Sports content and outdoor advertising have long been a winning combination. In 2024 this combination isn’t just arena or stadium big screens displaying out-of-town scores, but stadium concourse screens with eye-catching visuals highlighting athlete performance, digital displays with real-time game updates when you’re waiting to board a plane, interactive sports quizzes on seat-back screens in a rideshare, billboards, bars, gyms and more. In this article, we’ll explore recent fan engagement trends and show they can be applied to make sports content a high-performing DOOH engagement tool for fans and advertisers.
2024 Sports Fan Trends and Relevance to Digital Out-Of-Home Displays
- Real-time Engagement: In their 2023 Sports Insights Survey, Deloitte highlighted that 72% of sports enthusiasts express a preference for quick access to live score updates. Forbes also ranked the Pittsburgh Penguins as having one of the most passionate fan bases in the National Hockey League. They utilize DOOH to seamlessly integrate real-time player statistics onto stadium screens during game days in the PPG Paints Arena. For example, when Sidney Crosby scores a goal, historical sports data triggers a templated graphic displaying milestones for fans to celebrate the current goal and its wider context in terms of Sidney’s career achievement. In doing so, they successfully add an additional layer of interest for fans in the stadium, transforming passive viewing into an immersive and more memorable experience – and one that creates premium additional inventory for sponsors.
Pittsburgh Penguins PPG Paints Arena uses Stats Perform’s out of town scores/Data Feeds to integrate into the jumbotron
- Versatile and entertaining: DOOH advertising, like all advertising, is a fight for attention. The ability to synchronize sports data with advertising content is powerful because of its versatility as both full-screen content and side-bar content. Sports scores, insights and stats attract viewer attention and advertising can either be shown as interstitial content, or alongside the sports information, on the same screen at the same time. That’s because sports fans are used to L-bars showing sports information in sports broadcasts. Stadiums are now starting to do this with in-venue screens; interchanging live broadcasts with evergreen L bars that supplement sports information and statistics with ad placements. Wipro, an organisation focused on transforming stadium experiences through contextual graphics, use Stats Perform’s Pressbox Graphics platform to achieve this. The platform generates eye-catching visuals that can be interchanged with advertising at the click of a button. The ads can also be programmatically shown and connected to that team or result.
Bayern Munich uses PressBox graphics Out of Home feature to
their VisionEdge system at the start of the match
- The Third Screen: Deloitte’s research showed that nearly half of sports fans use their mobile devices as second screens while watching sports at home, specifically to look up player or team statistics. In the case of Generation Z sports fans, it was over half. There’s a number of reasons why sports statistics are so popular with fans and they generally boil down to making the game more entertaining. We see DOOH screens as the “third screen” for on-the-go sports enthusiasts and they are therefore a natural home for such entertaining sports statistics, news and information.
- Dynamic Content: The other great asset of sports content is that it is dynamic, which inherently keeps viewer interest, especially if it is based on real-time game data. T-Mobile’s Octopus screen network in rideshares across the US keep fans up to speed with dynamic sports videos previewing and recapping games, plus live scores feeds, and even quizzes, adding an exciting dimension to the journey.
Sports content integration into T-mobiles Octopus 40,000+ rideshare screen network
- Location-Based Personalisation: Sports content can easily be filtered to suit the location of a DOOH screen, to cover local teams and local star players. DOOH screen networks like Atmosphere and ReachTV leverage this to create engaging rights-free sports coverage that integrates live stats, scores and betting lines from providers like Stats Perform to create a comprehensive third screen display for travellers at airports, diners in restaurants and more.
Sports content is an ideal partner to attract eyeballs to Digital Out-of-Home media. There are billions of sports fans globally. Sports content is rich, dynamic, entertaining and authentic, that can be tailored for a specific location or advertiser. Combining DOOH displays plus sports offers an unparalleled avenue for targeted engagement. Real-time updates, brand-safe content, and the love that fans have for their favourite teams and players means outdoor screens can mirror online fan engagement trends to captivate audiences and create immersive, tailored experiences that outdoor advertisers and viewers love equally.
Download our swipe-file of case studies below, Digital Out-Of-Home Activations In Sport, to learn more about how the top brands, teams, stadiums and more are integrating sports content into their out-of-home strategies to delight fans and advertisers – and get in touch if we can help you do something similar.
