Now more than ever, content, digital and social teams face a critical mandate: transform their efforts into revenue for their organizations. Sponsored content in sports is nothing new, but the game is changing. There’s a growing level of strategy and sophistication in integrating partners and monetizing as much content as possible without compromising the fan experience.
Alex Kopilow, who spent years building digital partnerships for the Chicago White Sox and Madison Square Garden properties, watches it all. He publishes the weekly Sponcon Sports newsletter and shares examples and insights on his LinkedIn. Kopilow is a wealth of wisdom when it comes to monetizing content in sports.
For our new Green Room series featuring conversations with content experts across sports and entertainment, we caught up with him to discuss the sponsorship trends, tactics, strategies and ideas that sports marketers and partnerships teams working with short-form content need to know.
The following Q&A is part one of our two-part conversation. It’s lightly edited for brevity and clarity and is heavily PACKED with incredibly valuable insights.
“When you have a content team that’s pushing innovation and creativity, that’s always good for everyone.”
Alex Kopilow, Sponcon Sports
Greenfly: How do you see the state of sponsored content in general right now? How healthy is it and where are the opportunities and innovations?
Alex Kopilow: I think we’ve had a really big year in content, generally speaking, and it’s a rising tide lifts all boats kind of [state].
We’re seeing roof cam footage come from the Atlanta Falcons, and that hits the sports industry by storm. Then you see the Scottish Rugby team turning it into a sponsored format for Skyscanner. Or you see Bleacher Report come out with mic’d up where they’re miking up players and sending them to sports that they don’t play. They sent Eagles players to Phillies games and mic’d them up, and that turned into Courtside Cam sponsored by AT&T. The Boston Celtics are also on that level, with all the incredible formats that they’ve developed this year, and then they launch a real-time all-access show with FanDuel in the playoffs.
The creativity and the innovation in content and sports generally has gotten really great and continues to improve. And, as a result, that is trickling into sponsored content where there are just better opportunities to engage fans and include a partner in the rise of this innovation and better results.
GF: How does that emergence of content innovation and sponsorship of content play out — does the demand from sponsors drive supply or vice-versa?
AK: There are never enough ideas for sponsored content. There’s never enough. The variety of partners that you are pitching on a daily basis across categories is so wide-ranging that the more that you have available to you, the better from a partnerships point of view.
So when content teams are testing and learning and trying new things and bringing new things into the fold, that’s incredibly valuable from a partnerships perspective. You find out what works, you get the data back, and you can use that data and that traction to go and sell in the partnership later. So, it’s really great when teams are building built-to-sell concepts into their inventory. Then you can go and sell it; you see that data is right there: It does incredibly well in terms of views, or it’s our most engaged post of the last month. Can we turn this into a series and something recurring for our partner where we can help them achieve their goals?
When you have a content team that’s pushing innovation and creativity, that’s always good for everyone.
GF: What are some of the key factors to look at in identifying and packaging sponsored content?
AK: It starts with identifying what the content is really good at. Is it good at driving awareness? Is it good at driving great engagement? Is it highly shareable? Is the format that we’re using an outstanding opportunity to integrate the product? What is it best [suited] for?
Then, when a partner comes in, and we want to pitch them, you can filter down to the inventory that may be a fit (based on their objective). Next, does their budget align with what we want to charge? That eliminates more. Then, how can we start to tailor it to fit the partner specifically? Finding a way to tailor it to the partner is helpful, but understanding the KPI that it hits is what’s really important.
Then, what if there’s really great content, but it really only lives on Instagram Stories? A potential issue with that is that it’s not really driving that many impressions, right? You might have millions of followers, but you’re only getting low five figures in impressions per frame on Instagram Stories, so that might not be super enticing.
Game previews in the app [are an example]. What if your app audience isn’t so big, but it is engaged, and you have game previews there where you can integrate a partner? Well, if I can add in an Instagram story that links to the app, okay — now I’ve got some social coverage and that can add impressions. Oh, and I can link that to an email blast that goes out before every game previewing the game that also links to the app experience. Now you’re getting an email list, Instagram Stories and an app, and you’ve built up a wider campaign and platform where partners are ready to buy in.
So, sometimes, it’s about finding some little things that work and finding extensions to make it a bigger platform overall.
GF: Are teams well-equipped to realize that sort of multi-channel distribution and packaging? How can they connect the dots to build those bigger platforms for content?
AK: I don’t think teams are set up well for it. It’s why I believe most teams should have someone focused on digital partnerships who can understand the opportunities in content across all channels and departments and put a strategy behind it to make it bigger.
The issue is you’ve got content teams that, rightfully so, should be focused on their KPIs, building an audience, and doing what they do best. And they support most departments in an organization, not just partnerships, so they don’t have a lot of bandwidth to focus on the monetization and larger strategic build-out. And you have partnerships teams that, for the most part, don’t understand digital.
So, whether it is a digital strategy person, a digital partnerships person or a marketing strategy person — most teams don’t have those roles built in, so that is a problem. It’s really hard to come up with those ideas and extensions, and most teams aren’t set up to do that.
GF: How do you see sponsored content programs that do go across platforms, between social and owned and operated (O&O)? Does that added value and amplification get captured in deals?
AK: I think it’s the gold standard. I want to see diversification and channels in what you’re building out for a partner. So whether that taps into O&O and social, [as well as] in-arena assets or TV — the more channels and diversification you can build in a platform for a partner, the better.
The way I really like to approach it is I’ve got a list of every single channel I can tap into, or a mental list, and when I come up with a concept, the goal is to almost check off each channel, to check off each lever that I can pull. Does it make sense? Does it fit the target audience? Does the content fit for where it’s going to show up? How does it need to be tweaked to show up in a specific area? Because most channels are different, and especially as you get off of social into O&O and into experiential, you need to think about it in those ways.
I think the more departments you can touch by increasing the channels is really helpful. So when you have a TV station, like a regional sports network, what if you have a sweepstakes that you can now promote via QR code during a broadcast? That’s something you should tap into. And the same with radio reads, you can do that as well.
GF: You spoke earlier about where Stories fits into the paradigm, with lower reach per frame but some advantages, too. Where do Stories fit into the model for sponsored content, and what are the key factors or opportunities there?
AK: Stories are a really great opportunity for sponsored content for many reasons. One, I think you can increase the level of branding in the design of Instagram Story assets. You’ll see a lot of teams do a lot of great branding on that. You have travel content series, and you see everything from animated plane windows going up as they’re traveling to new cities and even custom-branded stickers that look native to the platform. Because they do [expire], you can get away with a little more branding for a partner.
Two, more teams need to be using the engagement stickers. Something that I found in my time in Chicago [working for the White Sox] was that when we used a poll sticker for a Player of the Game vote on [both] X and Instagram Stories, both had the vote function built in, and we would see up to four times as many votes on Instagram Stories than on X. Even though [on Stories] the vote reached a smaller audience per frame, it was way more engaged.
Three, I couldn’t agree more that it is a good testing ground because it goes away after 24 hours. So, it’s a good way to find what might work and what might not. I think Stories are also helpful for sharing In-feed content. We saw Wimbledon doing a partnership with Stella Artois, and it was a vote for your favorite serve. They actually used the poll feature in the In-feed post as well, but they extended it to Instagram Stories to do that.
The last thing I wanted to say about Instagram Stories was that I think stories can be spread further than Instagram. I think more people should tap into Facebook stories; everybody’s got a huge audience over there. Also, TikTok stories and, of course, Snapchat, right? We’ve also seen the stories function explode across teams’ mobile apps. Those stories functions are everywhere. So, how can we scale those opportunities across channels and give those a shot as well?
GF: An interesting illustrative example of Stories and some of the most popular content we see is player arrivals, or you might see players deplaning now or boarding a plane. And that becomes sponsored content. Do you see popular Stories content migrate or sort of ‘graduate’ to the feeds or other platforms where it captures more value and a higher rate?
AK: The data doesn’t lie, right? It tells you what works and what doesn’t, for better or worse. It’s the same process across channels. If you find something works, and the data tells you it works, try it in more places.
With the White Sox in the playoffs in 2021, we did mic’d up content in the playoffs featuring in-game moments, something we hadn’t been doing in the regular season. That was built for Instagram and TikTok. We mic’d up a pitcher while they were on the bench, and it went really well. The team took the lead on a tie-breaking home run, and it was a big moment in the playoffs. We posted it on TikTok and Instagram, and it had done really well and added value to the partner. We then posted it on X, a slightly extended version, and it was the top-performing post in the playoffs in terms of sponsorship. I think it had over a million impressions.
So, I think if you’re doing a good job of looking at the results and the data, if it’s doing well, start to extend it, find out where it works and where it doesn’t. You never know what’s going to happen.
GF: Technology like artificial intelligence is also getting really good at recognizing organic brand exposure from logos in short-form content clips. How does that sort of background exposure enter into the partnerships conversation. And how is that value conveyed and captured by the property?
AK: It’s brought up in the pitch. That data is used especially to pitch stadium signage. So, it’s understanding how much a certain placement of signage shows up on television, what’s the reach of your broadcast, and what you have available to you. Not just on television but on social media as well.
So, all that earned exposure is built into the price of what you’re paying for signage because certain positions will be shown on social media or on TV more often than not. When you’re thinking about baseball, that’s why home plate rotational signage can be really great. If it’s captured in a big home run moment or most strikeouts; you’re going to see it right there. It’s in the shot that’s framed up and shown a lot. So, that is definitely a factor that teams are baking into the mix.
You even see the Mets have digital LED signage on the lip of their dugout. You see branded on-deck circles, the [pitcher’s] mound, and there are DED [digitally-enhanced dasherboards] in the NHL. So, it’s 100% a factor, and those are put in as early as the pitch to show how much value you’re getting out of those placements.
GF: Especially for the content more commonly seen beyond the traditional broadcast, how can teams reverse-engineer or identify opportunities where there’s significant brand exposure value to be had? Some teams are getting good at branding the parts of the arena where players arrive, for example. While in other cases, arrival photos (including many that athletes share) have a blank white wall getting all those impressions.
AK: This is something that I was thinking about in my time at MSG [Madison Square Garden, the parent company of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, and the arena, among other properties].
A newer inventory placement was the top of the backboard. You can put a brand on the top of the backboard, and that’s not something that necessarily shows up so much in a broadcast. It definitely does through that top-down angle, but there was also a trend on social media from the roof cam, of taking those top-down photos and getting that amazing angle. And what happens to show up in those pictures and those videos? The top of the backboard signage.
So, one thing that I had tried to do was build a package, where yes, you buy that signage, and then you also are sponsoring a social content series from that angle. And you commit to a certain number of posts where that signage is shown. So, you’re double dipping and raising the value of maybe a piece of signage that doesn’t get a ton of exposure through your social channels on something that’s super engaged that does really well. The NBA even had that sponsored with their partner Hotels.com. So, that is an example of that.
I think you should absolutely be working [it in]. Again, that [comes down to] partnerships needs to work with content, and content needs to work with partnerships, right? They need to be working together because driving more revenue helps the entire organization.
Editor’s note: In part two of our conversation with Alex Kopliow, learn about how sports organizations are integrating players into sponsorships. We dive more into the process of creating impactful sponsorship campaigns, some of his favorite sponsored executions, and more insights on monetizing short-form content.
