With less than 50 days to go until the T20 Blast regional cricket competition kicks off once more in the U.K., it would appear that the game is, much like many other sports, currently struggling to attract both younger players and also fans.
Cricket participation levels among young people in the U.K. have been declining sharply in recent years. The number of people over 16 years old who play the sport at least once a month has dropped from 403,100 in 2011 to 278,600 in 2016. To tackle this issue, the the governing body of the sport in Britain, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), appointed Matt Dwyer as Director of Participation and Growth in 2015. Dwyer held a similar role with Australia’s governing body, Cricket Australia, for over four years. In an interview from last year he said: “In this country doesn’t feel as accessible to as many people as it should.”
Despite this problem, the ECB in its annual report detailed that more than 2 million people watched a domestic or international cricket match in England and Wales in 2016, the second highest total since the ECB was formed in 1997. In addition to this, the ECB racked up 1.8 million new followers on their social media channels last year.
A key part of this drive to generate new fans of the game, which could in turn help participation levels of the sport in the U.K., the ECB has been working with Threepipe, an independent digital agency, for the T20 Blast regional championship, which is held every summer. The league consists of 18 county teams from the U.K., which are divided into two divisions of nine teams each.
According to Threepipe co-founder Farhad Koodoruth, the agency’s role has been to “drive ticket sales across most formats of the game, from England internationals for both men and women and also for the T20 Blast tournaments at a local county level. The T20 Blast brief has been about bring both existing cricket fans and wider sports fans into the game and also helping to drive down the average age of people attending the games.”
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Last year’s T20 Blast awareness campaign, led by Threepipe, lasted four months and was focused on a variety of channels include display advertising, social media and also online search. This approach also had to be coordinated centrally with the ECB, the 18 countries taking part in the tournament and multiple ticketing agencies. Koodoruth in a statement to SportTechie said that this was “a huge and complex job and requires a lot of coordination.” He continued that they spent “a lot of time in setting up the programmes so that we are able to track everything and understand the path to purchasing tickets so we know which channels are performing best and how they all work together.”
In order to reach the objective set out by the ECB, Threepipe adopted a strategy which focused squarely on data to target relevant audiences. “A good proportion of our team have come from a maths background at school or university and are working with data and investigating data on a daily basis,” according to Koodoruth. “It’s the lifeblood of the organisation. As the saying goes ‘without data, you are just someone with an opinion.’”
In its approach it ran a number of digital advertising formats for the campaign, which were optimized against audience, time of day, day of week and even the weather forecast. A combination of both first and third party data was used to inform the overall targeting strategy based a whole range of demographics including age, gender and household income. A paid search campaign was in operation too to try to convert ticket sales.
A key plank of this approach was to use video content for the digital advertising formats. Koodoruth explained: “Video is by far the most preferred way that people enjoy consuming media and the audience we are trying to reach over indexes for video consumption, because of the mobile devices and the social channels that they are consuming media through. Over the last few years, the shift to video in the way we drive ticket sales has shifted to reflect this change.”
Another key strategy which paid off for the campaign was also the decision to target more general sports fans in the U.K. According to Koodoruth: “The T20 Blast tournament is a great way of bringing new people into the game for the first time but perhaps those that haven’t attended for a while. There are plenty of sports fans out there whose first game isn’t cricket but they do enjoy watching the game and attending with friends as part of a social occasion. We want to rekindle their love for the game too and sometimes they need a little prompting and reminding that this is a great sport to play and watch.”
The agency founded in 2004 currently has 70 employees and has particular expertise in retail and sport and its services focuses on paid media, search engine optimization (SEO), content and design. It has experience in working with a number of sporting governing bodies including the NFL and England Hockey.
In light of this work for other notable sporting organizations, Koodoruth has been impressed by “digital out of home” (DOOH) campaigns. This term refers to digital media which is used outside of the home for marketing purposes, but excludes traditional TV and radio advertising, but does includes digital ads. He wrote: “We have been running a lot of DOOH campaigns this year for targeted awareness campaigns. It’s an exciting ad format which is bringing new measurability options as well as providing a dynamic creative platform to communicate the excitement of sport.”
Regarding lessons learned from last year’s campaign, Koodoruth noted that “social media channels were keen for driving interest and attendance from a younger audience and so this has become a bigger part of the channel mix coming into this year’s tournament. Also, unsurprisingly, we are focusing much more on mobile devices to drive content engagement and purchasing.”
In terms of what is specifically planned for this year’s T20, Koodoruth kept his cards close to his chest and concluded: “The ECB is a great partner to work with and they are keen to trial new tech that is available to us. We are continuously innovating in the way that we approach the account and testing new channels, working with new providers and this season looks like being a really exciting one.”