Dawid Prokopowicz, Industry Manager for E-Commerce and Sports at Google Poland, teamed up with WSC Sports’ Adam Haliva from the Business Development team to lead the webinar, with Ranit Etzion Weiss from Marketing moderating.
Dawid began by outlining how important video has become: "Video is the most accessible and universal language of online communication.”
Watch the full webinar here:
A key theme discussed early on in the webinar was that, over the past decade, rights holders in the sports media world have discovered that different fans have different needs. Fans enjoy consuming content on different devices, in different ratios and durations. There is no default online fan. Fans want to see everything and be able to access it on any device.
The pair dived deeper into changing consumption habits, giving interesting examples from the most recent World Cup. Of the top World Cup YouTube Shorts by views, only a few were, in fact, game highlights. Some were exclusive interviews with players, live fan reactions, facts and trivia about the stadiums where the matches were being played at, etc. There is more content to share with fans than we have ever seen before, and the possibilities are endless. This is much different from a traditional broadcast or highlight package, with more content being captured and created around the game itself.
One of the biggest strategies discussed in the session was timing and speed. Sports rights holders must deliver their content to fans when their emotions peak. For example, their social media posts must be the first to share the match action and news as soon as it happens. This helps to build fandom around their platforms specifically, and it’s not necessarily limited to just during the game, either.
We need to follow what our fans want. If we don’t give them the information they seek, somebody else will, trust me. We need to be the first source of information. Before, during, and especially after the game.”
The discussion segued into introducing how the sports media community should address the change. Adam Haliva elaborated on how personalization, speed, and scale are the three main points to rights holders' success in sports media today. Content creation can be a very painful process. It is time-consuming and laborious manual work.
Fans expect so much more than just highlights. This is exactly where WSC Sports AI Automation comes into play.” rn
The webinar prioritized the message that speed is the future. “This is how you win on social media; speed matters. Getting the content out first.” Adam stated.
Storytelling is essential in sports media, and changing fan consumption behavior, combined with breakthrough technologies, has meant the content being created has become much more diverse.
WSC Sports and Google worked together to develop new content experiences such as Web Stories, that appear in Google Search’s OneBox, the top results page. The same technology is in use during Euro 24. Sports media rights holders used WSC Sports to create Web Stories during the last World Cup totaling over 362 million impressions and 61m views!
The pair concluded in agreement that automation technology is the only way forward to help drive fan engagement and new fan experiences. AI has already enabled rights holders to tell infinite content narratives and now with Generative AI that scope is being redefined once again, unlocking a whole new world of revenue streams to explore.
