You want to generate coverage with your moving image? That is good! It brings visibility to your event, league, series or club. This is measurable and above all verifiable. In a second step, this reach is a strong argument in negotiations with your several partners. These can be sponsors, athletes themselves, media, but also e.g. the community where the event takes place. A high reach builds up your brand and results in a stronger positioning - because your partners will then want to take advantage of your existing reach. You are looking for reach and attention. The sponsor buys advertising contacts with any kind of sports sponsorship - just not directly. But ideally with a lot of drama and thus emotionally charged and please: authentic...

Important: today there is rarely direct performance, there is a predominace of money-taking relationships in the field of sport. This usually only happens with extremely popular sports like football, Formula 1 or sometimes boxfights. All other events and organizers have to develop more and more into media producers and marketers, sometimes taking considerable risks and costs in order to raise the media potential of your product.

At the beginning of the digital age, many events, series and leagues had comprehensive TV contracts and thus income from TV rights. The TV partner produced and broadcast live and paid all the costs for this as well as paying the license fees. This was no risk for the organizer and often a guaranteed high income. In return, the broadcaster usually had all rights exclusively, at least in the national territory. An additional source of income for the organizer, club or association to be tapped was the reservation of international exploitation rights (if the event was of global relevance). Thus, the so-called world feed (the live image already produced) could be offered to international television broadcasters and exploited.

This model is very (!) rare today.

The international TV and media landscape has changed extremely. First there was a change that the TV stations a) no longer wanted to bear the enormous TV production costs or b) if they already pay production costs then they pay less license costs. Who had the reach? The TV station which had the upper hand.

There are various models how you as an organizer can react to all these changes. One thing is certain: success can only be achieved with efficiency along the entire value chain and by using existing, produced products. In 99% of all cases, much more can be made out of it than before. In my opinion, it's mostly not a matter of producing better or more elaborately, but rather of making full use of existing video content and also of using content already used several times. Other media products, which are more precisely tailored to the target group and above all more ways of playing out. For quite some time it was best practice that the own content was almost only used on own channels in the area of social media. The organizers wanted the likes and followers on their profiles. That worked quite well in the beginning. But the growth quickly comes to a standstill...

It is now a fact that in social media, users follow the athletes and stars directly - rather than the league, series, club or individual event. Who has the reach? Why don’t you make use of it?

How can I use my video content better?

Do you already produce animated pictures or receive video content from your media partner? Do you use the content on your own platforms? Website, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram etc.? Great. The beginning is made. But there is much more to it than that...

7 findings for Reach:

• Often other platforms in your desired target group already have considerable reach
• Often these platforms are in urgent need of fresh video
• These platforms often have little budget to produce video themselves
• They are dependent on content. The more finished, the better - because then there are less costs
• Everything that provides digital and non-linear content does not compete for rare airtime and event times, as is the case with linear TV.
• In general we have to understand that video content is a digital product. New and different rules apply to digital products. For example, such products can be copied and used several times without generating significant costs. Sending a PDF document to 1.000 email addresses is easy and inexpensive. To print this document and send it by post to 1.000 addresses will probably cost a low but still five-digit amount including printing costs and postage.
• If you own a signal recording of your event, game including exploitation rights or if you produce your own video content - for example just the press conference, training pictures, arrival of the athletes, fans in front of the stadium gates etc.: then you have content that can be easily adapted and exploited without much effort. To do this, you should take advantage of the benefits of digitalization and especially the cloud. And the best thing is that today, with such a project, you can save the high start-up costs and simply test it immediately...

What is your real goal? To create reach for yourself and your partners! This is the sports ecosystem. You benefit directly from more reach and as a result more ticket sales and possibly merchandising etc. With the additional reach you gain, you will inspire your sponsors and partners... the next contract negotiation is sure to come.

Closing words

The upheaval in the sports business and in the media landscape, but above all digitalization, creates considerable opportunities for "content owners", even of new events or sports that are not in the spotlight. For example, there are countless special interest channels. In order to exploit these potentials economically, only little effort is required today. With digitalisation and above all automation, considerable cost blocks in production and distribution are simply eliminated.

About the author:

Rene Alles is an entrepreneur and runs the TV production company best boys tv-factory GmbH in Cologne/Germany. The company is the TV production partner of many national and global events in the field of sports and entertainment. Since 2006, it is more and more his task to face the challenges of his customers and to find solutions that increase the reach. scoopa.com was developed as an internal project for the extremely fast and easy technical distribution of the very large video files and was spin off as an own product and brand due to the great success in use.

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