From Amazon Prime Video’s position in the WNBA’s historic media rights deal to Netflix’s continued push into live sports, streaming services have made some big moves in the sports media landscape this year—though perhaps not quite as many as Saquon Barkley did on the football field this past weekend.
By most indications, sports streaming is only going to continue to get more popular in the foreseeable future. Roku predicts that two-thirds of sports content will be consumed over streaming in 2025, according to Joe Franzetta, head of sports at Roku Media.
“That unlocks a lot of opportunities with advertisers,” he told Marketing Brew.
We spoke with Franzetta about his other predictions for sports media and advertising in 2025 and how Roku is looking to capitalize on the opportunity.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Some sports marketers started the year by saying that the industry could probably make better use of fan data for targeting and personalization. What do you expect to see on that front in 2025?
The cable model has long been the golden goose of sports media, and as we migrate to streaming, the question becomes, “What’s the new economic model, and how does data support that new economic model?” I think there’s a couple things. One is more targeted advertising, the ability to identify the audience and identify the audience as they’re interacting with you. The other is…you’re able to start layering in interactivity that provides other types of revenue opportunities and other types of relationship opportunities with viewers, whether that’s sports betting, or merchandise sales, or ticket sales, or food delivery.
This year saw some new categories invest more in sports ads and sponsorships. How do you see the types of brands that tend to advertise against sports changing in 2025?
I think that expansion is a natural progression of the way that the audience is growing…Having a digital platform allows there to be a much broader prism for what types of sports get attention in a streaming environment. Then that’s going to drive different types of sponsors to be interested.
Sports streaming is so fragmented, and especially when it comes to more growing or niche sports, that can be a very tricky experience for fans trying to tune in. Do you see that changing anytime soon?
With the move from linear television to streaming [in sports], you do have a proliferation of fragmentation, of disaggregation. It’s incumbent upon us…to provide a more frictionless experience for people to reach the content they want to reach, and then, of course, for advertisers to reach those viewers…So we launched an NFL Zone, we launched an MLB Zone, we launched an NBA Zone, and in those experiences, we’re aggregating all of their live rights partners into one place…Our first live rights partner was Formula E, and we built a destination around Formula E’s content. We have both the live races that are on Roku, but also live races that are on CBS, Paramount+, clips and highlights, documentaries, etc. It provides an opportunity for a smaller sport to have its moment on the stage, have its spotlight. In 2025, stay tuned. There’s going to be more of that.
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Women’s leagues like the NWSL and WNBA are among the sports that have claimed a growing share of the spotlight this year. Is that a space Roku intends to push more into?
We’ve definitely got some interesting opportunities in live rights, sports talk, and documentaries. I think the first thing we did with this that’s actually public is the documentary A Radical Act: Renee Montgomery. There might be more opportunities to work with her and folks like her…The WNBA has had an incredible year, the NWSL has had an incredible year, and there are a lot of other popular women’s sports that I think we’re going to have a significant opportunity to display and to highlight in 2025.
Any other trends from 2024 or predictions for 2025 you think are noteworthy?
We’re just seeing that continued trend with the move toward streaming. Every major rights deal that you see now has a streaming component, and the leagues are leaning more and more into streaming. The NFL actually is doing a flex for a Thursday night game; that’s the first time that’s ever happened. Nascar did a deal that includes streaming. The NBA obviously did a huge deal that includes streaming. We are seeing more opportunities for challenger brands to really lean into the fact that streaming provides them an opportunity in what was otherwise a difficult environment for them to get placement on a linear channel. I think we’re going to continue to see that in 2025.
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