Overtime's Dan Porter looked to counter the notion that Gen Z consumers have shorter attention spansMarc Bryan-Brown
How to understand and engage with Gen Z was the topic for the opening panel at the ’19 Octagon Sports Marketing Symposium. A main theme that emerged from the discussion was that today’s younger sports fans are accessible -- just not in the traditional sense. All four panelists agreed that content being pushed to Gen Z must be innovative and specialized, or else these young fans will not be interested. Octagon Senior VP Dan Cohen pointed to realizing the different consumption habits of older and younger generations. “They consume through access and experiences as opposed to material possessions,” he said. “What is ‘Snap-able’, what’s ‘Tweetable.’” To that point, Snap Head of Sports Partnerships Anmol Malhotra believes Gen Z does not care as much about the action on the field as much as the culture of sports. That is why Malhotra said his social media platform is moving past only trying to attract hardcore sports fans and focusing more on casual followers. MLB Senior VP/Marketing Barbara McHugh noted Gen Z baseball fans are more likely to be a follower of an individual player rather than a team or league, which is why the league has made it a point to provide its players with social content to push out on their own channels.
NOT WHAT YOU THINK: Overtime CEO Dan Porter countered the popular notion that Gen Z consumers have shorter attention spans, making it harder to engage with them. “Yes, for content for old people, (younger fans) do have short attention spans,” he said. “For things that are designed for them from the ground up, they actually don't have short attention spans.” He pointed to the length of broadcasts for things like esports on Twitch and videos on YouTube. Porter believes those platforms with that sort of content have no problem keeping younger fans interested and glued to the screen.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN: While the panelists were generally optimistic about marketing to Gen Z, they did admit there are some perplexing challenges. Porter said, “You just have so much competition from other things. Whether it’s 8 million people watching a Black Hole on ‘Fortnite,’ whether it’s watching Netflix, whether it’s watching twenty other streaming services.” Malhotra said leagues, teams and companies need to make sure content is formatted properly for each platform. “Our biggest fear is that they fall into the bucket of just taking the exact content they have somewhere else and putting it on Snap,” he said. “That can’t work. You have to customize it.”
