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Instagram sees itself as part of big picture for teams, leagues

Of Instagram’s more than 500 million users, more than 165 million are seen as sports fans, and those fans follow on average eight different sports-related accounts on the platform, according to the company’s own research.
Photo by: INSTAGRAM

Brandon Gayle, head of global sports partnerships at Instagram, sits at that sports-based intersection for the site, promoting the platform’s ability to reach not only fans but also athletes, leagues, teams and media properties — as well as finding new opportunities for connections around big events, like last month’s Copa America Centenario.

Gayle sat down with SportsBusiness Journal staff writer Ian Thomas recently to discuss how that’s happening.

What sort of opportunity does the sports industry have on Instagram?

GAYLE: Of the top 100 accounts that teens follow, one in four of them is a sports account. So if you think about the next generation of sports fans, we have a really great opportunity to cultivate the next wave of folks who will be buying tickets, buying merchandise and tuning in to broadcasts — which if you’re a league, a team or broadcaster is a pretty exciting opportunity.

How have teams been using the platform?

GAYLE: Where we see sports partners and brands actually leveraging Instagram is by using some of our ad tools. The Golden State Warriors, for example, were using the buy button on Instagram to sell their alternate, Slate Night uniforms. The San Jose Sharks were selling tickets on Instagram through their Stanley Cup run. So as we continue to build our ad platform really on the back of what Facebook has built [with Facebook in 2012 paying $1 billion to buy Instagram], I think that scale will allow us to do that very quickly as well.

How have the different constituents within sports responded to your pitches about Instagram?

GAYLE: They’ve been extremely receptive. Very few of the major organizing bodies, leagues, teams, broadcasters aren’t already on Instagram at this point, so the conversations that we’re having are really two-way conversations around how do they get the most out of the platform. In many ways, we are like free consultants.

You had partnerships with both Fox Sports and Univision Deportes for the recent Copa America Centenario. What was that experience like?

GAYLE: We actually had a video channel that was live during the final with the best content from the athletes, the teams, Copa America Centenario’s account, the organizers, content from Fox Sports and Univision. Really we tried to work with all of the major touch points so you as a soccer fan could experience that match. Over the course of the tournament, 40 million people had 231 million interactions with Copa America-related content … which is up 32 percent from Copa 2015 in Chile, so I think the passion around the sport is clearly there.

Have there been concerns from rights holders about their content appearing on Instagram?

GAYLE: It’s up to the rights holder in this case to make the call around what they want to share. For example, you take a league like the NBA that is probably the most forward leaning of all the leagues as far as sharing highlights, empowering their players to share, giving you really full access 24/7/365, versus other leagues who may take a different approach, and that’s OK; they might have a different model or different approach that’s totally fine. But we know and see it works best when you take a model like the NBA and you literally unleash the entire ecosystem, whether it’s allowing teams to share highlights within their own territories and regions [or] the broadcasters. … Things like geoblocking or rights management: We have tools to help take content down, but at the end of the day, it’s about helping them reach an audience that they may not otherwise be able to reach.

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