Alexander Stadium Birmingham. Getty Sport for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games
“I don’t dance I work; I don’t play, I slay; I don’t walk, I strut…and then sashay”
Short summary:
- delivering world-class and world-leading digital (in this case the # 1 global digital sports property in the first week of August 2022), even for a multisport Games, doesn’t need to cost the earth and effective resources can be deployed on demand and at short notice
- digital is mature enough now that you can build premium experiences from a kit of parts
- access to video is key. How you distribute, publish and exploit it is even more important – a case of not how big your video library is but how you use it. Use of video by organisers and participants doesn’t have to conflict with paying broadcast rights holders
- content teams need empowerment more than they need guidelines
- big sporting events are all about atmosphere and emotion. Capturing, reflecting and relaying that on digital channels is just as important as covering the sport. And if you aren’t having fun doing that, what are you even doing?
- every market in the world is digital and if you create appropriate content it will be consumed and often in huge numbers. Hello India, Uganda, Kenya, Pakistan, Nigeria…
- there is an enormous largely untapped sponsorship opportunity in athlete-lead and hybrid creative digital content
In 2018 or was it 2019 I put together a pitch team of Stephen Nuttall, Graham McWilliam, Robert Fraser and the inimitable David Marshall to write a digital strategy for the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF). David had run everything digital for Vancouver 2010, me for London 2012, Steve was ex-boss of Youtube sport, Graham and Robert ran comms at Sky. An “A” team for the pitch. Obvs we won.
“an athlete-centred, sport focused movement brought to life with digital content”
Our vision was to bring an athlete-centred, sports-focused movement to life with digital content, using Birmingham 2022 as a launchpad and building on this with the implementation of a longer-term digital content strategy.
Kate Olliff, programme lead at the CGFP (the commercial arm of the CGF), fountainhead of all good sense and person who gets s**t done, presented up our conclusions to the Commonwealth Games Federation board in a bid for funding.
Some highlights from her presentation:
“We are far behind what others are doing in this space”
“By investing now, there is the opportunity to leverage high-value assets already budgeted for by the OC [Organising Committee, i.e. Birmingham 2022], realising efficiencies and savings for 2026 and future Games”
“A ‘win win’ for the Commonwealth Sport Movement and local OC; Generating and managing high quality digital content to span movement and traditional OC objectives; Deliver a longer-term, ‘best in class’ digital delivery model, to meet expectations of fans, drive ticket sales and commercial partnerships; avoiding the ‘boom and bust’ digital delivery approach of previous Games.”
“Giving a voice to young athletes and reaching younger audiences through digital channels they instinctively understand; Provision of shared digital tools, insight, data and understanding to support the strategic and commercial goals of individual CGAs [Commonwealth Games Associations i.e. the 72 participating teams] and the wider movement; Better integration and a more connected network with sharing of ‘stories’ and compelling content, as well as promotion of specific campaigns, athletes, development programmes and so on.”
With the championing of board member and digital advocate Bruce Robertson, CM, CPA, CA, CITP (promising one billion dollars in a heady moment at a Commonwealth Games summit in Rwanda before we conferred on zeros – the ultimate budget was a lot less than 7 figures but would not have happened without Bruce and former CGF CEO David Grevemberg CBE) we secured funding and made two (only two!) hires initially: Kate Harley to run social and Sarah Griffiths to run the digital world – in the middle of a pandemic. Only one more rolling hire was added to the team, first India Blake then Isabella Mount. Hannah Newbold joined our sister team in technology to project manage the delivery of digital products under Pennie Brinsden and tech supremo Adrian Corcoran, and Matthew Aishaced the delivery of a live detailed results service sitting under the main site with Microplus and Longines. A motley crew of Sarah, Kate, Martin Reynolds, Tom Degun and I met weekly to discuss plans and progress.
Mark Ward as Chief Marketing and Comms at B2022 glued us together with the B2022 organising committee team under marketing boss Michael Holland and digital boss Jo Darby, with a small but perfectly formed digital team including Tom Parker and later Sarah Scarfe who joined in late 2021 to massage the Gamestime web and app to life. In the run into the Games the B2022 team had already attracted a third of the Birmingham population to the pre-Games website.
A cast of dozens came in the final weeks to deliver. And BOY did we deliver.
Not everything worked, some things broke, some things need fixing. But our ideas worked, our tech stood up, our people were brilliant.
We delivered a Gamestime website and app (naturally) with the help of Pulselive and Brightcove which is now being rolled into a Commonwealth Sport proposition and will be the underpinnings of future Games platform (no more boom and bust).
We put all the historical video and photo digital assets we could find in a DAM (digital asset management system).
We secured, thanks to the doggedness and foresight of CGFP CEO David Leatherand with support from Tony Gavin, Tom Wheaton and Jayne Pearce the right for every team, every athlete, sponsors and even sport federations to share clips with various geo-restrictions and time delays and commercial constraints too nuanced for this single post. We hired the host broadcast team from Sunset and Vine to create those clips (which they did mainly through a brilliant trainee scheme) as well as films and curated content to answer our “story” brief.
During Gamestime we populated the DAM with tens of thousands of Getty images in near real time. The clipping team created 150+ clips a day, initially focusing on medals and performances and then reacting to events and needs and ideas – and creating 100s of interviews spliced with action as an “athletes in action” series focusing on competitors from every team and daily short films. “Vibes” crews were out and about creating content with the public and capturing emotion and reaction while studio teams and outsourced teams at Livewire were creating videos and graphics.
“Giving a voice to young athletes and reaching younger audiences through digital channels they instinctively understand”
Every team (72 in all) or CGA (Commonwealth Games Association) had access to their own personalised library of footage as well as thousands of Getty photos which they could then distribute themselves or via athletes. In practice where teams couldn’t resource that effort we ended up going direct to athletes and sharing video and photo content, usually through Instagram direct message. We have published hundreds of clips in partnership with excited and digitally native athletes around the world with hundreds more still in waiting…
With all the rights, infrastructure and suppliers in place the key focus was on our team. Gathered on day -1 we didn’t know each other’s names and weren’t sure what anyone was capable of. A team of around 40 in two shifts sat across Web, app, social (Birmingham and Commonwealth Sport channels on all networks except for a single Youtube and Tiktok) DAM, CRM, supported by teams from Getty (photos), Sunset and Vine and their cast of clippers, Livewire, PA Sport, Pulselive, Brightcove. Stuart Rowson and I were drafted in as co-chief editors across two shifts (up to this point I had been less than a handful of days a month with CGF in an oversight role).
I had been lucky enough to learn in London that multi games is 100% about atmosphere and my job was to release the team to do their best work, be creative and have fun. Luckily Stu was also there to oversee their actual output because I was away with the adrenaline fairies within 24 hours. It all kicked off on Tiktok with “About damn time” and reached its apotheosis with our riff on race walking: “I don’t dance I work; I don’t play, I slay; I don’t walk, I strut…and then sashay”
So what did we achieve? Here’s a (raw!) excerpt from our final internal email roundup:
- ” Between July 28th and August 8th web and app recorded 9.7m users, 29m sessions and 132m page views. 35% UK, 24% India 13% US, 9% Australia, 3% NZ, 2% Malaysia. 69% male. 77% mobile (44% Apple, 56% Android).
- Pages categorised as Results account for 16% of traffic while pages categorised as Schedule (which often contain results) account for 23% of traffic – together 39%. Medals account for 13%, homepage 18%. We published over 500 news stories generating 1.5m page views (the top story covered Australia’s hockey comeback – half of the traffic was from India as that set the finalists up).
- As expected home fans were interested in everything going on but with a focus on what happened/what’s happening and what’s happening next whereas overseas fans often focus on team performance and medal table chest-thumping. The high preponderance of Apple users suggests we are not reaching outside of major metros in many less economically developed Commonwealth countries and gives us a future target
- A big story is India. Google trends shows that B2022 search interest greater than interest in the winter Olympics in some key territories including India ( a ratio of 4:1 in favour of B2022), the UK, and New Zealand and equivalent in Australia and Pakistan
- Ratio of search interest in 2021-22, Commonwealth Games : Winter Olympic Games – 78:22 in India, 58:42 in New Zealand, 53:47 in the UK, 50:50 in Pakistan, 45:55 in Aus.
- Relative interest in the Commonwealth Games compared to the Summer Olympic Games was also strong with interest in India at half the level of Tokyo, extraordinary for an event that by any other measure is at least ten times smaller
- Social channels have 561k followers divided equally between B2022 (271k with Twitter the largest and fastest growing channel) and CGF channels (290k with Tiktok now overtaking Twitter to get to 130k followers)
- Gold Coast 2018 [the previous Games edition], had bigger follower numbers with 801k followers but that doesn’t tell the whole story- Tiktok has burst the bubble of followership since then as the best Tiktok content is presented to huge numbers of users via the main feed triggered (know as the “for you” page) by algorithm. Instagram (to everyone’s annoyance) Facebook and Snapchat are now copying this model and showing content to people not in your friendship group meaning good content gets a wider airing but also diminishing the need to follow any particular entity – and even making it onerous to do so.
- B2022 and CGF channels achieved 154m impressions and 78m video views (12m of which were not Tiktok). Up 40% (impressions) and 1200% (video views) on Gold Coast 2018. Access to video clips was key to this success but our distribution and handling of the material was next level – we “sashayed”.
- In the gamestime period we recorded more social video views than any leading sports property in the world ahead of Barcelona (51m), Ronaldo (40.9m), f1 (39.4m) Man Utd. (31m) Real Madrid (23m) (and even Kim Kardashian (15m))
- An interesting comparison is the Women’s Euros. During their tournament in July the England team recorded 8.1m engagements and 31.4m video views this summer while the main UEFA official accounts generated 36m video views and 5m engagements
- The top Birmingham 2022 post was a video recap on Facebook celebrating Eilish Mcolgan’s iconic 10k win just ahead of an Instagram post featuring Ozzy Ozbourne’s sign off “Birmingham forever!”.
- The top Commonwealth Sport post was Helen Housby’s dance moment on Instagram with 22m impressions while at time of writing its Tiktok original has recorded over 45m views
- Globally there were 3.8m public posts throughout the Games mentioning Birmingham 2022 and the Commonwealth Games generating 56m engagements with 50% from India, 18% from the US (probably largely South Asian communities), 10% UK, 4.4% Pakistan. The most engaged post came from the Indian cricket team celebrating victory in the second match for India’s women [other top posters were Indian PM Modi on Twitter tweeting every medal and Indian Premier League Royal Challengers Bangalore Instagram also posting for every medal]. Country distribution and top global posts collage below:
- DAM stats: Total Video & Image files = 45,934 or 28.9 TB serving 356 users
Not only does Victoria 2026, the next Games host, have the best digital legacy imaginable but we have a serious opportunity for Commonwealth Sport to become a profile sports and entertainment content player in populous countries with undercooked local media offerings…”
There’s a lot to build on from here, not least the commercial opportunity (my day job at Generate Digital – my business partner Josh Belsher is just happy that my Commonwealth “holiday” is done). If you haven’t spotted the new sponsorship categories implicit in this delivery, get in touch. Likewise if you want to parachute in a digital superteam to deliver your next showpiece event, get in touch.
If you’ve read this far I’d like to add a final thank you to all the teams I’ve worked with, to Kate O for marshalling the strategy brilliantly, to Sarah for marshalling everything so brilliantly, to Kate H who is a superstar, to David L and Bruce for providing the runway, to Mark, Michael, Jo for letting the clown take over for a bit and having the foresight to have Stu on hand when the cabaret stopped, and especially to the shift gangs who don’t know how brilliant they are and certainly don’t know how brilliant they can be. Everyone will be tagged in this post but you’ll have to get past me before I let you hire them – although they all got a gold spray painted wrist band, hug from Perry the mascot and a Wispa Gold which should keep them happy for a few months.
Shaun Webbley, Loretta Harrison, Mihika Varshnei, Tom Cross, Molly Pocock, Dan Hargraves, Bryn Palmer, Ryan Hills, Chris Hall, Georgie Lack, Claire Lomax, Lucy Lomax-Dunne, Katy Markham, Lauren Coffman, Helena Sykes, Nilesh Patel, Tom Parker, Will Godsiff, Tom White, Becca Mihill, Luke Degun, Christopher Sleet, Martin Willetts, Lisa Coppola, Nicola Barlow, Karen Webb Moss, Jonathan Moore, Scott Hunt, Giorgio Guzman, Peter Raper, Stephen Marsden, Jamie Gavin, Siân Butcher, Asif Mirza, Alex Balzaretti, Nicole Reynolds, Luke Cusack
friends/ partners in crime: Tom Lush, Tomy Alexander, Ashley Abbott, James O’Brien, Carys Edwards, David Strachan
And if you want to see a live chronology of a so-called senior person losing their mind over 2 week period of sleepless adrenaline and how much fun a Games is you can look at my IG story . As Seb Coe told us at London 2012 nine months before the Games there when asked what it’ll be remembered for – he said: “the atmosphere”.
Finally passing the baton to the next generation courtesy of athlete liaison superstar Katy Markham and baby Enzo:
