Stadiums: Enhancing the Fan Experience - Mobile World Congress, Feb 2016
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Laurence Sotsky, founder and CEO of Hopscotch, and Chot Reyes, former head coach of the Philippine National Basketball team, five-time PBA Coach of the year and president of Media 5, describe how sports-team apps enhance the fan experience.
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Stadiums: Enhancing the Fan Experience - Mobile World Congress, Feb 2016
- 1. Stadiums: Enhancing the Fan Experience
- 2. It’s about heart and soul
- 3. Connect players and fans
- 5. Connect with your fans
- 8. Takeaways 1. It’s about heart, not infrastructure. 2. Fans want to engage via apps. 3. Reduce clutter to avoid app overload. 4. Get fans to play along. 5. Find smart ways to re-claim your money.
- 9. 310.773.3290 readyset@gohopscotch.com 2150 Park Place El Segundo, CA 90245 gohopscotch.com
Editor's Notes
- Stadiums: Enhancing the Fan Experience – Title Slide I’m Laurence Sotsky, founder and CEO of Hopscotch. I’m honored to be co-presenting with my good friend and client Chot Reyes, former head coach of the Philippine National Basketball team, and 5-time PBA Coach of the year. Chot is now President of Media 5, the sales and marketing arm of TV5 Inc, one of the 3 major TV networks in the Philippines. We are here today to talk about Fan Connectivity, and the important role mobile plays in it.
- Slide 2 – It’s about heart and soul Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch For the most part, when people talk about improving the stadium experience, they tend to focus on huge infrastructure projects that improve Internet connectivity. Internet connectivity is important, but fan connectivity is even more important. Fan connectivity is that strange and powerful phenomenon that makes grown men paint their faces blue and wear their heroes’ jerseys. Fan connectivity is that passion that makes ordinary people feel like they’re part of the team. It’s really the heart and soul of sports, Internet or no Internet. Chot, how does this play out in the Philippines? Chot Reyes, Media5 In the Philippines, we call this Puso, means heart. basketball isn’t just a sport. It’s a religion. In a country of 100 million, more than 70% watch basketball (source: http://www.interaksyon.com/interaktv/pba-fiba-world-cup-are-filipinos-most-watched-sports-events-of-2014-ufc-fifa-world-cup-also-had-many-viewers-study). That’s why Filipino fans won the “Most Valuable Fans” at the 2014 FIBA World Cup. Equally important, Filipinos live and die on their smartphones. According to Time magazine, the Philippines is literally home to the Selfie Capital of the World (source: http://time.com/selfies-cities-world-rankings/). So you take a selfie-crazed country where basketball is the national obsession … and you get a tremendous opportunity at the intersection of sports and mobile to do something great with all that fan engagement.
- Slide 4 – Connect players and fans Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch Increasingly, apps are the way fans want to connect with their favorite sports teams. Websites aren’t enough, even when they’re mobile-friendly. According to eMarketer, time spent with sports apps worldwide more than tripled between August 2013 and August 2014. (Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Sports-Apps-Win-Over-Fans/1011434). And that’s before you factor in Facebook and Twitter, which are the default apps that most fans use inside and outside of the stadium to interact with their favorite teams and fellow fans. Chot, what drove TV5 to build an app for the Philippine Basketball Association? Chot Reyes, Media5 Fans today demand more than just TV coverage. In TV, airtime is precious and therefore limited. There’s a 7 pm tipoff for the game. You can spend just a few minutes covering the pregame and just a few minutes covering the post-game. If someone gets injured during the game, you get one shot of him walking to the locker room. The second-screen experience that mobile provides allows you to go behind the scenes. You can show the player walking in healthy 3 hours before the game. You can interview the doctor of the injured player to find out how serious it is. And you can use the power of social media to directly connect players and fans, so fans can let the injured player know they’re rooting for him. TV5 wanted to bring this expanded coverage straight to the fans. We found Hopscotch and asked you to build an app for the 2015 PBA Finals. And we’re in the process of working with you now to deliver individual apps for all 12 PBA teams.
- Slide 5 – Reduce the clutter Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch So what goes into making a great sports app, the kind that fans will use again and again and again? First, you have to recognize that users don’t want a bunch of different apps cluttering up their phones and they don’t really want to change their habits. So if they’re coming to your stadium, you need to give them a one-stop shop for everything that’s going to make game day better. That means buying tickets, getting directions, parking, finding their seats, buying concessions, playing half-time trivia, watching replays, and of course, interacting on social media. The approach we take at Hopscotch is to provide a feature-rich mobile platform that integrates easily with other mobile technologies. For example, with social, we don’t reinvent the wheel. We simply make it extremely easy for teams to automatically import their existing social content into their app, so fans can like, share, comment and retweet without leaving the app. Similarly, when it comes to scores, schedules and rosters, we integrate with leading third-party stats providers to automatically keep the app up-to-date. We also make it easy for teams to start wherever they are. Our level of integration can be as simple as embedding someone else’s mobile-friendly URL into our apps or as complex as doing API calls between our app and a third-party system. This approach has allowed us to work with everyone from minor league hockey teams with 2,000-seat arenas to organizations like the PBA, with tens of millions of fans. Chot, where are the PBA apps now and where do you want to take them in the future? Chot Reyes, Media5 Last year, we started with a very simple PBA Finals app. Its primary purpose was to provide a one-stop shop for news and updates around the finals, and we used it to integrate and aggregate breaking news and updates from our website and social channels. To be frank, we were really just experimenting with the mobile channel, to see if our fans would use it. To our surprise, even though we did very little to promote it, over 100,000 fans have used the app since it launched last July. Now, we’re in the process of creating an app for each PBA team. With the new apps, we are integrating with a stats provider so we can show real-time scores, roster changes and schedule updates. We are looking into new ways to visualize stats and provide even more data on player movements, biomechanics and more.
- Slide 6 – Connect with your fans Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch One of the most effective ways to generate excitement on game day is to marry your app with the action. For example, showing trivia on the scoreboard and letting people play along via their phones. It’s a great way to drive app downloads, keep people coming back to your app and make them feel like they’re part of the community. Chot Reyes, Media5 At TV5, we’ve used this very approach to generate interest and excitement during halftime. We have a combination app and TV gameshow called Moneyball. People sit in front of the TV and answer trivia questions on their phones. For example, “who made the first shot?” They get a chance to win great prizes, such as a trip to the FIBA World Cup. We’re looking forward to exploring how we can integrate Moneyball into our team apps, to bring this excitement inside of the arena as well as outside.
- Slide 7 – Re-claim your money Laurence Speaking of Moneyball, it sounds like a way you can drive revenue from your sponsors. Is that true? Chot Reyes, Media5 Moneyball is the centerpiece of our fan-loyalty program. People earn points that they can redeem for VIP experiences, like a frequent flyer program. And this provides a very natural way for us to directly connect our fans and our sponsors. We want to make our sponsors part of the app experience instead of something annoying and intrusive, like ads that literally get in the way. Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch That’s an important point, Chot. Teams tend to focus on the fan-engagement piece, but let’s not forget about revenue. It’s no secret that there’s gold in user engagement. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat and every other social channel you can name make money off of selling ads to engaged users. We think their business model is brilliant. But if you’re a sports team, there’s a certain amount of built-in irony. They’re making money off of your content and your fans. And in some cases, you’re even paying them to reach your own fans. Sports apps are a way for teams to stake a claim to some of their own fan-engagement money. There are numerous ways that teams are monetizing their own apps. My personal favorite is what you just mentioned, getting very creative with sponsored content and loyalty programs. But there are additional ways to make money. Selling title sponsorships to top sponsors. Selling display and video ads throughout the app – not the annoying kind you can’t escape, but ads that are sprinkled throughout the app. And using the app to promote your own ticket, merchandise and concessions sales.
- Slide 8 – Expland your reach Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch As important as the stadium experience is, it’s really important to keep in mind that game attendees are actually a small portion of your fans. We did an analysis of 10 teams that Forbes magazine ranked as the 10 Most Valuable Sports Teams (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbespr/2015/07/15/forbes-announces-the-worlds-most-valuable-sports-teams/#3acf875e41fe). Teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, the LA Lakers and the NY Yankees. We looked at two metrics: their average attendance and their Facebook followers. The median team had 20,000 attendees and 6 million Facebook fans. Let that sink in for a moment: 20,000 vs. 6 million. The number of people who follow the team on Facebook is nearly 300 times higher than the number of people who can fit into the venue on game day. For the world’s most beloved football teams – Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United -- the number is exponentially higher. Facebook followers are more than 1,000 times greater than those attending. Chot, how important is it to you to reach the home crowd? Chot Reyes, Media5 It’s very important. In a developing country like the Philippines, many of our rural citizens will never see a game in their lifetime. Except on their TVs and smartphones. Providing that second-screen mobile experience is key to keeping young people as obsessed about basketball as their parents and grandparents. It’s also a key way to keep expatriate Filipinos connected to their home teams, even though they may now live an ocean away.
- Slide 9 - Takeaways Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch So to recap, these are the main points we hope you remember from this conversation.
- Slide 10 - Closing Laurence Sotsky, Hopscotch Thank you so much, we enjoyed speaking with you today. Chot Reyes, Media5 We look forward to your questions and comments during the Q&A.