DAZN Media+ has expanded its sports ecosystem beyond broadcast, tapping into fandom, creators and in-stadium touchpoints. At its epic Upfront event last night, media buyers walked away impressed by the strategy, and now they want to see what this means for brands.
Last year, Foxtel Media pulled out the frills: with racing car simulators, basketball hoops, a cricket net and other games on show. It was a confident and self assured evolution that included innovations in gaming, retail media, branded content, e-commerce, second screen shopping, ad formats and more.
Foxtel Media, as it was known back then, largely delivered on its promise, or so we are told. Tick.
This year, with 18 months under ownership of DAZN, Foxtel Media had no fun gimmicks, but promised to change the game forever, proudly declaring it had evolved “more in the past 12 months than in the previous five years”.
It has ditched the legacy brands that had become synonymous with Aussie sport, and entered a new era—the DAZN Media+ era—that promises much more than a traditional broadcaster would have even conceived possible five years ago.
Around 700 media executives, senior marketers and talent attended the inaugural DAZN Media+ Upfront event at the newly minted Cutaway in Sydney’s Barangaroo last night.
“Back in 2016, we were the first media company to host the event right here before this sensational renovation. It seems fitting we are first back here again. We don’t like to follow; we like to do things differently,” DAZN Media+ chief executive Mark Frain told the room.
“DAZN Media+ is not just a new name; it is a declaration of what we can now offer every brand in this room. We want to change the way Australians experience sport and entertainment, and want to change the way brands benefit from being part of it.”
Foxtel chief executive Patrick Delany doubled down on the point.
“I can say with complete confidence that what this company has done in the last 12 months is the most significant transformation that any Australian media company has done in history,” he said. “DAZN in this country is the infrastructure that’s the future of sports and entertainment, and we run on it.”
So what did media buyers think?
Omnicom Media chief executive Kristiaan Kroon described the show as: “An Upfront at its best in the traditional sense: large scale, very confident and a high production value…they’ve set the bar high for everyone else to follow”.
The overarching theme from the 80 minute long presentation is that DAZN Media+ is much more than a broadcaster of premium sports and entertainment content.
As Kroon puts it: “While it wasn’t a specific announcement, really what they were positioning to us is they’re no longer a broadcaster; they are an integrated sports business.
“If we go back five years, they would say ‘I’m a broadcaster and here are the sponsorship packages, and we’ve got new camera angles’,” he said. “Now it is very much the fully-integrated sports business from broadcast to code to club to player, and I think they did land that well as an underlying theme throughout the Upfront.”
This theme also earned the attention of WPP Media’s Claire Butterworth and Accenture Song’s Sam Geer.
“What they’re doing really well is as fan engagement kind of moves beyond broadcast, they’re evolving and extending their ecosystem, which I think is a really smart move,” said Butterworth, the GM of investment partnerships at WPP Media.
The Accenture Song ANZ managing director, Media was left impressed by DAZN Media+’s through-the-line integrated thinking.
“The idea of activating through one partner to get into stadiums, to get into codes, to get into teams, and then allowing you to use some of their owned, earned, and shared assets is clever,” he said.
“I think the big broadcasters are going to be jealous they didn’t think of that.”
What landed well
There are a few announcements that really caught the eye for media buyers at the DAZN Media+ Upfront event.
Club Kayo, a new creator-powered sports media ecosystem designed to put creators, communities and brands at the heart of Australia’s biggest sporting conversations, was viewed as a clever way of allowing brands to tap into sports fandom.
“The social and creator add-ons tapped into a genuine insight around sports consumption, which is 40 per cent of it is not in the broadcast, it’s outside of the broadcast. It’s in podcasts. It’s in social. It’s in creators. It’s in digital, and that is actually where a lot of the deeper engagement is. So to build a product as a broadcast player and go into those spaces was one of the most impressive announcements.”
Another eye-catcher was the partnership between DAZN Media+ and SureVision that will close the loop between broadcast advertising and in-stadia advertising.
Butterworth described it as a “really smart play” that will provide far greater flexibility to combine broadcast and stadium opportunities.
“The stadium experience is another extension of what they’re already doing. They are evolving their ecosystem beyond their current self-prescribed walls,” she said.
“The best part is you’re following your audience and you’re also growing your audience. Advertisers will be getting complimentary and incremental reach and this builds on those broad touch points.”
Geer said that although media agencies can technically achieve these by dealing with multiple vendors, expanding the DAZN sports ecosystem
“They’ve just added 10 or so touchpoints when you think of creators, brands, clubs, stadiums. If they can tie that back to a sale and measure the impact of each of those assets back to a closed-loop attribution sale, I’d be impressed, he said.
Kroon said that with the ever-increasing cost of sport, brands are looking at how they engage every touchpoint, and that is currently fragmented.
“I think it is answering a need. What was missing, and what we’ll be talking to Foxtel about, is how you create those case studies that prove the impact, because I’m sure it will come with high cost,” he said.
Michelle Mirofordis, the head of strategy at Nunn Media, was also taken by DAZN Media+ ecosystem play.
“The industry’s been talking about integrated ecosystems and multi-touchpoint access for years, so knowing DAZN Media+ can now connect audiences across broadcast, digital, social, content and physical sport touchpoints make their proposition incredibly powerful,” she said.
“To deliver scale, you need to reach audiences in the many ways they engage with sport, and this gives them exactly that.”
She was also impressed by Sports Audience Graph, which matches sports club members and Kayo SPORTS viewers against verified transaction data.
“It’s a logical next step for them, sport fan data has been fragmented across broadcasters, clubs and ticketing platforms for years, and someone was always going to consolidate it. The real test for me isn’t the data itself, it’s whether they open it up to plug into agency audience intelligence platforms or keep it a walled garden.”
It’s a point that Butterworth picked up on, wondering whether it would be “more of an internal play than an external one”, but it’s “certainly attractive for advertisers and agencies.”
Cross-measurement curiosity
One announcement that received a lukewarm response was DAZN Media+ promising to unify cross-media audience measurement across its linear and streaming video ecosystem, including Kayo SPORTS, BINGE, Foxtel Go and Foxtel. This is in partnership with AudienceProject.
“I still struggle with it because I want an industry measurement solution. No agency person is sitting there measuring one individual channel or one individual partner. We’re measuring across,” Geer said.
“Having an isolated measurement solution might hold them back, but they’re doing a wonderful job with what they have.”
It was not made clear whether AudienceProject tie up would bring other platforms into the cross-media measurement tent.
“It’s hard to land the detail required at an upfront,” Kroon pointed out. “Omnicom will engage, be positive about it, but also pull it apart. We believe measurement is critical. It’s complicated, and we’d want to see a lot more before we would be taking a view to our clients,” he said, while adding that he suspects that it will be broader than a DAZN Media+ initiative.
Being in Da Zone
Overall, Kroon said DAZN Media+ has set an incredibly high bar with its Upfront event and the evolution of the business.
“I don’t think a client would have left the room questioning whether Foxtel is a good place to be spending money next year,” he said.
“I love the strategy, let’s see the execution, the cost, the outcomes, which is where agencies play their role really effectively.”
Miroforidis added: “I see them as more of a sport and entertainment authority than ever before. They’re prioritising ecosystem-led thinking and making it easier for brands to connect with audiences wherever they are.”
Geer said that he left the room feeling “better about DAZN Media+ than I did coming in”, while Butterworth is “really positive” and “confident about their proposition”.
She added: “I feel like their strongest assets, apart from their data, is that amazing sports equity that they’ve built up. And they’re now able to effectively bring clients on a far broader journey, which is really important.”
When Frain closed the presentation he asked the audience to visualise the DAZN Media+ ecosystem as the ‘DAZN Media Plus Stadium’.
“The foundation is the sport, the entertainment, the stories that make up the fabric of Australian culture. The entrances are our platforms, Kayo, Binge, broadcast, social, and now creator. More ways in than ever before. DAZN is the infrastructure,” he beamed.
“The seating banks are yours. Some of them you already know. Some of them you’ve seen for the first time tonight. Every seat is an opportunity. Our role is to take those opportunities in this stadium and connect them to your brands in ways that make you impossible to ignore from every seat in the house.”
The message is clear, DAZN Media+ is an integrated sports advertising business. The stadium is built and the grandstands are lit.
In the coming year, the market will determine if DAZN Media+ will be able to sell out the ‘DAZN Media Plus Stadium’ or if some seats will be left empty. On last night’s display, few would bet against them.
