Buying in an audience can work. The New York Times recently acquired longform sports journalism outfit The Athletic for half a billion dollars to notch up its registered users to 10 million.
Spotify are on a mission to grow the music brand worldwide and the Swedish music streaming giant claims, “there are few partners (like FC Barcelona) that (sic.) have this sort of scale and global reach.”
Media interest in the partnership has gone global, with some social media listening platforms putting a reach figure of the news at close to 300 million people.
According to Catalan newspaper Sport the deal could have been much more than double Dylan’s ditties, if the addressable audience were more quantifiable.
The daily tabloid, aimed primarily at Barcelona supporters, claims that of the 350 million Barca fans, just 1% of them are registered with the club.
The business intelligence reaction to the 350 million fan number is ‘so what’.
The old Madmen adage of ‘half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half’, is utterly outmoded in 2022. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Meta, Neuralink all earnestly know the value of real customer data.
Sophisticated, real-time analytics now enable readers, fans, customers, users, whatever you want to call us, to interact deeper with content and events.
This enables media owners to understand what is hot / not so that recommendations for offers, features and channels can convert to 100% knowing where your advertising is being wasted.
With unemotional, structured analytics – insights teams can now confidently inform content strategies at scale and optimise digital experiences by audience.
First party data is the top priority in elite sport. Marketing, Communications and Commercial departments in clubs, federations and sponsors know there is a tidal wave of change on its way.