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February 14, 2023

Digital Audio Positioned to Play Integral Role in Sports Marcom Mix

Digital audio consumption is popular and growing.

eMarketer reports

U.S. adults now spend more time consuming the format daily (one hour 40 minutes), than they do viewing OTT services (one hour 27 minutes), surfing social media (one hour 15 minutes), or watching videos on their smartphones (40 minutes).

And yet, it remains an underused –and under monetized– asset class within sports. Few rights owners have done more with digital audio than introduce a long-form podcast.  

But the format appears positioned to play an increasingly integral role within the marcom mix in the years ahead. Macroeconomic headwinds will likely shrink some marketing and communications budgets and digital audio “offers an affordable way for sports entities to scale highly authentic and engaging content,” Brian Landau (co-founder and CEO, Vennly) said.

Recent technological developments have also finally made it easy for sports properties to package and distribute the mountains of audio content they sit on across owned and operated platforms, and to measure engagement with the programming.

“In the way there is Vimeo, Brightcove, Kaltura and JW Player on the video side, there hasn’t been an audio solution in that vein until now,” Landau said.

The ongoing audio resurgence has coincided with the rise of podcasting.

Most sports properties have followed the trend and launched a podcast series. Some have even managed to gain traction (see:

The Season with Peter Schrager

).

But because the audio industry has been behind video with respect to distribution, analytics, and monetization, few have chosen to do much more with the format.

“In video, table stakes marketing and monetization strategies include taking a long-form asset, versioning it for specific segments of the audience, and distributing the highlights across owned and operated channels,” Landau said. Each of those assets are sponsored.

That hasn’t happened on the audio side. “Sharing content across channels, in a way that lives as an integrated part of that channel, and measuring consumption and engagement, is super hard. [The capability] is first being pioneered right now,” Landau explained.

Vennly has started to enable that motion. 

The startup has predominantly worked with B2B brands to date. “SAP, for example, leverages our platform to integrate their audio content into their own PDF collateral,” Landau said. “They have found when people listen to the color commentary it brings a whole new dimension and provides some intelligence to an otherwise static offline asset.”

However, Vennly recently signed its first sports client–SailGP.

Landau believes there are several ways Vennly can aid sports properties. “The first is driving greater utilization of existing content,” Landau said. “So many [rights owners] are already creating audio content. [They just] don’t know how to scale these [podcast] audiences or to engage with these audiences in audio.”

Part of the problem is they are using owned and operated channels to push fans to podcast hosting providers like Apple, Spotify, iHeartMedia and Amazon.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those platforms, “It’s hard to drive audiences and [even harder] to understand the who, what, where, why of those audiences” in the event you can get them there, Landau said.

Rights owners receive few data points beyond the number of people who downloaded the podcast.

The large podcast services also have subscription-based business models built on exclusive programming. “So, unless you’re Joe Rogan or

Call Her Daddy

on Spotify, or a major publisher like Wondery on Amazon, those distribution points are just not motivated to help promote you,” Landau said.

That is problematic when you consider how oversaturated the podcasting space is. DemandSage has determined there are

five million

podcasts globally.

Vennly takes a vastly different approach to distribution. “Our methodology is to share content [directly] on owned and operated marketing or communications assets, [where the fans already are],” Landau said.

Each piece of audio content it shares includes a customizable call-to-action connecting playback with a specific bottom of the funnel activity.

By distributing programming across owned and operated channels rights owners can learn more about their audience and how it engages with the organization’s audio content.

And because Vennly serves as both the host and the player, rights owners can gain access to granular insights on specific pieces of content. “The reason we found [the company] interesting was due to the analytics it can provide when sharing the podcast outside of the large platforms,” Jose Garnes (head of content, SailGP) said.

Vennly tech also allows sports properties to publish more content, more often. “The first step is just dissecting our 50 plus minute podcast into smaller chunks,” Garnes said.

SailGP believes easy-to-digest short-form clips can be useful in hooking new podcast listeners.

They can also be used to engage existing supporters of the international sailing competition. “For us, it’s very much about tapping into micro communities [of super fans],” Melissa Lawton (chief content officer, SailGP) said.

There should be short-term commercial value in versioning content too. “We see it as sort of the second bite of the [apple], to add additional sponsors or presenting partners,” Lawton said.

But even if there is not a direct partner attached to the audio assets, Garnes said having additional ears listening will pay off in the long-term. “We will have the numbers, followers and engagement that every sport and brand is searching and always striving for.”

There is a manual editing process required to version content. However, Garnes said Vennly makes it easy to do. “Sometimes we’re resource poor. We definitely did not want to be hiring more people to snip up our podcast. Having a software tool that does that for us easily was important.”

Vennly touts its technology can also help rights owners unlock potentially valuable assets without a home on broadcast radio, SiriusXM or a podcast. “You can charge a sponsor a ton of money for [the star player’s] pre-game hype-up speech,” Landau said. “There are audiences for that.”

Similarly, Landau envisions rights owners sending fans preparing to attend a home game a sponsored audio clip previewing the matchup or using the format to re-target fans that recently came to an event.

There is an abundance of potential use cases. Now that the technology exists to distribute and track digital audio programming, it’s just a matter of time until sports properties begin to explore them.