Sports Marketing Executives: 3 Action Items to Help You Leverage the Next Big Thing in Sports Marketing

For sports marketers, advertising mediums are constantly changing, due in part to advancements in technology and in part to disruptions in the ad tech industry. After spending the summer working in the digital marketing department at Under Armour and spending four years at Northwestern University studying marketing, I have come across two articles on the future of sports video game advertisements that can help you improve your company’s return on ad spend.

The article “‘NBA 2K19’ And Other Sports Games Have Gone Overboard With Ads — And it’s Ruining the Fun” comes from Business Insider gaming reporter, Kevin Webb. Webb discusses the current state of aggressive advertising in sports games and how as games try to become more life-like, they are adopting a similar ad strategy to the actual sports leagues. Webb mentions the popular basketball games, “NBA 2K19” and “NBA Live 19,” which both have sponsorships with Nike and Jordan brands. However, the in-game ads transcend just equipping players with their product, but also include non-traditional marketing tactics like the Jordan-branded Parisian streetball tournament mode.

 

Citation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/516094/value-video-games-advertising-market-usa/. 

In Yahoo! Finance’s piece, “Teens Are Obsessed With Watching Netflix And Playing Video Games," Brian Sozzi explores a recent Piper Jaffray survey of 8,500 teens, which found that about 83 percent of teens own or expect to buy a current generation gaming console. The study found that teens are spending more time playing video games each week, and that “male teens spend almost as much on video games (and consoles) as they do on basic elements required for survival,” Michael Olsen, author of the report, said. The report also found that stocks were soaring for video-game publishers like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take Two Interactive.

Based on these articles and my experience in the sports digital marketing industry, I’ve developed three action items you should consider when planning your next digital advertisement buys.

• Capitalize on Video Games - Teens are increasingly obsessed with video games, making effective video game ad content that much more important for garnering exposure to young audiences.

• Find Your Game - Finding the right video game to advertise in is important because advertising with an already crowded game can create negative consumer sentiment.

• Attract Gen Z - A recent survey conducted by Piper Jaffray showed that about 83 percent of teens own or expect to buy a current generation gaming console, making it that much easier to reach a broad generation through one advertising medium.

The next time you’re thinking about diversifying how your company shows up in the digital ad space, consider these three important items about advertising with video games.

Dan Waldman is a senior at Northwestern University, studying Journalism, Business Institutions, and Integrated Marketing Communications. He has previously worked for Under Armour and the National Basketball Retired Players Association.

You can connect with Dan on Twitter or LinkedIn.

News Outlets: 3 Ways to Increase Millennial Interaction with Online Content

For news outlets, creating and sharing content online is more important now than ever. Given our increasingly digital world, appealing to millennial readers by focusing on making web content more accessible isn’t an option—it’s a requirement of the industry. As a Northwestern student specializing in journalism and integrated marketing communications, I’ve found two articles that I think you will find interesting as you consider how to best reach millennial news consumers.

In her article for Business Insider, Audrey Schomer notes that millennials (age 21-37) consume a mere 8,766 minutes of news a year on average compared to their older counterparts, who consume closer to 30,103 minutes a day. Yet she also highlights the fact that when millenials do consume news, its digital reach is greater than it is to that same older age group—digital news reaches 88% of millennials. A last important note from Schomer’s article—many people in this demographic highlight convenience as their favorite aspect of social media; further, about half (48%) of social media news consumers ages 18-29 felt that accessing news on social made them better informed. Thus, it stands to reason that streamlining web content would increase millennial consumption of news.

A graphic from a 2018 Nielsen study on digital media use.

(Source: https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media.html)

As per the graph above, Nielsen conducted a study in July of 2018 that resulted in a shocking outcome—American adults spend over 11 hours a day listening to, watching, reading, and interacting with digital media. Notably, smartphones are the tool that enables a great deal of this usage. Over 72% of the 18-34 demographic view video content on social networking sites at least once a day, if not more; various digital platforms allow consumers to stay connected to the digital world to a greater extent than they ever have before. Younger generations tend to devote the majority of their time to smartphones and computers instead of TV; the portability of new devices allows adults older than 18 to spend an average of 45 minutes a day on social media—in large part on smartphones.

Given these insights, I’ve developed three action items that will help news outlets make their content more accessible to millennial consumers:

·             Turn to social.

o   Digital news reaches 88% of millennials while national TV news reaches 61% of them; thus, providers would do better to produce news for social to hit a wider target demographic.

·             Convenience is key.

o   Since digital consumers see so much media every day, they will not take the extra time to investigate materials that aren’t convenient to access, meaning that news agencies / marketing firms need to make sure their digital material is right at consumers’ fingers.

·             Hook consumers early.

o   Digital consumers spend, on average, 11 hours interacting with digital media a day—they see a lot of news, so make content interesting/interactive to get clicks.

Effective use of digital content can make or break a news outlet, and the industry must implement it to grow.