Tagboard has long served as a behind-the-scenes conduit to which social media posts find their way to sport arena video boards and news broadcasts. But now, Tagboard has been named as one of the four news discovery companies that Snapchat is partnering with to build a reliable news hub.
Along with three other companies—NewsWhip, Storyful and SAM Desk—Tagboard will connect organizations with content created by users and professionals on Snapchat, according to news first reported by Axios. Given Tagboard’s history of working with sports organizations, such as the MLB’s San Francisco Giants, NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and PGA Tour, fans should expect this initiative to seep into live sports.
Tagboard is used by 175 different sports properties around the world and roughly 200 different broadcasters (including local news stations, such as Sinclair, NBC, ABC, Fox, Telemundo, and Univision). The company operates in the business of finding and pushing relevant fan, player, and team-owned content from Snapchat onto third-party locations, such as video boards and websites. Previously Tagboard helped teams do this more-or-less manually by sifting through public snaps.
With an enhanced dashboard powered by its partnership with Snap Kit, however, Tagboard is now automating the process, enabling sports organizations and broadcasters to easily sift through shareable content in real time by taking advantage of artificial intelligence and Snapchat’s geo-location services. Organizations will now be able to find snaps as soon as they’re posted and embed content into websites, apps, broadcasts, live streams and on arena video boards.
This will assist Snapchat’s goal of turning into a content creation and consumption hub, particularly as that pertains to live and on-demand sports, according to Tagboard Chief Revenue Officer Nathan Peterson. It will also enable Snapchat’s content to be more easily shared across platforms, expanding the company’s reach.
“As teams and broadcasters that cover sports are dedicating more time to creating niche content via Snapchat, Tagboard is a platform that allows them to take all the great work they’re doing and put it in more places,” said Peterson. “We play an important role in a 360-degree marketing strategy for the sports organizations and brands we work with to be able to do more with the content they’re investing so much in creating.”
Peterson said he believes partnerships such as these are just scratching the surface of what’s possible. Fans increasingly demand personalized content and rely on non-traditional channels, such as streaming and social media companies, to consume live sports content and highlights.
Earlier this year, Tagboard first experimented with the realm of Snap Maps (a part of the social media platform’s geolocation services) during the PGA Tour’s Phoenix Open. Tagboard assisted NBC Golf Channel’s coverage of the tournament by live broadcasting fan videos from the course.
With Tagboard’s new partnership with Snap Kit, expect more of these behind-the-scenes looks into sporting events.
“It’s been an eyeballs game for years and the eyeballs are shifting: content is being consumed in a variety of different methods. You’ve got live streams, you have on-demand. The traditional platforms are very actively shifting to a combo of both of those. And in the future, I think we’ll play really well in both spaces,” Peterson said. “We’re really just scratching the surface with a partnership like this with Snapchat when you think of all the different content elements that come into play, such as filters, AI, bitmojis.”