What Engages Younger Gamers and Sports Fans and How to Measure It
When it comes to engaging fans and bringing them closer to players and into the games, sports leagues like the NBA have more touchpoints than ever. But as fan engagement is distributed over more and more social platforms, it becomes harder and harder to measure. iGaming, by contrast, is uniquely measurable. What can leagues learn from sim racing and other gaming platforms that integrate with live sports action when it comes to measurement, and are gaming levels of measurement really attainable? Hub Entertainment Research’s Jon Giegengack, WTFast’s Darcy Lorincz, and the NBA’s Michelle Auguste discuss the opportunities and challenges of increasing and tracking diversified fan engagement from sports to esports in this clip from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Connecting the Sport to the Game in Real Time
Hub Entertainment Research Principal and Founder Jon Giegengack notes that while linear scripted content faces competition from social media and streaming, sports benefits from new engagement methods. “[T]o me, it seems like the advantages outweigh the challenges to the traditional business model,” he states. “You lose that kind of traditional linear TV audience—or some of them—but you gain all of these other ways to not only capture their attention, but [also] brand-new ways to interact with them and kind of build that relationship.”
Giegengack asks WTFast Chairman and President Darcy Lorincz to speak to how sim racing for F1 brings about opportunities for interactivity with the sport of Formula 1 racing and the real athletes. In sim racing games, fans can race against racers in real time, which caters to viewers who prefer active involvement over passive viewing.
Lorincz responds, “I think most sports should take a page out of that playbook. If there’s a sport that doesn’t have a game [already], let me know. … And this new thing called AI … gives you opportunities in real time to connect what’s going on in the sport to the game.” Sim racing enables anyone to participate in the sport, and there’s even a level of interactivity in Formula E where “you get more boost for your car because you’ve got social media engagement,” Lorincz adds. “[F]igure out what they’re doing in the game that is representative of your sport and figure out how you connect those dots.”
Generational Preferences
Lorincz calls racing a particularly intimate sport—sim racers are in the cockpit with the driver at the same time that they’re at home watching the race. “And you’re participating, not just passively watching, which is the key,” he notes. “[B]etween the generations, that’s the difference. Linear people lean back and watch linear and they don’t interact, and that’s okay. You [need] to still serve them. This new generation, they want to be in it. They want to be part of it. Sim racing is probably the best example of real-time being in the race, racing against these [real] people.”
It stands to reason that a player might even become a better racer than the actual athlete, Lorincz says, citing a successful past initiative to bring in people from the gaming community to become real racers. “I think the same things happen in a lot of sports. People are learning or getting their interest in that sport initially from just being in a game. And so if you can connect more real-time [content to] what’s going on in your sport, like in the playoffs, let them play against the real team,” he continues. “That’s cool for kids; they love that stuff. And when I say kids, 18- to 45-year-olds, they want that.” You can retain attention to content because you’re staying relevant and available in more mediums than just linear or streaming, Lorincz notes.
Aggregating Measurements Across Platforms
NBA Global Media Insights Team Leader Michelle Auguste jumps in to agree with Lorincz and to say, “I think the one challenge that we have as a league, as the definition of fandom changes, is, … How do you measure how engaged people are in your brand and how many people are engaged with your brand?” At the NBA, Auguste explains, she’s only able to (incompletely) measure the linear, social, and digital components of viewership, but she’d like to be able to aggregate it all and deduplicate the information to get a firm number of, for example, 10 million people engaging with the NBA brand on an average day. The NBA is working towards capturing and measuring engagement across all platforms in its ecosystem, she says.
Lorincz highlights that data collection is easier in gaming compared to other media because of its real-time nature and data volume. For example, “if you want to find out who’s playing NBA 2K right now, just go look at all the servers that serve up the games; these millions of kids that are playing, you’re going to find out what team they’re playing, what players they’re playing, [and] what they’re doing,” he says. Paying attention to discussions on Discord throughout the year is another reliable way to collect data. He asserts that the NBA has an advantage in meeting this challenge because, he tells Auguste, “you are the league. You’ve got the rights. [If y]ou give the rights to some publisher to make a game about your stuff, you need to be more involved in that and not just passively throwing your rights over the fence to the game publisher.”
Auguste replies, “No, I totally understand. And I wish all the other platforms were as easy as the gaming, because unfortunately, … the measurements not consistent across the board, and I think that’s one of the challenges that we have is aggregating [them] together.”
Giegengack asks, “When you say easier, what’s easier about the game platforms specifically?”
Auguste clarifies, “You could understand what’s going on, who’s watching, which teams they’re playing. For betting, we don’t really get that detailed into the data. Even for social media, there’s only so much that we can know. We can’t even really know demographic data and understanding who’s actually engaging. … And so when you look at all the different touch points into our ecosystems, it’s really kind of hard to get consistent measurement across all of them.”
Leveraging Gaming Data Effectively
Lorincz uses the playoffs or March Madness as an example of measurement; there’s usually a groundswell of people playing more often as excitement builds. He affirms, “So there’s some magic in all that measurement. And games, it already provides that [data] to you, so you almost don’t have to worry about it. You just have to figure out how to yield that data into your systems to find out where these groundswells coming from and how you get the game attached to them.”
Lorincz reiterates that sports should take advantage of new technologies such as sim racing as much as possible. Connecting the gamified experiences with the technology that the games are introducing—for example, clicking on a player to find out more about them during a real game—needs to be a priority. “I think sports needs to spend more time on understanding that connectivity and that data and figuring out how to put ’em together in the magic to figure out how to get more viewers and more sponsors and advertisers,” he concludes.
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