Have you watched any gymnastics on television since the 2012 Summer Olympics? Can you name any of the gymnasts (men or women) from any country that competed at the summer games? Do you know what a double-double is?
Most people would answer all of these questions with a no. However, if you watched the first Professional Gymnastics Challenge (PGC) of ESPN2 last May, you would be able to answer yes to all these questions above. The reason why you might have answered no to all of these questions is because gymnastics is about 20 years behind in the way it produces media content to its fans compared to the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL.
What is PGC?
The Pro Gymnastics Challenge is a new format of gymnastics competition created by Brent Klaus. It is a skill-for-skill competition as opposed to doing routines on the events and having complicated scoring. PGC is a battle between two teams: Team USA vs. Team World, with women and men on each team competing against each other in a game similar to H-O-R-S-E.
There are seven events in the competition: tumbling, parallel bars (men) and uneven bars (women), vault, rings (men) and balance beam (women), rope climb, audience all-around (audience selects the skills), high bar (men) and single rail (women). The winning team of each event receives $16,000, making the total winnings $112,000. A team is victorious in an event when they score 10 total points. A team scores a point by doing the skill better, bigger, and more creative. When there is a tie between the two judges, the audience decides the vote. There are also four unique rules that PGC has: Double Down, Freestyle, Callout, and Wildcard. The rules can be learned more in-detail at professionalgymnastics.com.
Here is the teaser for the re-air of PGC in June:
The Use of Technology to Turn Consumers into “Prosumers”
The sport of gymnastics has consumers (fans) that are passive. As mentioned earlier, gymnastics is about 20 years behind in the media-sport production complex model (below) which breaks down how the sport is delivered to the consumers.
In the model on the left shown above, the consumers are passive and are not involved in the process of creating or getting the media-sport delivered to them.
The model on the right is the new direction PGC is going, with the consumers becoming “prosumers” by being active during the event and active in delivering the event.
After an interview with Chelsea Lapent, the Director of Technology and Digital Marketing of PGC, I found out more information on the technology use for the competition. PGC uses a company called Phizzle to do the polls, live tie breaking, games, trivia, and quizzes. The PGC website was designed using Phizzle and also uses FanTracker to track their fans. According to Phizzle, FanTracker is designed to capture a true, 360-degree view of a consumer’s engagements with a brand as well as their social, behavioral and transactional activities.
When a fan likes PGC on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or YouTube, FanTracker takes information about the consumer from all their profiles and runs “complex decision making algorithms to build a complete profile of consumers who have multiple profiles from various engagement channels and data sources.”
When there is a tie between the judges, the audience votes on their cell phones to decide the winner. Fans vote by texting “PGCVote1” and the results are released instantly and shown to the crowd. This is putting the control of the outcome of certain points in the hands of the fans. They are becoming active “prosumers” as opposed to passive consumers.
Here is a video of an example of a tie breaking vote: (Start video at 30:00)
One of the events is called the Audience All-Around. This is when the audience selects the skill that they want to see an athlete perform. The audience is given an array of options to select from and vote for. They text in their votes to “PGCVote2” and Phizzle does the calculations and comes up with results instantly and the athletes are informed with the skills that are in high demand. This is just another example of how PGC is turning the consumers into “prosumers” by making them active and a part of the competition.
What is a Double-Double?
A double-double is when a gymnast does two twists in two flips in the air before landing on their feet. To put the quad-double in perspective, imagine hitting a game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the 9th inning of game 7 of the World Series.
Maybe one day we will see Kohei Uchimura compete in PGC and see a quad-double – when the gymnast does four twists in two flips before landing on their feet.
Overall, more gymnastics fans and non-traditional gymnastics fans will be able to see more double-doubles with PGC’s technology-fan interaction initiatives. These digital initiatives will undoubtedly help the sport and be great for the fans.
Also for your viewing pleasure if you wanted to see one of the most exciting events from PGC you can check out the rope climb (Start video at 1:58):
The next PGC is coming this Fall so be sure to catch it on ESPN2.