports Chair Christy Tanner to talk about a recent favorite pitch: slap-fighting. “I did not go for that one. Christy, I don’t know if you did,” she says.
Tanner confirms, “We don’t actually feature slap-fighting.”
“Okay. I’m not quite sure who does. But it is interesting,” Duckworth admits. Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) was a group whose pitch she did accept, although some at Fubo thought bare-knuckle boxing might be too violent. She decided to test it on overnights and see what happened. “And it ended up getting a great following, and it kind of lives in the top 10 of all of our programming on Fubo Sports. Every single month, it’s ranking up there in the top 10. And it was doing so well that we—Fubo, the company—decided to make an investment. So we’re minority owners,” she shares.
Throwing Out the Old Rules
This is all possible because Fubo Sports is on so many platforms and on OTA; there are 155–175 million potential viewers out there, Duckworth notes, although of course getting to that number range is unlikely. However, “increasing the brand by using the internal marketing and just getting the brand out there has lifted [BKFC], and now they’re a game changer. But yeah, some of these sports that come by—and I’m sure Christy, you have ton of stories as well—they’re quite interesting and inventive.”
Tanner replies, “Pamela, this is a great point about, let’s call it, the emerging video strategies in sports … [T]heir old rules are thrown out.” She emphasizes the shift in viewing habits over at least the past 10 years that she’s been exposed to first-party data about what’s being watched. Tanner reiterates that traditional broadcast and cable sports programming wisdom does not apply to the streaming space.
Swerve Sports has recently done research on Gen Z media habits; it finds that the top three sports Gen Z watches are:
- football
- basketball
- combat sports.
“So that is surprising to a lot of media and even sports executives who are not engaged in combat sports themselves or who are of a certain age where … it’s not on their radar,” Tanner elaborates. “[C]ertain geographies, I find, are surprised by the enthusiasm for combat sports.” Keeping expectations for sports programming inside a prescribed box “can be limiting to creativity, experimentation, and testing and seeing what works,” she concludes.
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