In the past week, we’ve watched Wimbledon finals, the Tour de France, a State of Origin thriller and, of course, the FIFA World Cup. Nunn Media Sydney managing director Chris Walton argues it is a timely reminder that sport can deliver something far more valuable and less predictable than the industry’s obsession with AI technology and precision targeting.
Every few years, marketers convince themselves they’ve finally cracked it. The algorithms are smarter, the attribution models more elaborate, and somewhere in a dashboard, AI promises to tell us precisely which advert persuaded someone to buy premium dog food at 9:47pm on a Tuesday.
Then along comes the World Cup. Or Wimbledon. Or State of Origin. Or the Tour de France. And several million people abandon their carefully curated, endlessly personalised digital lives to watch exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time, with exactly the same amount of shouting at the television.
It’s terribly inconvenient for modern marketing. But it does help to explain the huge numbers reported around the awarding of NRL rights we have all heard about over the course of the last few days.
For years we’ve pursued ever more precise targeting, slicing audiences into segments as finicky as a goalkeeper arranging his wall: left a bit, forward a bit, extra player in, one lying down… still not quite right. And yet the biggest commercial moments of the year keep belonging to lesser targeted events: live sport.
The obvious explanation is reach. It always has been. But reach alone doesn’t explain why broadcast rights keep getting more expensive while finance directors quietly reach for the Panadol.
The more interesting explanation is scarcity – not of attention in general, which in theory is almost infinite and free and mostly wasted on people falling off scooters. But of genuine attention, which has become almost impossible to buy. We’ve all become expert skippers, scrollers and ignorers of anything resembling an ad.
Live sport is one of the last places people willingly hand over both their time and their emotions. Better still, they turn up on time for it.
There’s also something wonderfully old-fashioned about not knowing what happens next. Everything else is on demand, summarised by AI, or spoiled by someone’s cousin on Instagram before you’ve found the remote.
Gloriously unedited
Sport stubbornly refuses to be spoiled. Nobody actually knows if there will be extra-time or how penalties are going to go, or that a player ranked 114th in the world can make the semis of the greatest tennis tournament in the world, or that NSW can win an Origin decider in Brisbane. That uncertainty is, commercially speaking, priceless.
This creates something brands find increasingly hard to manufacture anywhere else: a shared moment.
Then there’s trust. In a world where everything feels filtered, generated or faintly suspicious, live sport is gloriously unedited. It’s thrilling, maddening, heartbreaking, and sometimes ridiculous (Google ‘Aguero Moment’ – 14 years old and still unbelievable). Brands that get close to those real emotions borrow a little authenticity for themselves, free of charge.
Here’s the delicious irony: the current obsession with short-term, measurable performance marketing may be quietly strengthening sport’s position. The more measurable everything becomes, the more interchangeable it starts to look.
Every platform’s numbers begin to resemble every other platform’s numbers, and the marginal gains get smaller while the costs get larger.
Distinctiveness, unhelpfully, refuses to fit into a spreadsheet.
The brands that win over the long run aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated attribution model. They’re the ones people simply remember. And nothing builds memory at scale quite like sport, because it combines emotion, repetition and bragging rights in a way a banner ad never will.
None of this makes sporting rights cheap. Quite the opposite. They’re becoming eye-wateringly expensive precisely because they deliver the one thing technology still can’t replicate: genuine, collective human attention, all in one place, at one time. (As an aside, few, if any, brands have mastered making enough content to sustain a sponsorship without becoming overly repetitive).
Perhaps that’s the real lesson. In an age obsessed with finding ever-smaller audiences more efficiently, the smartest move might still be gathering a few million people together for two hours and having your brand turn up when all of them are looking at and feeling nothing else other than what is being shown on the screen.
Some old ideas are remarkably hard to disrupt.
