Euro 2024, Paris Olympics and other major competitions are approaching, and the global business opportunities behind them are becoming increasingly prominent. With its unique spectatorship, competitiveness and gameplay, marketing in sports competitions has a unique magic. Taking the 2020 Euro Cup as an example, Chinese brands can be described as "attacking all the troops", whether it is car companies, home appliances, mobile phone manufacturers, or emerging Internet platforms, they are all taking advantage of the European Cup to find a new fulcrum to go overseas.
Less than two months away from the opening of this European Cup, iQIYI Sports held the 2024 Super Event Resource Sharing Conference, in this year of sports events, this platform that has been deeply cultivated in the sports industry for many years, how to create a high-quality plan for the brand to achieve a win-win situation of "volume and sales", the 2024 sports marketing year, starting with the European Cup.
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Text / Huang Mengting
Unleash the marketing potential of the European Cup, new technologies, new people and more new possibilities
Euro 2024 will be held in Germany from June 14 to July 14, and now that all 24 teams have been announced, the "Group of Death" created by Spain, Croatia and Italy is even more eye-catching.
The attention of the top league also brings great commercial value. According to UEFA officials, Euro 2020 has a cumulative global audience of 5.23 billion. According to the latest data, in the first European Championship match that resumed offline home viewing, more than 20 million people have competed for 1.2 million tickets in the first stage, of which the demand for final tickets has exceeded the capacity of the stadium by 33 times, which shows the degree of popularity.
According to the "2022 National Fitness Trend Report" of the General Administration of Sports of China, 67.5% of people aged 7 and above in mainland China participate in physical exercise at least once a week, and sports as a way of life are penetrating more people. Among them, there are two major audience groups, Generation Z and the new urban middle class, and the boundaries of sports audiences are constantly expanding, which has brought about diversified sports content innovations.
Screenshot from GroupM Think Tank's "2024 Sports Marketing White Paper"
With the continuous development of digital media, for those fans who were unable to attend the game, the low-latency, high-definition, and non-stuttering game broadcast content is more likely to be favored by the audience. As a new media broadcast platform for this year's European Cup, combined with the past European Cup operation experience, iQIYI Sports has newly upgraded the XR super live broadcast scene, used the "Frame Qiying MAX" high-definition viewing audio-visual experience, AI one-click generation of battle reports, etc., so that users can enjoy a 360-degree full-scene immersive viewing experience and watch the game.
Since the 30-day countdown to the European Cup, iQIYI Sports has started the warm-up of the Super Competition, enriching the football life of fans with "all-weather content". A variety of professional commentary, front visits, entertainment variety shows and other diversified derivative programs, covering the needs of different types of audiences such as seniors, the public and pan-sports fans, covering the entire cycle of the European Cup.
Among them, the "Indiscriminate Football Watching Guide" led by Zhang Lu, Liu Jianhong, Huang Jianxiang and Li Xin will be launched soon, and many cross-border celebrities such as Lu Chuan, Tengger and Fan Deng will help in the future;
At present, the main axis logic of sports content competition with event copyright as the core will not change, but it has become a reality to graft various industrial forms such as consumption, marketing, entertainment, social networking, film and television, and MCN through sports content. At the same time, iQIYI Sports will invite many celebrities, senior sports commentators, cultural celebrities, cross-border experts, etc. to join the 2024 summer football carnival, whether it is a German scene or a domestic social occasion, it can create a warm atmosphere of public hot spots and professional topics.
Through the whole cycle of the competition, three strategies help brands win the sports year
With the blessing of the atmosphere of the sports year, sports will become a huge traffic gathering place and emotional place - under the competition for marketing home, how can brand owners seize the opportunity? Xinai Sports will build a diversified and multi-level integrated marketing solution for the brand, and comprehensively improve the super traffic brought by the competition in terms of event communication, content communication, scene activation, and cross-platform resource integration.
According to the "2024 Sports Marketing White Paper" jointly released by GroupM Think Tank and iQIYI Sports, three major sports marketing strategies are proposed - "integrated marketing", "popular IP", and "innovative marketing".
The "integrated marketing" strategy is suitable for the official sponsor brands of top events, and enhances the value of the brand's official identity through a variety of media configurations. As the official global partner of Euro 2020, Shell Heineken and iQIYI Sports have joined forces to not only attract audiences through the broadcast of the event, but also sponsor the variety show "European Emperor Lucky Night" to achieve a cross-border breakthrough. At the same time, iQIYI Sports integrated multiple resources and carefully planned offline theme activities, and finally accumulated more than 25 fermented topics on social media, with a cumulative reading of more than 580 million topics, strengthening the brand impression of "European Cup is with Heineken".
Due to the fierce competition for official sponsorship of top-level events, it is particularly important for brands that invest in sports marketing for a long time to adopt the strategy of integrating media, shaping brand image, and creating "hot IP" by capturing hot spots inside and outside the venue. In 2022, with the help of the global craze and traffic brought by the Premier League championship, Jian Nanchun, as the official global partner of Manchester City, joined hands with iQiyi Sports to carefully create an immersive Premier League talk show "Sword Pointing to the Peak" for fans, which has reached 20 hot topics on social media and a total of more than 120 million views.
"Innovative marketing" is to leverage the influence of sports events to attract sports lifestyle enthusiasts through social media and offline activities. iQIYI Sports has cooperated with a number of brands by virtue of the broadcasting rights of the four Grand Slams of tennis. For example, during the 2024 Australian Open, Helena used the iQiyi broadcast scene to place advertisements to cater to the market demand for gifts on Valentine's Day and achieve instant conversion of the brand. In addition, Jindian was exposed throughout the broadcast of the iQiyi Sports Tennis Grand Slam, and also used multiple platforms to disseminate and plan offline tennis activities to further convey the brand concept of a healthy lifestyle.
Today, iQIYI Sports has attracted widespread attention with the holding of top-level events, and has further expanded its influence through a global integration strategy. Xin Ai Sports' senior vice president Yu Miao elaborated on iQIYI Sports' marketing offensive system. He said, "To help brand owners achieve a closed loop of exposure, cognition, communication and conversion, we will make full use of the hard and wide resources of the whole cycle of the event, combined with the full content resources of brand characteristics, and conduct two-way communication through the all-round scene chain of online and offline. At the same time, it also relies on multi-platform distribution and leverages the powerful attributes of e-commerce platforms to achieve the ultimate conversion goal. 」
Times are changing, and the operation strategy of New Love Sports is constantly changing
After the great waves of the times, the road of China's sports copyright operation has changed, and Xinai Sports, which has been deeply involved in the industry for many years, has also ushered in a clear positioning - a digital distribution platform for sports content.
From 2007, when Xinying Sports began to get involved in sports copyright events, to the combination of super platform and head sports IP in 2018 to establish Xinai Sports, and then to the iterative upgrade to a digital distribution platform in 2023, when the usage habits of users' consumption content have changed, Xinai Sports is not only serving professional fans, but also seeking more increments in the sports crowd.
As a digital distribution platform for sports content,Xinai Sports not only broadcasts the event live、Derivative content is operated in iQiyi、iQiyi Sports APP,It will also be distributed to short video、TV terminals and other platforms,It can not only capture the fragmented time of users,Let users enjoy various types of sports content anytime and anywhere,It also works with Xiaomi、Hisense、Skyworth and other smart TV manufacturers to jointly create a new height of sports content operation,Make the experience of watching games on the large screen more smooth and convenient。
Through the cooperation with these high-quality multi-platforms, Xinai Sports has achieved multi-dimensional reach to sports fans and successfully implemented differentiated operation strategies. In the future, according to the personalized needs, usage habits and interests of users, Xinai Sports will accurately distribute sports content to various platforms, fully covering users' life scenarios, and ensuring that users can easily enjoy high-quality sports feasts no matter where they are.
With years of accumulation in the sports industry, New Love Sports has established close cooperative relations with various top event IPs around the world, and in the new media environment, it has continuously integrated content layout, product upgrades and marketing innovations, and is committed to achieving mutual benefit and win-win results for IP, users and brand owners.
We can see that when Xinai Sports meets the needs of users for content, it is also striving to connect more sports users through the continuous construction of a diversified content ecological matrix, highlighting the strategic deployment of its leading sports company.
For advertisers, relying on such an ecological matrix, brands will also have more diversified scenarios, realize the effective connection between content, users and brands, and open a new chapter in sports marketing.