The Big Interview: ESPN
Charly Classen, general manager EMEA at ESPN, talks to sportindustry.biz about personalisation of their digital offering, and the changing world of digital rights…
Almost one year on from your last major relaunch, you recently introduced personalisation to your online platforms, what does that entail?
Yes we relaunched our ESPN.co.uk and ESPN.com websites in April last year, getting all our different sites and legacy systems and working on migrating them onto one platform, so ESPNcricinfo is still in the process of being migrated but all the others sit in one place. On 1st April we launched co.uk and .com in the US on the same platform, which was with the view of giving people the best possible experience, really pushing the engagement and video side. That’s worked well, we are very pleased with it, we’ve seen a 61% increase in minutes per visitor to our site and a 30% increase in monthly video views since then. If we look at our record days, they’ve all been happening recently and we had two video record days during the opening weekend of the RBS 6 Nations.
Subsequently, we launched what we call the editions systems which we build globally, but programme locally. We launched editions in Spanish speaking Latin America, so the next phase was personalisation which we launched in the US in April and launched here last month.
The beautiful thing about sports fans is we are all different and have different passion points. So, I have quite a quirky one as I have a confused history being born in Germany, half Bolivian and living in the UK for a long time. I support Arsenal and Hamburg from a football perspective, I support the German national team, I like the Mavericks in basketball, like my cricket, rugby and love my tennis. There are probably not many fans who have the exact same combination of things to follow. Ultimately it all comes down to how we can serve the sports fan in a better way, so how do you get to your sport in a quicker way, and that is what personalisation will enable people to do.
The first way is to sort by sports and by teams, we are rolling out different sports as we go along and get deeper into it, so I can go to the Arsenal club page from the homepage and whether that is from the desktop, mobile and tablet the personalisation goes with you by device. Later this year we will be launching a UK specific app again with that experience incorporated into it.
The other thing that is changing is the navigation at the top, so normally we’d set football, cricket, rugby and – depending on the season – Formula One or tennis. But the navigation will now reflect the sports you’ve chosen as your main ones to make it easier to get what you want quickly. You can still get to everything else, but your preference would be there earlier. We will evolve the experience on an ongoing basis, so one of the things we are considering is what we call ‘The River’, which is the main, editorial, curated homepage. Currently it’s very editorially driven and the editorial side is incredibly important to us but we will certainly experiment with it. If you’ve told us you’re an Arsenal fan, like German football and English rugby, those subjects may not be the top news of the day, but we will still incorporate that news into that ‘river’. We are going to experiment to see how much we should dial that up or not, ultimately based on what users really respond to. We are aiming to make it as rich of an experience as we possibly can.
The other benefit is that we will get far more data on the user. There are some interesting things we are exploring, we can give a better experience to the user but advertisers are increasingly looking at what data we can provide them for their advertising to be as effective as possible and to that extent we are looking into the emotional state of the users. For example, with Arsenal versus Spurs, if Arsenal win all the Arsenal fans will be happy and the Spurs supporters are unhappy, so you have a different emotional response. When you can start targeting different messages for the happy fans and others for disappointed fans you start to enter really interesting territory. Those are some of the things we are starting to think about and how we can execute it.
ESPNcricinfo is popular around the world and recently acquired the ICC highlights rights for online, including the Twenty20 World Cup. Is the short form of the game more appealing from a digital point of view?
The beauty of cricket is you have three main forms of the game whether it’s Twenty20, One Day Internationals or Test matches and they all work very differently and have their unique audiences. It depends on the various markets as to where the different popularity is, and our new website has really focussed on that.
Our ball-by-ball commentary is the crown jewel of what this site is, most people don’t have time to follow the five days of Test matches or watch it on TV, so digital gives you a fantastic way to dip in and out. Having acquired the highlights rights means we can embed it into the scorecards in a contextual way.
There are two elements to having these rights, one is just having the rights, so you have to produce highlights in a high quality way and quickly. The other is how do you contextualise it and bring it to the fans. This for us is the scorecard which is our highest traffic page, when there’s a wicket you can go to see that wicket, you can get that very quickly. There are people who will seek out a video directly, but that’s a small minority, it’s more that you’re interested in the game and the addition of video brings it to life in a fantastic way.
Is the increasing amount of highlights shared instantly via social media a concern?
My first consideration is how do we control what we can control, producing the right quality clips, quickly and presenting it in a better way than anyone else. Making that user experience the best it possibly can be is key and generally, when you do that, people will come to you.
Do we like piracy? Of course we don’t, we are one of the biggest rights buyers and we sell rights, so the rights part of the business is incredibly important to us. Yes, we are worried about piracy and we try to protect things where we can, there’s only so much we can do and I’m optimistic that everyone in the industry will get better at it. Ultimately it’s also about really focussing on what we can control and how we can be delivering the best possible experience.
In the midst of another RBS 6 Nations, fantasy rugby is back, which has really caught on. Having grown in football for years, did you expect it to be so successful in rugby?
We have around 100,000 people playing the Six Nations game and had more than that for the Rugby World Cup. It’s a great experience for people and gives a different appreciation of what the Six Nations is all about. Most people will have a decent understanding of the England side and will know a few key players from the Welsh and Irish players, then the French and Italian knowledge perhaps gets a little bit more sketchy! So, fantasy does an amazing job of getting people to expand their knowledge, talking about rugby in real depth, and they can go through the stats and the previews, they cater to different audiences.
With fantasy rugby you want to find a different hook. Yes I want England to win but I want a certain player to do well because he’s in my fantasy team – it gives you a different element and interest in the game. Are we massively surprised by it? Not really. Fantasy is very big in football, it’s huge in American football so it goes across different sports and we focused on making the game good but also getting people into it. We make it easier, with accompanying videos and different information. It’s a really good way to get the user to read more, watch more, consume more and get more interested so we see also see a big uplift in editorial we produce around it.
