Why sport continues taking a chance on youth culture
Are mash-ups the most effective way to broaden your reach or just a mis-match made in the marketing department?
At Formula One race there will always be: the fans, the sponsors, the teams, their guests, the press… and a tour bus-load of top-drawer musicians. Flick back over the last couple of years and you’ll have seen a host of them, from Kasabian to Manic Street Preachers, from Pharrell to Goldie, from Motorhead to the odd Spice Girl or two. Some were genuine motorsports fanatics (the Manics, Goldie), some were, er… less so. But it gave a team good coverage and a quasi-endorsement from (mostly…) A-listers. Providing, of course, they remembered which team they were guests of.
Stand up Macy Gray…
(The best musical tie-in though, was Swedish driver Slim Borgudd. He raced for ATS and Tyrell and finished sixth at the ’81 British Grand Prix. However, to the more discerning, Slim will always be Abba’s session drummer. I know. Brilliant. But, despite having band’s name slapped down the side, apparently no money money, money was involved. The Abba moniker was a marketing ploy to lure in other investors…)
Music was/is a way for F1 to appeal to a potentially younger demographic — that racing that your mum and dad are watching? It’s also cool . There’s Eric Clapton! and the Pink Floyd drummer! Check out the singer from Razorlight!
The 2018 equivalent to music cross-over appeal sits with esports. Right there, brands, sports and teams have a (potential) audience of those elusive millennials and a chance to tap into millions of kids streaming Twitch for 136 hours at a time.
The trouble is, the esport audience is not only digitally native, they are, for the most part, social media native as well. The games and their tournaments are massively popular, they have incredible potential reach, and possess that demographic the marketing, sales and comms departments are all banging on about. But, they also possess a healthy cynical streak.
And that goes for the games’ organisers, the publishers and the players as well as the audience.
Just as dragging along a former Yardbirds guitarist to Bahrain might not necessarily appeal to anyone younger than your gran, a Premier League football club giving a pro FIFA player a club shirt might result in a press release and a nice photo op — but is that persuading the esports audience they should leave the sofas and streaming behind to stand and sing in the stadium?
Motorsports has been quick off the mark with this one. The second season of F1 Esports has begun and nine of the real-life on track teams are taking part. While it makes sense on one level — race car sims are an essential part of the teams’ preparation for races — and while there is a touch of the dad at the disco about it, the series has, largely been appreciated by the gaming community.
Will motorsports investing in console sports create any kind of payback from the younger end of its intended demographic? Is this a smart trojan horse to smuggle the next generation into watching F1? Is it clever diversification by Liberty to encourage fans’ sons and daughters that F1 is still hip? Or a short-burst (albeit healthy) PR event which won’t see the return in viewers medium and long term?
Who knows, most importantly it could be a chance for Slim Borgudd to virtually resurrect his racing career.
