PHILADELPHIA — Is the six-second commercial the future of televised live sports? Fox Networks Group’s Bruce Lefkowitz thinks it could be.
The network’s executive vice president of ad sales said as much during a panel about the future of sports consumption at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Sports Business Summit on Friday. Those six-second ads debuted earlier this fall but were especially noticeable during Fox’s coverage of the World Series.
“I keep coming back to this concept of content, and to some degree it’s platform-agnostic,” Lefkowitz said. “James Murdoch from Fox says, ‘We’re not in the advertising business; we’re in the audience business, and when we can no longer make money in aggregating these audiences, we’ll be in a different business.’ And I think that’s really, really important to understand — that it all starts with content.
“To some degree, we’re platform-agnostic, and what you have to do to prevent people from moving to other platforms is to improve the viewing experience,” he added.
To that end, Fox Sports used the six-second ads during the World Series to keep fans tuned in while still allowing advertisers to convey a simpler message to viewers. The innovative ad format — originally developed by YouTube — was introduced in August to broadcast during the Teen Choice Awards with advertisers such as Duracell and Mars, and was tested in certain situations (kickoff, for example) for Fox’s Sunday NFL coverage.
“In a world where consumers are becoming more accustomed to shorter-form brand messages, we’re excited to explore the impact of six-second ads on TV with our partners at Fox Networks,” Ramon Velutini, Vice President of Marketing at Duracell, said in a statement in August. “At Duracell, we are always looking at innovative ways to tell our story of trust, and drive value in our media investments. We believe our ‘power packed’ six-second ads could play a bigger role in our creative asset mix in the near future.”
Nine quick-play ads will be rolled out during Fox’s Thanksgiving “America’s Game of the Week.” What happens to the revenue that comes from traditional 30-second spots? Fox will charge advertisers for 15 seconds worth of commercial time despite the shorter exposure because the ads will be played live while the game is in action.
“The length of the ad is really irrelevant. It depends on the message; not all messages necessitate 30 seconds or 15 seconds,” Lefkowitz said. “If you’re T-Mobile, who was one of our first sponsors ever, T-Mobile has a number of messaging points. One of them is ‘No fees for life.’ You don’t need 30 seconds for that.”
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Other panelists discussed how their companies are changing the game when it comes to how fans stream or connect with sports content.
Melissa Brenner, who heads the NBA’s digital media department, said it matters not where games are telecast so much as how they’re telecast. She mentioned Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook as partners in that effort; Twitter specifically was useful for successfully streaming WNBA games across the world earlier this year. She also discussed mobile viewing as an experience the NBA improved this year by installing cameras in 29 arenas to better capture the game in a mobile-friendly way.
However, other sports like hockey, football, and baseball — which pose challenges of their own — could make their way onto Overtime as the platform expands. Weiner told SportTechie that football already makes up 30 percent of Overtime’s views and is prevalent on its side channels.
“There are highlights in every sport; the highlight is different to each person. As we said on this panel, the NFL is still huge, football is still huge in this country, so I think there’s a big opportunity there,” Weiner said.
“I don’t think you consider hockey a niche sport, but some of the sports that are a little bit less-watched and less-thought-of, particularly in the high school space, I think there’s enormous opportunity there too… There’s a lot of narrative stories to be told that are not being told, and ultimately, that’s what people care about.”
Twitter head of U.S. league partnerships TJ Adeshola and NFL VP of digital media business development Blake Stuchin also contributed to the sports consumption panel.
The all-day conference, organized jointly by Wharton’s Undergraduate Sports Business Club and the Wharton Sports Business Initiative, featured keynote speeches from president Don Smolenski and general counsel Aileen Dagrosa of the Philadelphia Eagles and from Josh Harris, the principal owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, as well as panels on analytics, the NFL, student research presentations, and a number of other topics.