This is a guest interview conducted and shared by Clint Vojdinoski from Sports Business Insider Australia.
Over a period of three years Surfing Australia has made a decisive transformation from not just a representative body for surfing but a digitally focussed organisation.
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The step towards this model signifies how a sport could develop a thoughtful online content strategy to engage new and current fans that sidesteps the need to lock down major broadcast television contracts. Strikingly, the organisation has gained an enviable audience by using the beautiful visual and lifestyle appeal of the sport to their advantage to create content opportunities.
One of Surfing Australia’s lead digital channels is mySURF.tv, an online and social channel that positively promotes the sport through narrative and branded content. The philosophy is simple, show the best waves, the best surfers and produce it well.
The frequency of such short-form, digital video content allows Surfing Australia to market and deliver the sport socially without forgetting that the mantra of the organisation is to encourage a healthy lifestyle and to get more participants into the sport.
Andrew Stark has been the CEO of Surfing Australia since March 2009 and he spoke about why the organisation took the digital content route.
How big of a role does content play in Surfing Australia’s commercial strategy?
“It’s become nearly everything. It’s incredibly important. You’ve got mySURFtv and the ability to commercialise that platform through advertising pre-roll and content solutions and partnerships, but most importantly for Surfing Australia, as an organisation, is that we deliver a lot of content for our major partners like Subway, Nikon and Toyota. The Subway Surf Series is an example of 10 junior events around Australia, we’ll produce short form content on all of those events and publish that across our social platforms, mySURFtv, Surfing Australia TV, we’ll provide them (Subway) with that content for them to publish it across their platforms.
“The content in the digital area has become incredibly important to the commercialisation of our partners and programs and being able to deliver to our sponsors and partners what they need in this day and age. We can really offer a ‘beach-to-broadcast’ solution to our partners.”
Is there an aim to develop surfing content which is aspirational, professional?
“With Surfing Australia we’ve got sport programs and they’re about getting people engaged in a sense of joining clubs and competing in events.
“MySURFtv in particular, the lifestyle and the culture of free surfing and the storytelling and free-spirit is about capturing that aspirational surfer and talking to them in a way they want to be spoken to, and engaging them to either filter them through our programs or being able to connect with them.
“The big sports leagues like AFL, NRL they have major broadcast deals and they talk to big audiences through their broadcast partners and we cannot achieve that in a broadcast television sense with surfing. But we can attempt to achieve in a digital environment through this frequency of short-form content and making our sport appealing, true to our roots and true to our culture.”
Obviously without the significant broadcast deals, does that then breed and invite greater innovation to target people in a different way?
“Absolutely. We’ve looked at Australian Rules, cricket and tennis, rugby league, the biggest sports in the country are the ones with the major broadcast deals. They have significant revenues, audiences and sponsorships that are ridden off the back of those broadcast deals so we looked at from a strategic sense how can Surfing Australia grow and how can we reach a broader audience to commercialise the organisation to be able to provide sport development outcomes. The future in the ability to achieve that pointed to a need to aggressively enter the digital space.”
Have you been able to measure the increase in participation and engagement to surfing due to your digital content strategy?
“Sixty percent of the audience, traffic and consumers that are coming through the Hurley Surfing Australia High Performance Centre website are coming straight off mySURFtv. Straight away we’re seeing our own digital owned assets delivering us customers in different areas of our organisation.
“The key though is we’re offering our partners what they need in this environment, partners need content solutions. We’ve got six full-time digital content staff putting out free and branded content solutions. It’s become ingrained in our organisation across every area that the digital space is a part of who we are now and needs to be in the future.”
And you’ll of course be beefing those resources up?
“It’s been a three-year investment phase and you can treat it as a startup business. You need to be able to be responsive to change and the change with digital and social media tools. We’re very agile in that sense, we’ve learned a lot and it’s been a three-year project of investing heavily into it. Now we need to make sure that we have a sustainable business in its own right.”
What’s in the future for Surfing Australia’s content and digital engagement strategy?
“If you think about us more broadly we’ve got some exciting things coming up, it’s likely that we’ll be announced as an Olympic sport in August for Tokyo 2020, so that’s going to bring a lot of attention to the sport.
“Month by month we’re seeing over a million video views and we’ve got over 200,000 unique audiences to mySURFtv month by month, we’ve got a big email subscription database so the numbers are now there. The next couple of years is about needing to continue to grow but we’ve really got to drive revenue and partnerships and be able to convert casual fans into participants.”