The Sport Industry Report: Content as a competitive edge
Andrew Hall, VP of Global Demand Generation, Canto
Nowadays, content is big business.
Every club across every sport has a website which doubles as a shopfront, and a plethora of social media networks and marketing platforms to engage directly with fans.
In fact, sports organisations don’t necessarily need to win the league to increase their fanbase: brand value can be won off the pitch.
Major players in the sports world are leading the charge with original content creation. Manchester City FC has its own production studio and many Premier League clubs now have creative directors. Sports
brands produce hours of raw content every week, from prematch hype and behind-the-scenes moments to sideline imagery, postmatch interviews, and so on.
Content is increasingly seen as the leading mechanism to drive engagement with the market, fans, sponsors, players, and other stakeholders. And this enhanced engagement drives commercial advantage, with engaged fans spending six times more than casual fans.
“How you adopt new technologies to create and control your content could be the critical factor in your commercial success.”
Ultimately, this means that the sport industry is heading for a content problem. According to Canto research, around 75% of sport organisations intend to create more content next year than they did this past year, in some cases expecting to more than double their output.
But if you produce more and more content without a strategy to manage that content, you’re heading for an absolute mess.
At board level, the key question should be about how to manage that content more efficiently, commercialise it, and maximise its value. This is most pertinent for small and medium organisations. Not everyone has a Premier League budget, so how can you play your content right to meet your business goals?
The best approach is getting the basics right. The sports organisations who will win in this space are those with the right tools to create, manage, and distribute their content. You need to make it as frictionless as possible for your team to search, select and edit the best images and videos, and then get it into the hands – and on to the socials – of your external partners.
These days AI-powered platforms can do the legwork for you, using facial recognition, smart tagging, copywriting, and instant distribution, which means you can achieve your content demands with fewer resources.
Does AI signal the end of the sports marketing team? Absolutely not – but it has brought a seismic change which marketing teams must keep pace with. How you adopt new technologies to create and control your content could be the critical factor in your commercial success.
This is an extract from the report – to read the full interview with Andrew Hall download the Sport Industry Report 2025.
