Julia McInnis is the CEO and co-founder of Lancealot and can be reached at julia@lancealot.me.
If you spend a few minutes on Reddit reading the fan commentary on the Washington Wizards’ Kelly Oubre Jr., you might be surprised to see that few fans are actually discussing his game stats. Instead, they’re talking about Supreme, the NYC-based fashion brand that’s become synonymous with the NBA and its players.
On the court, a basketball game today might not look much different from a game 25 years ago. What has changed, however, is how fans engage with teams and athletes. Gone are the days when game-time action was all that sports fans wanted to see. Today, they want well-made, bite-sized videos that capture off-the-field stories about the lifestyles and personalities surrounding the sport. It’s this shift in storytelling that inspired the founders of Lancealot, a platform for sports content creators who specialize in new media content, to start the company.
After interviewing sports fans in the U.S., E.U. and China, Lancealot discovered that these fans share something big in common: they want to get closer to their favorite games, not necessarily the matches themselves, but the culture and individual players. “More people than ever before have access to screens, so now a fan of a team is not necessarily even living in that team’s city; they could be anywhere in the world but they still want to be as close to that team as they can,” Lancealot CFO Cindy Li explained. It is a trend that Li noticed while visiting her home city of Beijing. Her friends there are tech savvy, die-hard U.S. sports fans who rely on video for sports news coverage. But the video stories available to them from the U.S. are dismal in comparison to the interest of the fans. By comparing social media follower count on Instagram and the count on the leading social site in China, Weibo, we noticed that not only NBA’s official account, but also many teams and individual players have many more followers on the Chinese site than they do on Instagram. This represents significant fan engagement potential, but requires culturally relevant content to specifically reach these Chinese fans.
Explaining the gap between supply and demand, Li looks at the challenges surrounding high-volume production; “while there are so many new opportunities for content, like the direct-from-athlete stories that we see on the Players Tribune and Unscripted, producing a lot of good quality content can be insanely expensive and time-consuming. It gets even harder when content teams try to find creators with specialized skills like AR. Word of mouth might give you a recommendation, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right person to hire, and no one has time to scroll through hundreds of resumes and reels on hiring sites.”
Creating the volume of varied video content necessary to accommodate all types of audiences, players and brands is not cheap. It’s simply not possible for an organization to hire large teams or full-time personnel to manage content for all regions and groups that a sports organization must exist in. This is why more organizations are embracing the “gig economy”, and why Lancealot’s business model focuses on freelancers.
Imagine that as a content creator of a U.S. soccer team that’s very popular with Chinese viewers, you want to create a one-off video story for the Chinese social site WeChat. The content will need to appear in Mandarin, in a format that interests Chinese audiences, and in a way that meets compliance for Chinese video posts. How do you get started? What kind of video should you make and who should you hire to make it? These are the questions that Lancealot has been helping sports organizations counter since its inception this past year.
Using technology developed by the company for creative recruiting in sports, Lancealot has helped its clients find documentary filmmakers in Madrid, social media pros in New York City, and augmented reality creators in Chicago, all of whom have experience creating high quality sports content.
Sports is one of the few things that can unite people in every pocket of the world through shared excitement for events and stories of incredible successes and struggles. The move to social content and now augmented and virtual reality means that the world of sports will continue to become smaller and more deeply connected. It’s a welcome move and gives sports organizations and athletes alike the opportunity to become even more targeted content producers.