Grabyo’s live sports video clipping platform has been a stellar advancement in keeping fans current with gameday action. But combining that with automated delivery to distribute Grabyo video clips direct to athletes for amplifying on their social channels is a whole new ballgame. Accelerating content delivery to get it in the hands of their most influential social stars in seconds is critical. It helps sports properties hit new heights in global fan engagement and revenue.
Grabyo’s Director of Customer Success, Matt Ferrara, recently hosted a conversation with Katie Lavin, VP of Marketing at the National Lacrosse League, and Andrew Patterson, Chief Strategy Officer at Greenfly to delve into this topic. The group discussed how pairing automated technology, creative content and original player voices in real-time, shared sports video clips is driving new levels of social fandom.
Grabyo’s premium video editing and publishing platform for live sports video clipping integrates with Greenfly’s digital media management platform for last-mile automated clip distribution. This partnership has proven to be a powerhouse combination for sports organizations worldwide. Athletes, sponsors and broadcasters fuel digital media channels with personalized, original event videos. This activity builds value and revenue for sports properties simultaneously.
The trio reviewed how real-time social video’s immediacy and athletes’ authenticity enable relevant, captivating stories and build unstoppable relationships with sports’ most avid supporters. Read more here on sharing photos and videos with athletes.
Watch the webinar or read the highlights below.
Move Content at the Speed of Social
As the executives discussed, getting special sports moments to fans when they happen is essential now. Digital-savvy audiences have many distractions and demands on their media time. If you don’t reach them with content moving at the speed of social, they’re off to something else. Technology to publish sports happenings in an instant keeps content top of mind and high up on fans’ social timelines.
Athletes and fans are both expecting content in hand now to tell their own stories and share in the excitement. Live video clipping and automated delivery to distribute Grabyo video clips have become more important than ever before.
Maximize Content Delivery for Athletes’ Authentic Stories
As Lavin noted, the NLL uses social and content data to maximize what they deliver. They’ve found that beyond the floor of play, behind-the-scenes shoulder content is critical to fans and most engaging to them. Supporters want to see team arrivals, warm-ups, milestone moments, and the activity around post-game wins and defeats. With automated workflows, leagues and teams can deliver this personalized content to athletes to make the most of these moments. Players can share and augment the stories surrounding these happenings in their own voices. And properties can optimize how their photographers and freelancers spend their gameday time to capture more content and help these stories come to life.
Patterson also discussed that authenticity is at the core of conversation and content today. Making a lot of digital media available to athletes immediately allows them to pick and choose and tell their authentic stories. This overcomes the issue of only being able to tell a single narrative. He shared how one athlete took all of their arrival shots in warm-up suits and posted that compilation. It became one of their most highly engaged social posts. Patterson pointed out that it’s critical to be able to scale that authentic content and move it across the entire sports organization for multiple teams to use it rapidly. These groups could include the social team sharing gameday videos on TikTok. Or they could be the sponsorship team bringing more value to partners with their marks and logos shown in visual assets.
He agreed that game action is core to sports strategy, and highlights may be why people follow a sports property. But shoulder content is how organizations build a brand and relationships. What they use to fill feeds beyond a game day is part of the story they tell. It also provides opportunities in how they introduce that content.
“For a large sports league, arrivals make up 4% of content in total volume but make up 23% of content shared.
A dunk looks like a dunk, a crossover looks like a crossover, and a goal looks like a goal. But every day you come out in a new outfit, that’s popping on Instagram…. In actually giving an athlete the chance to show what they want and what’s important to them, they make their own choices, and that tells their own story.”
Andrew Patterson, Chief Strategy Officer, Greenfly
Monetize and Build Campaigns To Drive Revenue
Lavin’s team has monetized content by slicing game footage for sponsors based on their brand objectives. They’ve created themed sports video clips at the league level. This includes games of the week, plays of the month, rookie-of-the-week moments, matchups, and more. All are collections they publish in real-time through the Grabyo and Greenfly integration. They leverage them for sponsors and tie them back to authentic content. She also explained that the NLL has monetized fans through fan-generated content captured through Greenfly +Engage. They collect more fan information to upsell merchandise, tickets, subscriptions to broadcast partner OTT services and more.
Patterson highlighted how digital experiences such as content co-created with fans are becoming the norm in sports and have made organizations more creative. He also shared how Greenfly provides value to sports organizations working with sponsors and broadcasters in a number of ways. Sponsors want posts to showcase their brands, while media rights holders want to enhance the broadcast for their audiences. In both cases, sports properties can charge for that value. They can do this by providing social posts to many athletes to expand reach and conversation beyond their more limited owned social channels.
Be Creative on Social With Short-Form Clips
When the NLL halted gameplay during the pandemic, the league quickly pivoted to showcasing great archive footage from their library. They leveraged clipping and editing production tools to create new stories from old ones — both short-form and long-form content with teams and players. These included “The World’s Longest Pass” (where players were self-producers and the league edited their clips together). They also featured player dialogues, day-in-a-life snapshots, interview series, cooking shows and more — all while athletes were at home. And as Ferrara commented, players had more time to craft their own authentic messages. The league has also supported players’ personal interests, such as their pro-social partnerships.
Ferrara shared a webinar poll of attendees, which found that short-form content on and off the pitch was the most important content type for fan engagement. Yet, Lavin noted that the NLL uses a mixture of both long-form and short-form content. They have long-form features rolling out bi-weekly. These are key to creating personalities behind the players and engaging in culturally relevant and timely topics. The league balances these pieces with daily and hourly short-form content that drives long-form tune-in. Patterson explained that Greenfly specializes in managing and distributing short-form digital media, such as 60-second game highlights, and scaling them widely.
Lavin cited an example of a viral moment involving two fighting goalies. The short-form clip went out through league social channels (including Twitter and Instagram), and athlete and media partner channels. It also ended up on a SportsCenter top 10 list. All of this activity allowed the clip to blow up. In another example, a fan posted a goalie scoring a goal (a historic moment), pushed it out and made it viral. The authenticity of a fan sharing that clip meant that engagement was high. And the post was not buried in fans’ social feeds.
Distribute Grabyo Video Clips Efficiently
In closing, Lavin revealed how, as a challenger league, content creation and digital media have democratized their ability to be breakthrough and relevant. This helps them capture more audience timeshare and grow their fan base. That mindset and having a lot of digital media pushes the NLL team to be both creative and judicious about their content strategy. She also noted that a feedback loop between the league and players is instrumental in bringing on partners like Grabyo and Greenfly to create efficiencies and make athletes’ lives easier in working with content.
Patterson spoke about how organizations can efficiently distribute Grabyo video clips in real-time. Sports properties that integrate Grabyo and Greenfly can unite groups in a centralized place. This hub of activity enables them to work together, bring large volumes of content in and push it out quickly. This partnership provides a scalable way to create streamlined workflows and support leagues, teams, broadcasters and sponsors.
