How to maximise the value of branded content in 2022
Europe’s leading football clubs drove over €150million of branded content media value on Facebook & Instagram, over the past 18 months – up 90% vs. the period prior.
Branded content is an increasingly important component of any rights holders commercial strategy and its value is rising. These are 5 key considerations for working with brands to plan, produce, track and value content.
Ensure you already have a consistent, high quality publishing strategy in place
Any successful branded content strategy must begin with an overall content strategy, and within sport that means a clear picture of what, when, how and why content will be made available to fans. The pandemic has only crystalised that need; with the volume of sports content being produced digitally by leagues, teams, broadcasters, publishers and athletes, rising quickly, it’s a cluttered, saturated online world in which teams are operating. But it’s an increasingly valuable one.
The rising volume of branded content
During the 18 months from March 2020 to August 2021, there was a 95% increase in branded content post volume across the club pages of Europe’s top football clubs compared to the previous 18-month period.
Data on the 12 clubs – Arsenal, FC Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Paris Saint Germain, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur - was sourced by CrowdTangle.
O2, shirt sponsor of England Rugby’s men’s and women’s teams, has carved out a regular slot for its Inside Line series of Facebook Watch videos, offering a regular recap of behind-the-scenes moments from within camp.
FC Barcelona completely shifted its digital commercial offering five seasons ago, transitioning from offering single posts on social media channels to partners to a more regular brand presence. “Everything started with a content inventory and media valuation exercise, aimed at packaging regular existing content,” says Juli Guiu, Vice President, Marketing Area, FC Barcelona. “By doing this we identified more than 100 regular content [types] that our current and potential partners could be linked with – not randomly, but following a case-by-case, bespoke approach, identifying what content could benefit each partner or category."
FC Barcelona and Rakuten collaborated to create an entertainment content series, 'Most Likely to’, featuring the club’s biggest stars driving awareness of some of Rakuten’s key products and services.
“The results speak for themselves: in the last three seasons the overall social media value from our partners has increased +145%. Additionally, we transformed those social media single posts into co-created branded content campaigns. Working together with each partner, for every campaign we are mixing a clear campaign brief with Barça digital team expertise about what performs better in each channel to create/plan/activate branded content campaigns that tick partner goals and messages and are attractive for our fans.”
For the past two seasons, FC Barcelona and its partner, mobile telecoms company OPPO, have produced ‘Inside Vlogs’, which integrate OPPO devices by using them as the main camera in each video and highlighting other key camera features throughout.
For German sports broadcaster Sport1, which has in recent months been ramping up its own branded content strategy, the message to prospective partners is simple. “We are always trying to convince brands that the most important thing is that branded content must work for the fans,” says Thomas Kriner, the former DAZN and Infront executive who is now Director of Digital and Client Sales at the channel. “Content must be relevant for the fans and brands must be authentic within the content.”
In Germany, rights holders like Sport1, which hold digital clip rights to the Bundesliga, are incorporating brand messaging in highlights videos. Sport1 brand partners are able to reach the broadcaster’s 8.59 million unique digital users across its various social and owned channels.
“Our strategy is to enlarge digital reach and to approach sports fans on their digital journey with the right pieces of content in the right time. It could be 3-minute video of Bayern Munich versus Dortmund on Sunday on our portals, followed by a 30-second video on Facebook on Monday morning with the spectacular goal of Robert Lewandowski, and fan voting on Wednesday of the most important moment of the match. Most important is that branded content has to work for the fans. If this happens, it also works for the brands.”
Work with your long-term partners; but have an eye open for short-term opportunities
Tactics around branded content are to a large extent dictated by the nature of partnership between a team and a brand. Existing, long-term commercial partnerships may well have had branded content opportunities baked into them long before the pandemic struck; now, it is a virtual certainty.
“If you’re a football club with a technical supplier or shirt sponsor, one of your premium, tier one sponsors, the job of the content team, the digital team, is to make sure they’re enacting the best delivery against that, hopefully over-delivering, and making the case back to the sponsor that not only have they achieved the results, but surpassed them – and that there’s value to be had within it. That’s the way it’s been happening over the last three to five years, at increasing levels of sophistication.”
However, the nature of branded content means social campaigns can be sold, planned and executed on a much shorter-term, reactive basis, opening up another form of potential partnership for teams to go to market with. “We’re starting to see that as well as delivering for the top sponsors, clubs and leagues are looking at categories that they haven’t currently sold against and wondering if there’s the opportunity to do a digital-specific or platform-specific content partnership,” says Joyce. While such deals will inevitably have a lower yield, done well they can still generate significant value for brands – and, in a fast-moving world such as sport, allow for more reactive, timely content.
Chelsea’s short-term tie-up with Duracell in December 2019 coincided with the brand’s advertising campaign during Amazon Prime Video’s Premier League broadcasts, to promote its range of portable power banks. The content was produced in-house by the club, then distributed across Chelsea’s social channels.
What I’m seeing is more rights holders seeing it as an opportunity to exploit,” Joyce says. “It isn’t one or the other. If it’s delivered well and there’s an impactful campaign with a sponsor for a time-limited period, there’s also the potential that the creativity of that, the slick execution of it, can be an inspiration to longer-term sponsors, who can then perhaps tap into it in their own way.”
Quality doesn’t have to be comprised in shorter-term campaigns, either. “Ultimately you can have something that’s more short-term but still very well thought-out, aligns with what the club is doing with its content strategy and how they want to communicate with fans, but also aligning with the brand’s idea for messaging,” Joyce explains. “Coming up with a process, a storyboard and a really solid content publishing strategy, and then executing it. Once that’s done it’s all about tracking results.”
Understand what's important to measure - and how you'll relay it to brand partners
Reporting back to partners about how a campaign has performed and the value generated is, of course, essential but only effective if the way in which value will be measured has been agreed in advance. At a broad level, with online video, that means alignment on whether impressions, 3-second views, engagements or something else entirely. “Ideally you’d go a bit further than impressions and go for some of the more meaningful metrics,” Facebook’s Joyce explains, “If impressions is at one end of the scale, you might move through to three-second views, then to engagements. These are all greater signals of intent, better indicators of how things are performing.
“At the more meaningful end of the spectrum we’d have one minute views and watch time, real signals that people care about your content. If you’re a smart, savvy digital team that wants to put forward the best proposition to a would-be sponsor, you’re looking at how much, on average, you are delivering for watch time or one minute views for branded content. You’re then adding that together with the number of posts you do, you’re selecting a cost per whatever the metric is, so that could be cost per 1000 impressions, cost per 1000 watch hours and so you’re scientifically determining a number. You’re presenting that to the sponsor as ‘this is why we’re valuing it like this’.”
Juli Guiu has the FC Barcelona perspective. “Our partners are mostly looking for reach, views and engagement. Barça channels represent for them an important speaker to a huge audience that is willing to consume all Barça content. This is why it is so important that each campaign has its own plan for Barça channels and why we are working closely with each of the partners. After each digital activation the performance data of the campaign is shared and evaluated together with the aim to get insights and learnings for upcoming ones.”
The concept of ‘test and learn’ – specifically testing different formats, platforms, publishing times - still applies, but within agreed parameters. “You test and learn with the type of content you are publishing, but you also test and learn with the way you integrate a brand,” Joyce says. On Facebook, for example, there are clear branded content policies in place, from not having a brand appear in the centre of the screen for the first three seconds or not having a banner appear consecutively during the content. “The idea is to protect the consumption experience for the fan and these rules do quite a good job of that,” explains Joyce.
“They’ve iterated over time to make sure they stay honest and reflect people’s consumption habits on the platform. But you want to make sure you’re testing them. If you’re a rights holder working with a sponsor, you want to find the balance between not disrupting the fan experience, but pull the sponsor in in an effective way to give them that exposure. And test the relevance of the content: make sure it’s a natural fit and that the two [content and brand] go together.”
Don't stop once you've tracked; retarget and nudge your audience
A rights holder – or brand – planning, executing, publishing and tracking the performance of branded content may still not be exploiting the content and the subsequent data capture to its fullest potential. Initial tracking may only be the beginning. Nudging an engaged audience towards an offer, an incentive and ultimately a purchase of a product or subscription is the next important consideration for any savvy sports organisation.
“Retargeting your audience you’ve built up is definitely a key step,” Joyce says. “The power of Facebook and Instagram, if you publish content, is that as the rights owner you’re able to track people who have consumed that within a custom audience. You can retarget that audience of people who have consumed the content (always anonymised and aggregated for privacy reasons) with a lead generation ad or with a bespoke code to go and purchase a product.”
As FC Barcelona’s Guiu explains, the LaLiga club has developed a strong fan-focused and personalized approach, which brands are now benefiting from. “The more we know from our fans, the more we can tailor the content and messages we send to them,” he says. “In order to achieve this level of personalisation, we need to get fan data and as part of our content strategy, we aim to convert the most engaged fans on Social Media into registered fans in our platforms - web and app. We achieve that through only-for-members content/games/giveaways that allow us to get their data and start their onboarding to a much more personalized Barça experience.”
Retargeting is a potentially powerful tool for clubs to directly attribute sponsorship sales revenue back to original branded content posts. In general, any content partnership agreement between a rights holder and a brand will be based initially on softer metrics such as impressions or views. In increasingly sophisticated ways, however, clubs are utilising their highly engaged, passionate fanbases to drive tangible business outcomes for partners – retargeting strategies are helping to demonstrate and quantify the impact of this audience on a brand’s bottom line.
“You can try and track this as much as you can end to end; there’s always slight gaps in the system and that’s where we’ve got to improve and get better,” says Joyce, “but if we’re able to retarget the people who consumed your branded content you’re taking it beyond what can be done in a traditional linear sense and maximising what can be done with social media to the fullest.”
Consider branded content a driver of revenue, not a cost centre
The rising value of branded content
During the 18 months from March 2020 to August 2021, the media valuation of branded content on Facebook and Instagram, across club pages/profiles of 12 of the major European football clubs, increased by 90% - €81 million to €153.7 million – compared to the previous 18-month period.
Data on the 12 clubs – Arsenal, FC Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Paris Saint Germain, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur - was sourced by CrowdTangle.
Branded digital content is here to stay and will only increase in volume and value to rights holders and their brand partners. The models and evaluations will be refined but, as Joyce suggests, “arguably, the possibilities are infinite”. As he says: “You’re not going to badge up everything you send out but you can get better and better at how you integrate the brand.”
Sport1’s Kriner adds: “We’re just at the beginning of this journey. But we’ll definitely do more of it, because, depending on the time and situation, we often reach fans better on Facebook than on our portals.”
Beyond the metrics, a particular area of evolution may be in how organisations come to view branded content and where it sits within a wider commercial portfolio. “Something we’re passionate about is making sure that the work digital teams are doing in creating and publishing content isn’t seen simply as a cost centre,” Joyce says. “It’s an incremental revenue driver for the business and it’s important that’s recognized within P&Ls.
"We can track how well branded content has performed – publishers can tangibly determine how much has been delivered per brand. The data points from Nielsen illustrate that the media value attributable to branded content has grown hugely over the past 18 months. A club, league or broadcaster can leverage this insight to illustrate how branded content is comparable to more traditional forms of sponsorships such as LEDs, signage etc. – making sure its worth isn’t undervalued."