Sunday, we reached the end of the NFL regular season, with the bumps and shifts along the way, on time and pretty much intact. Somewhere down the road we will look back on this year and its best practices and amongst the Bubbles and Wubbles we will tip the hat to the NFL for getting through and going on.
From the Virtual Draft from the commissioner’s basement last spring, to managing hundreds of staff, players and coaches travelling around the country in an environment that was not isolated for them, to still innovating with media platforms like Twitch and Redditt, to making adjustments that tried to make it OK for us to watch and engage with almost no one in the building, to keeping the quality of play more than enjoyable, to dealing with the larger picture issues in society, and to somehow keep a lurching, moving and shaking train on the rails to this point, the NFL deserves a lot of credit not just today, but as to where we will go, and what we will learn going forward.
Now of course the journey isn’t done. The playoffs and the Super Bowl have to have less hitches than the regular season as there is less of a margin for error, but just to get to this point? Good luck having have predicted that.
As we hit the end of the season, even with Black Monday ahead and coaches and staffs losing their jobs or moving on, we wanted to take a quick second and do what was learned and what a look ahead to what we may see when the 2021 NFL regular season finishes its run at this time NEXT January. Some thoughts.
Beginning With Buffalo: The Buffalo Bills success on the field was one of notable stories of the regular season, but what happens with Buffalo’s home playoff game, one with fans in the stands, may be an even more important success story for where we will end up with live events. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is working with the team and the league to put in place a wide number of tracing and measurement measures, many based on some of the best practices other NFL teams have implemented, to help create a roadmap for fan engagement for 2021 and maybe beyond. Especially in a state like New York, if those best practices can be examined and replicated, the Bills may help us all be winners regardless of their result on the scoreboard, and it may give us a good look at what we will be looking like for a spring and summer of MLB, concerts, college sports, and maybe indoor events as well.
New Jobs: We talked about this last spring, but every team either has or will have a Director or VP of Fan Confidence or something to that extent. That person, probably with a health background, will, be part of a new army of employees who are or will be in charge of not just cleanliness, but public and consumer confidence for when fans return to stands in large numbers at some point, most probably masked and somewhat distanced. That person or persons will be in charge of not just health protocol; a and issue tracking, he or she or they will be in charge of making sure bathrooms are clean, smell clean and look clean; that employees are masked and gloved when serving and delivering food, that contact between fans and players as part of an experience is done at a measurable distance, and most importantly that the fan experience is done in a way that all feel OK about a gathering, should we choose to go. He/she/they will be some of the more visible new faces we will meet when play returns.
There will also be opportunities for areas like vending that have slowly disappeared in recent years. To get your order, stadia will need people delivering to seats or to other areas to keep lines down. The hawkers will be replaced by quick delivery folks who will be essential for a better experience.
Contactless everything: If you haven’t gotten used to using your mobile device for various and sundry “event day” things, then you better. We will be ticketless, we will watch more highlights, we will be able to find out which lines are shorter for the bathroom, we will be ordering food to grab and go, for those who choose to we will be betting or playing games, we will be able to identify where and how the quickest lines to enter and leave will be, we will be able to find our colleagues and friends tailgating in the parking lot, we may be able to instantly upgrade to empty seats, and we will be able to order items to best capture our moments, quickly, safely and more easily than every before, all with a swipe that used to take us away from where we are, or make us late for where we wanted to go.
Connectivity To Go With Contactless: Keep watching the progress that comes with 5G retrofitted into stadia. Lots of testing in empty venues has gone on and hopefully accelerated the process, but that connectivity for next year’s kickoff is what will make the touchless experience happen. Increased connectivity to thousands at once moves things along faster, will help with disaster response and with contact tracing not just for COVID but for other potential issues as well), and will make the consumer experience much more seamless. It won’t be everywhere, and we will only know that it will work best when we have fans in stands, so the NFL will get to benefit from the testing (hopefully) at the Olympics and with MLB this summer as well. Increased connectivity will also help make the sports gambling experience that much better as well, as then (if mobile wagering continues to grow) you will be able to have in stadia contests of value on almost every play. Much like we have gotten used to seeing the numbers grow on 50/50 raffles in stadia, we will be able to watch the interaction, for either dollars or gamified versions of credits ebb and flow in real time. We may not be fully there by end of 2021, but with 5G implementation, we will be farther along with all forms of enhanced contactless and interactive experiences in stadia.
Keeping A Grasp on The Past: All that innovation and contactless might lead us down a path that has already started to kill parts of the collectable business…but… In recent years good luck trying to buy a program in certain stadia or arenas or trying to explain why a ticket stub is important. Team officials have said most people don’t want them, it wastes dollars, it’s a drain on the environment etc. etc. However there has been a sharp uptick in the collectable market this past year, especially for programs and memorable ticket stubs. Also there has to be an accountability for corporations that still need hard tickets to get in hand to clients that cannot be transferred digitally, and there is going to be a part of the population that still does not have a smart phone. So, for those, and for the nostalgia or collectable folks, their ability to get hard tickets from customer service, or know where to pick up a program, even one preordered, is going to be important as well. Yes, we will be better with most innovation, but changing all of the little nuances for the game experience should not be totally lost. Those stubs tie to memories tie to passion, and that passion is what fuels the game interest, and the fandom. So, have an out, an opportunity, for those who still want part of their experience.
Reuse and recycle: Lost a bit in the year of no fans in stands was the path many stadia were on to become carbon neutral. Get used to seeing less plastic and more paper, no straws and more take in, take out opportunities as we go back to games. Also, the economy may give fans the ability to again feel safe about brining items in with them, vs. going to stands for food that people have not prepared themselves. Maybe there will be preorder, pre pickup delivery options available so we can bring food in, a harken back to the days when you packed a sandwich at home and brought it along for halftime. Also, the pandemic has reminded us about the issues of those who do not have enough to eat, in every part of the country. Getting food out that is not sold (although waste should go down if we go to an on demand plan for food prep at stadia) to homeless shelters, food pantries and other areas will be another key part of the team storytelling, and the ability for large venues to give back to the community, more than ever before.
Streaming Here, Streaming There: Whether it is concurrent live streams or additional weekly programming on Twitch (as part of their deal with Amazon Prime), or the upcoming kid focused stream and broadcast of an NFL Wild Card game on Nickelodeon, the NFL continues to show that there is a market to reach fans who might not always be watching through the use of concurrent streams. The ability to have different forms of data sets, live interactive chat communities, and different channels with a customized, or unique look at a game, is something that we will be seeing more of as rightsholders start to split pies in different ways, and over the second half of the season the NFL, a league which has been a little more hesitant than leagues like the NBA and the NHL and MLS, to go away from a traditional broadcast feed, took some subtle steps to find another way to story tell to a different audience. Helping the streaming argument is a new way to look at measurement that will soon encompass all platforms, which can better show an ROI for brands who have struggled to justify being all things on all platforms.
Goodbye scrum: No not the scrum on the field around the ball, but the one in the locker room. One of those “accelerating the inevitable” aspects came as The Pandemic started, with the NBA and NHL closing locker rooms and going to a podium setup for media access before sports stopped in March. After that came the use of technology and streaming services which were able to bring spokespeople, be they coaches, teams, or officials, to a wider audience than just those in the locker room, or for that matter at the Stadium on game day or at a facility for practice. Now will we see contact and access between media and players and coaches totally restricted once we get back to a little bit of normalcy? Probably not. There will be looks at what the Olympic community has used for years in terms of Mixed Zones, where select players and officials can meet with smaller groups of media…thereby justifying beat writers and others looking for access…as well as the continued and refined use of technology for larger announcements. We will probably have large scale press events as we have continued to see, with safety protocols in place, but unfettered access to locker rooms will probably be a thing of the past. Is that a bad thing? We will see, as the best storytellers and most diligent media will find a way to get a competitive edge, and hopefully teams will continue to find ways to create avenues for storytelling beyond a group video session.
Going Global: One thing lost during the NFL season was the continued game day pushes into London and Mexico, with talk of Germany and other places also in the mix. However, what was not lost by some teams…the Giants, the Steelers, the Chiefs, the Patriots among them…was the expansion of language specific broadcasts and content that catered to audiences, especially the German audience. As teams look to be more global, and also find more revenue streams, look for the multilingual content opportunities to grow. Next year could we see multiple language streams from teams beyond just Spanish, German and English? Maybe, as the ability to run streams has become more successful, sellable to a brand, and most importantly, cost efficient.
Patches, Do We Finally See Patches? We wrote about the patch question a few weeks ago, as the “Los Angeles Rams” uniform patch still seems like a test for the future. While some media insiders said it was nothing, it seems like the tide there may also turn faster, as the need for new streams of revenue to make up for the massive shortfall this year, could lead to an NFL patch plan sooner rather than later. Other areas for revenue…secondary screens in stadia that will show wait times and points of fast egress, delivery services like Grubhub, official cleaning partners (like the NBA has with Clorox), will all be in the mix as we head toward next fall, with others surely coming along as well.
There is still a great deal to be determined on many fronts before we get to next fall’s NFL season, with so many more lessons to be learned, and the crunch time for playoffs is just ahead. Will all these things be part of the game experience by this time next year? Maybe not all, but there were a great deal of learning across all sports and events these past eight months that have yielded lots of lessons, and positives, amongst the chos. Maybe this becomes a simple primer for where we are going, but if it all leads to a better experience and a time when teams are maximizing best practices and growing as business, that’s great news.
The crystal ball is still murky, but as we head into 2021 a bit deeper, the best practices, and the opportunities, are starting to come clearer.
