Sponsorships & Branded Content

"Content is king."

If you work in digital or social media, you've undoubtedly heard that message a thousand times. Yet that’s only partially true. Good content attracts eyeballs, and an aptitude for telling stories is definitely the most essential part of growing digital audiences. However, most organizations aren't looking to simply accumulate the most eyeballs — total views, engagements, and even audience size are great metrics, but what can those metrics do for your business? In short, it all comes down to money, and companies need to find ways to effectively translate content into business results. Perhaps the phrase should be “content is king, but kings don’t pay bills.”

At FOX Sports, our digital content team made money in four key ways:

1. Ads that that ran against our authenticated streams for shows and events across our website, app, and third-party services

2. Branded content across platforms that allow it

3. Backfill programmatic revenue

4. Platform partnership licensing deals

All four of these avenues for revenue generation are effective, but branded content is probably the most common for brands across the sports landscape, and certainly requires more effort from in-house creative teams. A few examples:

At FOX Sports, studios often approached us about digital extensions for upcoming movie releases that we could tie into our sports programming. We worked with Universal Pictures to promote the 2020 Dolittle film with Robert Downey Jr. Given Dr. Dolittle’s ability to speak to animals, we thought it would be fun to tie the movie into our Thursday Night Football promotions when matchups featured animal vs. animal mascots.

For the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup on FOX, we worked with Coca-Cola’s agency UM and US Soccer to create Hometown Heroes spots, promoting players from the US Women’s National Team and the good work they do in their local communities:

During the 2019 NASCAR season, Busch Beer wanted to do something stunty – so they decided to take Kevin Harvick’s Busch-sponsored car and turn it into collector’s edition beer cans. We collaborated with Busch’s agency – Deustch – to create a story around the car being turned into the special cans:

One of our other repeatable models was long-form livestream sponsorship executions. An example — we partnered with Wendy’s on a Watch Party from the Texas State Fair for the Red River Showdown between Texas and Oklahoma.

Not only did we have UT legends Vince Young and Brian Orakpo (with guest appearances from Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart) host a live, four-hour interactive watch party for the game that received over half a million views across Facebook/Twitter/YouTube, but pullout VOD clips from the party also added nearly 600k additional views. We had significant brand integration with Wendy’s, as talent and fans alike ranked their best college QBs of all time, the best players in Texas history, and of course, the best items on the Wendy’s menu. My opinion: clearly the Triple Baconator.

These shows were fun to put on, and an amazing second-screen experience that allow for fans to interact directly with some of the biggest names in sports. We did them for the Super Bowl, Daytona 500, and many other major events.

At the Raiders, our methods for making money via our platforms were primarily focused on sponsored content — branded social posts and larger content series tied to Raiders.com — and sales of tickets and team merchandise via The Raider Image. Similar to our mentality at FOX Sports, if we were going to partner with a brand, we wanted true integration — the messaging, look, and feel had to make sense for both parties, instead of screaming "Ad!" and sticking out like a sore thumb. Some examples:

Having real, authentic brand integrations not only made our sponsored content "feel" better, but it also made Raiders social platforms arguably the most valuable in the NFL.

Sales by using sponsored posts and paid social worked tremendously for us in 2015 and 2016 — while we did test and run a few campaigns with Twitter and Instagram, we found by far the greatest returns on Facebook. In fact, over the course of the 2016 season we saw over 14x profit returns for paid Facebook posts.

Note: Paid social has come a long way since these efforts — Instagram in particular has become a hotbed for product sales.