How DAZN Leans Into the Curves of Consumer Engagement
Delivering premium content to broad audiences means acclimating to the viewing habits of different consumer demographics. This can make serving younger viewers with typically long-form content like live sports challenging for sports streamers like DAZN. In this clip from Streaming Media NYC 2024, DAZN Global CRO and President USA Walker Jacobs talks to Nadine Krefetz, Consultant, Reality Software, Contributing Editor, Streaming Media, about the engagement curves of social and CTV viewers and how DAZN has learned to lean into them.
The ”M curve” and the “W curve” of sports viewing engagement
“There's a little bit of research that shows that younger consumers are not watching full sports games,” Krefetz says to Jacobs. “So, how do you engage them? Or do you disagree?”
Jacobs emphasizes the importance of engaging fans in the ways they prefer to consume content. “I think, in general, linear ratings are down across the board,” he says. “But we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can super-serve fans, and we try to be a little bit less obsessed with driving ratings to the game itself than we are engaging the fan wherever they are and however they want to receive content in as much time that they have.”
He describes the "M curve" and the "W curve" of consumer engagement, representing fluctuating interest levels during a sports game and on social media. “The M curve is this notion of consumer engagement around an NFL game or a soccer match where nobody [is watching at the beginning]. And then the match starts, and it goes up, and then it's halftime, and it goes down, and then the second half starts, and it goes up, and then the match ends, and everyone leaves,” he says. “Well, it turns out social media has the exact opposite curve. It's a W curve before the match. [Viewership is] peaking, the match starts, it goes down, and at halftime, it goes up. In the second half, it goes down. After the match is over, it goes back up, and people watch the highlights and everything else. So we lean into that. It's not the way most of our competitive set would think about this necessarily, but that's kind of how we think, both from a programming perspective, but it's also how we think about how we build programs with our marketing partners.”
The importance of nimbleness in approaching different demographic engagements
Krefetz remarks that this approach resembles the “nimbleness” of approaching viewer engagement, which she discussed with Jacobs earlier in their session.
“I think that's part of it,” Jacobs says. “[With that] approach, we become far less reliant on the ratings and how we have to monetize the consumer in that three hours or else. It allows us to make sure that we're able to guarantee an audience over a specific flight and deliver the value that our customers are investing in to exactly the consumers they care about. And if that's a younger cohort, we can deliver that as well.”
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