Interview with Gregory Owens, Head of Large Media, Twitter Europe

Why does Twitter love sports content and opinion?

Well, Twitter is essentially a news platform, it’s the place people go to see and discover what’s happening and find and learn the latest information for whatever it is that interests them.  It just so happens that sports is the most popular topic of conversation and within that football is extremely popular.  In the UK alone there are 15 million Twitter users who are interested in football and every weekend if you go on to Twitter, you’ll see that the most popular things that are trending are all football games or sports events.  So we love sports because it drives conversation on our platform.  It’s culturally relevant and it’s a big topic of conversation week-in, week out.

How do you define audience disruption and why is it an important topic?

Audience disruption is controversial because disruption creates problems for some people and opportunities for other, and whenever there’s disruption, you have people who rise with it and do extremely well, and you have those who resist change or don’t adapt their business models and they ultimately end up dying.  I think in the case of audience disruption that happens now, I think it’s actually positive for most operators and most people in the industry.  What’s happening now is that we have multiple platforms and multiple groups of users accessing content on different platforms.  You think back to 15 years ago, you wanted to watch a major sports event and participate in that.  You either went to watch the game, listen to it on a radio or you dialled in on TV.  Now you think of the sheer volume of places you can go and experience that.  So, we still a lot of people consuming sports, live sporting events on TV.  But they’ve also got a second screen in their hands and that’s an opportunity for advertisers to reach those audiences on that second screen.

How can sports betting and sports incumbents build better brand identities on Twitter?

Brand identity is key, where particularly in the UK it’s a very mature market, so that brands differentiation is so important.  How do build that?  well, it’s not just about in-game moments, they are key, you’ve got to be there in the action when the goal goes in, when there is a flashpoint in a game, but it’s about what happens in the build-up and in the week before a game.  I’ll give you an example, this world cup, Twitter generated 115 Billion impressions globally, but the Neymar challenge, if you remember that hashtag which had Neymar rolling around clutching his knee and people imitating him, that generated 2.4 Billion impressions, that’s a massive audience that has nothing to do with a live sports game.  It’s just related to it, and I think the big opportunity there for advertisers is not just in the live moments, but actually tapping with their brand putting against those key moments that happen throughout the week.  Something that happens after a game, the conversation continues on, and being there through that as well.

How is Twitter changing as a social media vertical, and will it help sports incumbents?

Yes, we’re continuously involving, one of the things that we’ve just launched recently is a new events functionality which sits at the top of your timeline.  So when you go into Twitter now and there’s a premier league game on say, for example, we did a lot of this during the world cup, you go into that event and what you’re going to get is a beautifully curated feed with the score line at the top, a moment about the game and this curated feed of tweets below from the people that you follow with the most relevant content.  But, also like the top pundits in the games, the top trending tweets.  So as a user you’re going in and seeing this content, it’s like it’s packaged up and personalised just for you, so it’s a really immersive experience.  The opportunity for advertisers is tapping into that engaged audience around that which is live in that moment.

What future technology or trend do you feel will have the biggest impact on sports viewership?

I think the biggest one is sports rights, that’s where this is going to change. Traditionally we had a couple of operators held all the sports right, we’re starting to see that change now with other platforms coming in, and winning sports rights for big live sporting events.  I can foresee a day where exclusivity isn’t a thing anymore and you’ve got sports rights running across multiple platforms for the same games, and that’s possible as well.  I think that’s positive for the industry, because it’s no longer just one place, there’s a number of different platforms where that live content can be viewed and that’s an opportunity for advertisers to go and engage with those users in that time.