When Rich Luker presents a batch of analytics at one of our conferences, you can be sure that (1) he has got the numbers down pat, and (2) what he tells you can be alternately depressing and encouraging. His presentation at Game Changers was right on target and filled with complex charts and graphs. But for those of you who were not in the room (or might need a refresher), we asked him for the three biggest takeaways:
* No. 1: “The first is that we’ve crossed the tipping point for how we think about girls and sports. It’s no longer applicable to think of them as a distinctive group. They are athletes and they are fans. And it’s not that all females are fully integrated into the experience, but better than half. So if you go out there and do things that are somehow calling out females, it’s like calling out left-handed people. It’s not relevant now to better than half of all females who are interested in sports.”
* No. 2: “We are at a point in sports when we can no longer assume growth. It may take 10 or 15 years before we see that financially. But if we wait 10 or 15 years to do something about it, because our greatest concerns are with males 12-34, it will be too late to be able to recoup. That goes to the point of people saying, ‘Well, Rich, you don’t have to worry about those people, because when they become parents they’ll come back,’ and the point is that they can’t come back if they weren’t there in the first place.”
* No. 3: “Softball. If you want a good story, the fact that 16.1% of females 12-17 said the first sport they followed as a fan was softball is really powerful.”
REASONS TO BE PESSIMISTIC, AND OPTIMISTIC: Luker also gave us one reason to be pessimistic about the sports industry, and one reason to be optimistic.
* Pessimistic: “The biggest concern is that it’s the heart of sport that’s declining -- males 12-34. And that it’s been a long decline. It’s not short-term. It’s been 15 years with 12-17-year-olds. And now, the last five years, males 18-34. And those were the 12-17-year-olds we lost 10 years ago. And it is a sports problem, it is not a sport problem. It’s across the board. So that’s the biggest concern, because that is the traditional feeder for sports.” Where have they gone? “Online. There’s an interesting piece of that: Unmotivated, unconnected time online. ... It’s not like there’s any place in particular they go, but they’re doing a ton of streaming. These same 12-17-year-olds who anybody in television will tell you never watch TV. So why all of a sudden are they doing this kind of watching? It wasn’t because they didn’t want to watch TV. When you’re 12-17, you don’t want to be home! So they’re able to do it outside the home.”
* Optimism: “There’s real potential that females 12-17-years-old today form a new foundation for sports for the future. So the fact that they are now normalized forces us as an industry to think differently about them. They are normalized and powerful, because it’s the females 12-34 and all fans 35-plus who are keeping the numbers up in sports while males 12-34 are down. That is the foundation for the future.”
