Turning engagement into assets

Part 1 covered the challenge, the engagement treadmill: most clubs sell the attention that a victory, a signing or a kit launch attracts on the day, keep nothing from it and start the next occasion from zero. The scope is the same: the media and advertising revenue channel that a club can add to its headline sponsorship, for the football clubs below the four or five biggest in each country and for most organisations in other sports. This part covers the opportunity: what the club can keep from each of those occasions, what it can build with it, and why a club that keeps it has products to sell to its sponsors in a bad season too.

In a previous piece, I wrote that a global number coming from the combined reach on social media and tech platforms to claim a club's worldwide fanbase is an incomplete asset.

Data is an asset, the fan's consent to the use of that data is an asset, a subscription to the team's updates is an asset, ticketing data, e-commerce data, interests and preferences willingly provided by the fan in exchange for value are assets. Each of those assets is a part of the same system. Together, they are the foundations of what the club needs to build the products it sells to sponsors and advertisers.

Selling a sponsor more than plain exposure takes three capabilities on the data side: addressability (reaching the fan), insights (knowing the fan well enough to build effective, unique and tailored sponsorship proposals and briefs) and measurement (proving the outcomes). For most clubs, the three exist only through third-party platforms, with the same tools and metrics available to competitors, at the same depth, while battling for visibility across the same audiences. Nothing on the data side differentiates the club in the competition for winning and keeping sponsors. The sponsor can take advantage of those capabilities elsewhere, on platforms that profile those very fans and connect with them more effectively, at the expense of the clubs that generated the engagement in the first place.

Furthermore, engagement turned into assets helps mitigate the bad periods on three fronts and make monetisation less dependent on the results on the pitch or in the arena. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms' feeds prioritise the content that performs. A losing club's content performs less, so the fans who still care are not shown it. Email open rates are low too, but a registered fan is still a fan the club can reach and engage on its own terms, which a follower hidden by the algorithm is not. Commercial products built on knowledge of the fans, and the capability to measure results, exist in a bad season too. A bad season lowers engagement everywhere, in the club's own channels too, but the club can see who is losing interest and why, and tweak communication and initiatives to keep the relationship alive.

What most clubs lack is an audience monetisation strategy sitting on an infrastructure to capture, process and categorise data, and turn it into insights and products. In practice, that means a destination or a product the club owns, with a direct channel to the fan, with social media platforms feeding rather than replacing it; registration and consent designed with a commercial model in mind, not as a compliance exercise; one view of the fan across ticketing, membership, retail and digital; ownership of the data and an approach that does not tie the club to one supplier, to guarantee continuity after a change of tech partner, without losing any audience relationship. Third parties should stay very much in the picture, but leaving the data to them and using it to the club's advantage are not the same thing.

What that infrastructure produces is a portfolio the commercial team can monetise: sponsor campaigns and initiatives reaching known fan segments through the club's channels or third-party platforms but using the club's unique data; advertising products developed in exclusive environments combining data, content, engagement and context; sponsor integration as access to the system with groups of fans the club knows and outcomes it can measure. Reaching the same people inside the club's own environment, where the club knows who they are, at the moment they are most engaged, is worth more to a sponsor than reaching them anywhere else. The club creates that environment and controls its quality, which determines the quality of the interaction. None of it works if the fan gets nothing back for the consent, the data, the registration and the participation in any interaction that the club invites them to. Value exchange with the fan is the foundation of all of it, not the value extraction that killed the trust between traditional media companies and their audiences.

The volatility is the sponsor's problem too. A sponsorship built only around the big occasions loses value when a season does not go as planned, which will later affect renewals. A sponsorship whose strategy and activation are built on known segments and measured outcomes will still mitigate the damage. The asset is a sponsor retention and renewal argument as much as a club revenue argument.

Collecting data is particularly valuable during the big occasions, because that is when new fans are attracted and the platforms show the club's content to more people organically. What the club collects then is what it will need when results turn and engagement becomes scarcer and weaker. In good times, during a big occasion, nothing feels missing, so few organisations develop a strategy and an infrastructure to keep the revenue going in bad times. A derby, a cup run, a signing, a final: the extra appeal brings occasional and international fans, and retaining them takes a content strategy that does not stop between matches, which I will cover separately.

Certain types of events repeat every season and can be forecast, so the collection of the data and the sale to sponsors can be planned in advance. At Yahoo! we tracked the intensity and patterns of certain types of engagement and produced 13-month forecasts which, for example, told us the number of visits that certain sites and topics would receive around Wimbledon. Not technically audience data, but a powerful tool for selling to sponsors and advertisers.

Occasions such as a victory, a signing, a kit launch or a prize draw must become a calendar with an asset-building plan for each occasion. It is never too late to start. The minimum starting point is a registration and consent strategy, as one item of a broader audience monetisation strategy. For years, many media owners tried (and many still try) to force registration instead of explaining and giving the audience a reason to register. 

Social and tech platforms profile the club's fans and reach them. The environment belonging to the club, where those fans are reached directly at the moment they are most engaged and measured afterwards, is what no third-party platform can provide: only the club can create it. 

That environment can produce repeatable revenue in one way only, through products built on the assets: what the club knows about those fans, with their consent, and the means to reach them without a platform in between. This is what turning engagement into assets means.

It is also the only way off the engagement treadmill.