What Does The Future Of Sports Marketing Hold? We Asked The Experts

We welcomed guests into Unruly’s future home yesterday for a panel discussion on how brands can harness premium media and emerging technologies such as AI, AR, VR to engage consumers around big sporting events.

News Corp CEO Robert Thompson opened the session,  moderated by talkSPORT presenter Andy Goldstein, and introduced our excellent panellists – Stephen Hutchison, from FUSE, Unruly Futurist Simon Gosling, Karin Seymour, Client Strategy Director of News UK, and Matthew Baxter, President of Dugout.

During the session we peeked into the future of how brands will interact with consumers around sporting events.

One of the key points made by our panel was that, fundamentally, sports is always a passion play – even if some brand audiences are only really invested in the big sporting events for a few weeks every other year.

As a result, the panellists agreed that emotion has to be front and centre of any campaign, but that it was important to find the emotion that’s true to each brand.

"Be part of the story, make people part of the story, and focus on what the consumer wants" Matt Baxter @Dugout key sports marketing tips #FutureHome pic.twitter.com/5h7DRNrCf3

— Unruly (@unrulyco) November 23, 2017

Speaking about the future of sports marketing, Simon Gosling spoke about the transition from “storytelling to story sharing” – and how in the connected home, multi-channel strategies will reign supreme. He talked about the power of ‘micro-moments’ in this spaces, where the consumer controls the story.

“The future of storytelling will be made up of micro moments” with “increased danger of brand bypass” as vocal purchases grow says @sigosling at the @unrulyco Future of Sports Marketing event pic.twitter.com/4GyOcbUieg

— Sarah Wood (@sarahfwood) November 23, 2017

You can see all the photos from the event here.