Marketing in the sports industry

09 February 2023 | Newsworthy

Since ancient times, sports have been a fundamental part of human development.

Athletes are semi-gods that we admire for almost having superpowers, demonstrating mastery of speed, strength, skills, and technique. With the difference that we feel strongly related to them because they are not comic book characters but people like us, who struggle for their goals.

Exorbitant amounts of money

It’s not surprising that the current sports industry moves millions of people and, therefore, exorbitant amounts of money: PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that, by 2022, it would reach a value of 80 billion dollars.

Marketing has been a key piece in this evolution, but this has also represented an enormous challenge for its professionals, since sports gather very broad and different audiences, almost only linked by a specific sport, team or athlete. However, this has not been an obstacle. On the contrary, it has resulted in some of the most interesting and successful marketing campaigns. Here we tell you about some of them.

Doritos for the Super Bowl

Every year a huge competition breaks out to see which are the best campaigns launched for the Super Bowl. Why? Because in one single event it has one of the highest audiences of the year. Only in 2022 it reached 112 million viewers. With an audience that size, it's clear that big brands want to generate the most engagement and reach.

In 2007, Doritos did what only few would have thought: they let their amateur audience create their Super Bowl ad. For ten years, for each edition of the event, the company launched a contest to choose the best idea and, by the time the campaign wrapped, they were already offering a budget of $1 million and the opportunity to work alongside film director Zack Snyder. Needless to say, Doritos commercials were, year after year, among the most viewed during the Super Bowl.

The success of the campaign was astonishing, taking the conversation beyond the 30-second ads and outside of the traditional media that broadcasts the match.

Skittles for Super Bowl LII

In 2018, Skittles created a campaign with actor David Schwimmer where they made not one stellar ad for the match broadcast, but four small teasers. The campaign consisted of creating enormous expectation for what would happen in the actual ad but with a plot twist: it would only be viewed by a single person, Marcos Menendez, a 17-year-old boy. Instead of airing the short during prime time, a Facebook livestream showed Marcos watching the ad. This way the company challenged the traditional campaign model for the Super Bowl and reinforced the business philosophy. The campaign was so successful that Doritos repeated the formula for three consecutive years.

This Girl Can for Sports England

There’s a significant gender gap in sports. Some brands and institutions are aware of that and are trying to create awareness and change things. One of the most interesting campaigns in this regard was made by Sports England, a British institution focused on promoting sports.

The campaign focuses on telling the stories of great female athletes, aiming to inspire a new generation of girls to practice sports and challenging the idea that some disciplines are single-gendered. Promotional videos appeal to the audience’s sensibility and create an emotional bond with its characters. As a result, after launching the campaign, 2.8 million women between the ages of 14 and 40 declared that they had increased their physical activity inspired by the ads and, of these, 1.6 million said that they had started practicing some sport.

There is no doubt that sports move the most sensitive fibers of its viewers, and so do the marketing campaigns around it. Having a deep understanding of audiences allows you to connect with people and get amazing marketing and advertising results. Do you have that kind of knowledge of your audience?