As much as younger Americans in recent years have troubled the sleep of league commissioners and their media partners—given the hundreds of billions of dollars in play, Gen Z’s aversion to the lean-back pleasures of traditional TV is the stuff of nightmares—new research from Horizon Media’s WHY Group suggests that digital natives are just as interested in sports as their elders, even if it seems that they’re a lot harder to reach.
In a 62-page study on the so-called “Sports-Curious” segment, Horizon’s researchers have made a case for reimagining outreach to younger fans, revealing that the next wave of enthusiasts is more likely to be recruited into the monoculture through various on-ramps, including comedy, tech, fashion and entertainment. In understanding the myriad ways in which consumers are drawn to sports via such seemingly unlikely channels as golfcore—think Tyler, the Creator’s Golf Wang collection or Macklemore’s Bogey Boys line—and the absurdist comedy embodied by the feeding frenzy that followed last year’s Pop-Tarts Bowl, marketers will have a better shot at engaging with a new generation of fans.
As Courtney Mota explains it, younger consumers tend to find their way into the wider phenomenon of sports by what amounts to a sort of pop-cultural exchange program. The VP of cultural strategy at Horizon Media’s WHY Group, a unit within the agency that analyzes the intersection of customs, people and brands, Mota began thinking about the many indirect routes that lead the junior set to the promised land of fandom while she was on a barnstorming tour of the country’s minor league ballparks.
“My hobby is to travel around the country and visit minor league baseball teams,” Mota said. “As a cultural strategist I’ve been researching people and communities and places for 15 years, and I think that minor league sports teams are a great way into understanding local culture.” Through her experiences with such clubs as the freelance Savannah Bananas, Mota began unearthing insights into a host of elements that are entwined with the circuit, a matrix that includes everything from ballpark fashion to the singular delights of doggie ball boys.
As Mota says, just about any given lifestyle component may turn out to be an entry point into sports. Quite often, the clothes, music and other elements that at first blush may seem tangential to fandom will overlap with sports in a manner sufficient to help spawn a sort of energy exchange. In other words, by embracing certain pop-cultural elements, teams and leagues often can effect an almost amoebic absorption of people who might otherwise not have found their way into an appreciation for sports.
“The reason that all of this lifestyle stuff matters is that people are more likely to have a stronger affinity for the brands that connect with the things that they love—and they’re willing to pay more for them, too,” Mota said. “So it’s not just about attracting eyeballs and building awareness; the big moment is when people can see the dots align and it’s like, ‘Oh, this brand gets me. And this sport gets me, this team gets me. They care about the things that I care about.’ So we’re seeing that there are all these organic ways to reach new fans in ways that are of particular interest to them, rather than just sports beating its drum and hoping more people join the tribe.”
“The modern sports fan cares about so much more than the wins and the losses,” said Kerry Bradley, the senior vice president of strategy at Horizon Sports & Experiences. “It’s about the experience, it’s about getting to know the athletes, off the field, behind the scenes—these are the values that sports fans and consumers in general want to now act in accordance with.”
Bradley and her team have presented Mota’s research to clients in an effort to make them more comfortable with the notion of broadening their marketing funnels. As brands gain greater insight into the way various enthusiasms can lead to a sort-of backdoor embrace of sports culture, their media plans can work a lot harder for them.
“It’s not enough to think about these two-dimensional, casual-versus-avid-fan segmentation strategies,” Bradley said. “We have to widen the aperture and put more effort into engaging with and meeting these consumers wherever they are.”
As Bradley sees it, marketers who overlook the sport-curious segment are effectively undermining their own outreach efforts. By better understanding younger fans’ origin stories, by examining the various elements that served to usher them into the sports fold, brands can make their messaging all the more relevant—and by extension, far more effective.
What’s particularly interesting about the sports-curious gang is that their enthusiasm for a given athlete is largely informed by the sense of virtual “connection” that’s fostered by the no-filter era of social media. If you’re a fan of a certain age, you probably knew a handful of things about your favorite player’s personal life; in the days before the internet was omnipresent, maybe you had a sense of what kind of beer he liked or where he lived in the offseason.
These days, fans have a direct line into the lives of their favorite athletes, and it seems as if there’s very little about them that isn’t in circulation. So while someone who follows Jamaal Williams on Instagram may not necessarily be able to trot out his stat line, he or she is well-versed in the running back’s obsession with Pokémon and cats. It may seem like a small thing on which to build a rooting interest, but the kids these days are just built different.
“Social media humanizes players, and makes them more accessible,” Mota said. “Gen Z is all about their own individuality and their personal brand, and it’s important to them that they’re not just engaging with faceless players. They’re following individuals. And I feel like that dynamic is an olive branch to a whole new segment of potential NFL viewers.”
One way in which Gen Z is no different than the rest of us is that they always want to be in the loop. And that desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves goes a long way toward explaining the explosion in the popularity of women’s sports.
“For a long time, women’s sports only engaged those diehard fans because it wasn’t possible to be a casual women’s sports fan,” Mota said. “You couldn’t stumble across the WNBA, you had to go in search of it. After years of only engaging this very passionate, avid fanbase, now we’re seeing the downstream effects of increased marketing and media dollars spotlighting these women, and it’s creating more household names, more rivalries and more storylines. As awareness grows, the WNBA is getting more primetime slots, which means the discoverability is increasing; as a result, you’re getting the sport-curious and those folks who just care about the pop culture angle tuning in.”
The greater the insights into the somewhat arcane connections between pop culture and emerging sports fandom, the more authentic the outreach. “When done correctly, sponsorships should be the force multiplier that amplifies the impact of all the rest of your media assets,” Bradley said. “Those strategies should live at the heart of the marketing plan, to make all of your media work harder. But it starts with building that authentic connection. Because consumers will vehemently reject any messaging that’s inauthentic.”
The Horizon Sports & Experiences unit was launched two years ago by David Levy and Chris Weil, two industry veterans that have lived at the crossroads of sports and culture for the better part of the last 40 years. HS&E was founded on the principle that sports marketing has allowed itself to get fat and lazy up there in the catbird seat. But that’s all changing.
“There simply hasn’t been any incentive for sports to evolve or innovate because people would just show up of their own volition, for decades upon decades,” Bradley said. “Now it’s a little more challenging, so there finally is an incentive to start thinking differently about fan acquisition and engagement.”
These curiosity seekers who keep sneaking into sports fandom via alternative entry points may or may not emerge as the hardcore fanatics of the future, but marketers who overlook this new breed of enthusiast do so at the risk of missing out on a real movement. Grouse all you like about all the airtime Taylor Swift will likely gobble up during the coming NFL season, but any brand that turns its nose up at her army of followers may as well be chopping that appendage off to spite its own face.
