IMG’s Digital Trends Report 2024 ranks TikTok in the lead, women’s sport mass opportunities and AI taking no prisoners in the New Year
FC Barcelona Femeni took on VfL Wolfsburg at the PSV Stadium, Eindhoven, the Netherlands for the 2023 UEFA Women’s Champions League Final
IMG’s Digital Trends Report 2024 ranks the 10 most important third-party media platforms for the global sports industry with TikTok coming out on top, followed by YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
The platforms are ranked based on a detailed analysis of their audience profile and growth, commercial potential and the functionality they offer both rightsholders and users, among others.
The report also shows that artificial intelligence (AI) has surpassed all expectations and that women’s sport is set to continue to be an area of growth for rights holders and advertisers.
Featuring insights and analysis from IMG’s global team of digital experts (formerly known as Seven League), the report breaks down the biggest developments in the sector and how they will influence the ways sports brands and organisations engage fans and audiences.
TikTok phenomenon
On TikTok making it as the number one third-party app media platform on the study, IMG senior vice president and managing director of digital, Lewis Wiltshire, tells SVG Europe: “This is the first year that we’ve included what we’re calling the platform power rankings. It came about through a combined methodology where we took all of the digital experts right across the IMG digital team and looked at where we see clients investing their time and the results that clients are getting, the usability of those platforms, the commercial power of those platforms.
“When we look at all factors combined, TikTok is absolutely worth investing in. We realised that it can be a heavier lift in terms of production, but we see our clients maximising those returns on it.”
As to whether rights holders should consider going all out and investing everything into TikTok, Wiltshire says: “Should they put all of their resources into [TikTok]? Definitely not all because we would always preach a nuanced approach where sports rights holders look at where to place their bets. But we definitely think we’ve moved on from a world of the classic quartet of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Now, we think that sports rights holders should avoid the sunk cost fallacy of, “well, we’ve built up all of this audience on X,” or, “we’ve already built this audience on Facebook,” and actually think strategically and looking forwards, not back. Where would you place your bets? All things considered, we think that TikTok has phenomenal growth potential, but also with Instagram and YouTube making up that big three; and we do see it as a big three. There’s quite a big gap between those three and then Facebook and so forth.”
He continues: “It’s really important to tie this back to your strategic business objectives. We often say to our clients, “you don’t need a digital strategy; you need a strategy with digital in it”. So the strategy should be your business strategy, and digital is one of the best levers you have to unlock that business strategy.”
AI, Web 3.0 and women’s sport
The Digital Trends Report 2024 shows that since the launch of ChatGPT last year, the adoption of generative AI has surpassed all expectations. In 2024, sports organisations will have a clearer idea of how to use AI and to unlock efficiencies in their processes, develop new and innovative content formats and marketing campaigns, and identify new commercial opportunities in large data sets. Early examples will see sports using AI to improve ticket and retail conversion through better user targeting, while rightsholders will seek to reduce churn on streaming and membership services and optimise pricing through much deeper predictive analytics.
As for how sports broadcasters will see early benefits in 2024, Wiltshire says: “We talk in the report about cut, create, and cultivate, the three areas where we think AI will be useful to sports rights holders. Cutting in terms of efficiencies; we think all sports rights holders will find efficiencies in that by using AI. As we move into an AI world where so much heavy lifting can be done by tools that are based on machine learning, I think for sports rights holders, that will certainly drive efficiencies. But then there’s also the creative element to that, so generative AI as a way of producing creative assets, or simply just editing long-form video into short-form clips.”
Meanwhile it states that as Web 3.0 shakes down, machine learning is powering up, with the report claiming that we are at the start of a third age of the internet and some technologies will begin to emerge as category-defining, while others will fall away. Most notably, this shakedown will be led by Web 3.0 technologies underpinned by blockchain, immersive experiences encompassing everything from VR to virtual worlds, and machine learning.
While the metaverse was the big buzzword for last year, Web 3.0 is the key, notes Wiltshire: “I don’t think anyone thinks that mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) have receded as viable future tech. When Zuck renamed the Facebook Inc. as Meta, the world suddenly latched onto this word, metaverse, and it became a word a bit like NFT’s and some other new terminology around tech where everyone’s definition of the word became slightly different. I think what happened is that people started to attach metaverse the word, and their belief in whether metaverse would eventually become a thing, to any VR that they saw. So even really nascent, really early VR, if it didn’t fulfil people’s dream or their vision for what VR could become, people would just say, “well, the metaverse is not going to be a thing”.
“I believe Zuck’s intention was always that this was a 10 year bet or longer that he felt that tech would move in that direction, and clearly, it is. When you look at Apple’s VR products and Meta’s own VR products, I think those two will do battle in Christmas sales and will both be prominent hardware in 2024. There absolutely is a future in mixed reality and virtual reality, and I think we’re only at the very, very start of that. So whether you choose to call that metaverse or not, the tech definitely has a future.”
The report also shows that we have seen for some time that women’s sport has a very engaged, digital-savvy audience and highly engaged pockets of online communities. There is already data to suggest these communities will over-index on support of the brands that commit to it – for example, Michelob Ultra found that fans of women’s sport are 30% more likely to engage with its brand. 2024 is the moment that rightsholders can translate digital engagement to effective commercial partnerships.
Personalised experiences are now an expectation, not a frill, and the driving force behind this trend comes from changing consumer needs, the report shows. Every sport is faced with concerns about ageing audiences in-stadia and on TV, and competing with a huge variety of attractions for the attention of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. This means sport is now competing for audiences who are used to algorithmic recommendations or personalised feeds across their platforms, and any league or club-owned product needs to get on board with reaching that level of sophistication.
It also says that as we enter 2024, it is time for sports rights holders, leagues, and governing bodies to stop saying ‘social media’. The major platforms do not exist simply to connect us publicly with friends and family; that behaviour has moved to private messaging apps and groups, the report claims. By taking the emphasis off the ‘social’, sports organisations can and will reassess how they distribute and syndicate content and messaging, while making big decisions on which platforms they focus their efforts on to achieve their objectives.
Wiltshire concludes: “The unprecedented speed with which AI blew the doors off the technology landscape in 2023 has unquestionably moved us into a new era of digital. We are now in an age of AI, mixed reality, and streaming.”