Layer 1 Stage | Navigating Web3 Fandom: The Future of Sports Marketing

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1. 0:13

   all righty that's a lot of good to see everybody here uh my name is Sam Wang I lead sports and entertainment Partnerships at near foundation and welcome to this afternoon's panel on the intersection of sports and web 3 um why don't I give an opportunity to each of my panelists here to introduce themselves uh their organization and what they do there uh ommer why don't we start off with you

2. 0:36

   sure uh thank you very much Sam thank you very much everyone for having me here it's a great pleasure to be here for the second year in a row in the ne conference uh my name is am RI uh I'm a sports marketing director for Oracle I manage our partnership with Sal GP working very closely with Matt Oracle Rebel racing in the F1 and the Premier League and my core focus is to help our

3. 0:59

   Sports spawners to improve performance on track on the sea and off the beach and of the track amazing um thank you to the N Foundation thank you to Sam for inviting me my name is uh Noah dis and Klein I'm the CEO and founder of a lovely company called windcast and we build uh B2B sports or B2B infrastructure for interactive experiences for the largest sports leagues in the world um so right now well I'll dive into it in a little bit but we work with near found and we

4. 1:30

   work with the international cricket Council on a huge activation going on right now but Serv a ton of different leagues around the world you'll see a lot of things next year hi everyone thanks for the invitation sound speak on this panel um my name is Matthew Lord I'm director of Technology development delivery at SGP uh I work really closely with Amar and the Oracle team and near and the rest of our technology Partners

5. 1:52

   at SGP to to bring new experiences to to our fans But ultimately make sale GP Works um some of you May wonder what SGP is and unfortunately I couldn't get a sailing event um taking place this weekend so I thought the best next thing to do was to to play a video and show you so you could see what it was like

6. 2:58

   to here he is taking the win is this thing on yeah that's what we call a Sizzle reel in the industry and what is was um let's do a little Icebreaker to get the audience a little bit more familiar with each of you um Matt why don't I start with you what's your what's your favorite sport and crypto related project I think for me was probably sare and what they we did with sort of giving more utility to nfts

7. 3:35

   the whole gamifying um of Collectibles making that into like a resource based game where you could collect things that's kind of my first parade into that alongside maybe top shots I think there were things that as a kid I loved collecting trading cards and trading with my mates and um used to collect Pokemon cards as a kid as well so it's kind of felt very kind of a cool Web Two

8. 4:01

   experience but then into a web 3 world that um yeah I really felt at home and Drew me into the world of web 3 very nice very nice hmer or Noah um right I was going to say actually the same about the NBA but actually I have to say now my favorite is the uh I know we're going to talk about this a little bit more the cgp and article uh the dock the doc the do download the do and and I we're going to keep kind of uh that Intrigue into to kind of cover it all a little bit

9. 4:32

   later historically I would say my answer has two or my answer is twofold one I appreciate the people that basically dove into the industry uh first and foremost with nfts people like NBA Top Shot or tops even so rare I I quite enjoy um and then I'm going to plug windcast because our whole uh Focus was looking at these people saying you have created a beautiful digitally native

10. 4:57

    experience um that benefits all these fans around the world how do we take it to the next level and so that's what our number one focus is and I'll I'll dive into that in a little bit awesome and so we mentioned the dock already and this is a nice segue into a question for you Matt and ommer which is can you tell us a little bit more about how Oracle and SGP are working together to elevate The Fan Experience and particularly how you

11. 5:20

    might be using new technologies whether they're onchain or offchain uh to achieve that yeah I can kick it off I guess or cell GP a long history of trying to I guess engage on new audience new fans sailing is quite a difficult sport for people to understand traditionally it's always been sort of little white triangles and a blue background and no one's really sure what's going on so cgp is All Around inore close Hy adrine racing and we have created a product called liveline which

12. 5:51

    is a augmented reality package that sits on top of um our broadcast that basically demystifies um the sport of sailing and that's all powered by Oracle technology so as an offchain example we've really tried to push the boundaries on on how do you show a traditional sport to a new audience by creating augmented reality graphics on on top of broadcast but more recently on an on-train example is working with Oracle on providing a new Fan Experience through a fan engagement platform called

13. 6:22

    the doc so using traditional web2 technology within the Oracle World an identity management solution called idcs with an oracle and a product called crowd twist which is a fan loyalty platform to create a traditional rewards versus activities and Rewards program but what we're doing to add a little web three twist to that is I'm sure many of you have seen through gaming the concept of battle

14. 6:45

    passes where people can unlock maybe additional skins or guns and things like that within it where we've done the same where people have a very similar web to experience but actually end up with a web 3 wallet and we try to not to use web three terminology so they just get an account and they collect a digital collectible that unlocks additional rewards and experiences for them and that's been kind of the first gateway

15. 7:09

    for people to experience having a web 3 Journey but kind of in a web 2.5 experience right and if they want to they can take it off chain which is kind of the next sort of iteration as we award them with more points and more experiences if they take the next step and actually take the wallet and and what I me Matt I mean and one of the thing that I really liked about the doc that it's actually have the key

16. 7:34

    foundational element of fan engagement I would say in one. zero of web because the thing that sports fan hat the most is that you word them based on their is spent you spend one pound you get one point and this is many sports brand I used to work for Tottenham hot SPS before joining Oracle some of the Loyalty program that we have seen in Premier League is that you spend one pound you get one point but one of the

17. 7:58

    thing that we have done equally as well with Oracle Reber racing and S GP which is again the foundational element of building a loyalty program the more you engage with the sports the more points you gain then SGP came back with a with with another challenge said like okay we want even to take that into the next level we would like that loyalty program to be able to integrate with nft said

18. 8:22

    like okay yeah fine we can I'm sure we can find a way to do it and then they said it has to be a seamless like the custodial non-custodial so that was kind of one of the key challenges that we were having when we building the dock is how could we translate that football like the sports and sailing fandom into a digital world but equally as well take them into the journey by having the different layers because you

19. 8:45

    have the different fans and different audiences those who are still in Web 1. 2.0 and those who are actually more advanced and you are ready to use nfts amazing and this is an opportunity the the doc or the new CG GP app launched I think a couple of months ago if you download it from the App Store there are I want to say seven QR codes located around the conference scan those earn some points get involved um it's pretty coolx income yeah that's what you

20. 9:12

    get as rewards that's right um no the next question is for you um can you give us an overview of how windcast has worked with the international cricket Council to create something like Captain's call um did you uncover anything in the development process that gives that's giv you new insight into what it takes to be successful when building a blockchain-based uh Sports offering absolutely so Captain's call for the record is a

21. 9:39

    pregame predictive strategy game where you're basically setting your strategy saying I think my team is going to succeed in Bowling batting or fielding and for people who don't understand Cricket you're just looking at things on the field and saying will my team succeed and in doing so you gain points it increases engagement and gets people to watch it for longer um something that's interesting about this in particular is that that actually gets the ICC closer to the fan because a user

22. 10:03

    is able to go on their existing flows they're able to go into the applications that they love they're able to go on the Cricket World Cup website and our our game our technology Powers a game right now where all you have to do is include your email or if you already have an ICC account and you click our game we're automat automatically pass an authentication token and we open up a near wallet for you and something that's interesting about this is because or is

23. 10:27

    that it served a need to create a compelling web 3 experience that isn't you know just riddled with these barriers to entry we're not telling you hey go download or go go open a wallet go buy some ethereum you know how do you explain that to your grandmother right what what we're saying is we can build a better experience that's user experience first we can figure out the monetization afterwards we can figure out how to just

24. 10:52

    really crank this out but first and foremost something that we focused on specifically especially in our focus groups and our testing was how do you make something that people actually want to play I think that's that's the number one issue and something that a lot of these uh existing platforms are running into because they're saying cool well you can buy and sell branded IP and that's like pretty much the extent of of kind of web three technology within Sports licenses right now obviously

25. 11:16

    there's a few exceptions but you know from from a high level so for us we were saying well look there's all these people that are excited about these Sports excited about the ownership aspect of this how do we take it to the next level right we meet the fans where they are and the number one thing for is what we realized and through through uh plenty of iterations we we did a launch with uh Dapper labs and Sony TV for the NBA finals in June and what we realized

26. 11:39

    in that experience was that if you meet the fans where they are if you're advertising on their Smart TVs if you're advertising through their fan accounts like where they're getting information from Dapper Labs they're they're more you know inclined to actually interact with it as OPP posted this random web 3 company saying like go buy our nfts or go download this right so what we learned with ICC and uh 275,000 players later we've confirmed or

27. 12:04

    we still have a few weeks left but we've confirmed this so far is that if you give a good user experience to the fans where they're already engaging with their favorite sports you see phenomenal engagement you see a more willingness to let's say enter your email open a wallet interact with the partners and so on um and we will continue to do that so uh we have a few things for next year where

28. 12:28

    we're tying into smart TV technology so that we can read what's happening on screen we have an opportunity to tap into broadcast so we can read advertising brand activations things like that the number one thing though that we're focused on is is this exciting to fans at the end of the day I if I wouldn't use this app I wouldn't be building this app and as someone who just learned what cricket was in the last year let me rephrase that the rules of cricket um you know I'm excited about

29. 12:52

    this and I like the the validation that we're getting from the market so far I hope everyone is following we're moving from sailing to to football to Cricket so I just keep the pace with us guys there's like six or seven more abstract Sports we're going to toss out but again just interesting like you see that there's so many commonalities between the different sports and the challenges that we face between each of the like the leagues and the sports on the team

30. 13:15

    as we were talking earlier it's just very similar as well yeah I mean and let's talk about macro Trends across the entire Sports landscape I mean this is a question for all of you uh what do you think that what's your current perspective of this the state of fan engagement and which leagues or rights holders do you think are doing things differently or more uniquely um whether it's cgp or ICC or another

31. 13:40

    League um okay let me let me gu again there is a different uh firstly let's kind of think about each I me again SGP compared to rubber racing or the F1 in general there is a really unique and again we were talking about this earlier Sam is uh in SGP they are kind of leveling the battlefield if you can say and just kind of all the athletes have all the access to the data compared to the F1 where each of the team have to do

32. 14:04

    their own data analysis they need to come up with a race strategy it's kind of thinking about it from an open data source versus a closed data source but what we have seen that's one thing and again we can talk a little bit more about the differences between each of the sports but what was very interesting in terms of Technology what is allow is allow F like athletes and celebrities to

33. 14:27

    have direct access to fans that gives a different perspective in terms of the engagement of the fans with the sports because you got the characters and you start to see the personality of those athletes who start building relationship with those fans and that created a different level of interaction which is again that level of interaction could be translated in the nft and web3.0 yeah something that's interesting about the sports Market as a whole is it's um spectator sports is a a very

34. 14:58

    rapidly grow gr industry and the difficulty in this from a B2B perspective is that uh the rights for these broadcasts for these different licenses are continually increasing because live sports are basically the last vestage of live TV that still engaging um and so for us when we are partnering with the sports League whether it's NBA whether it's ICC and in this case IC they're saying we have a Global Network of of fans we have people

35. 15:24

    that will come into this application to our properties uh no matter what country they're from and we want a way to connect with them uh that's direct right how do we how do we create the Bas line for a Fan's experience across every aspect of their Journey whether it's the advertising whether it's the actual gameplay just even saying oh I like this team right so for us that that the focus is to kind of skip all of the different

36. 15:52

    layers whether it's the data side or the gambling side or the broadcast side and we're basically saying to these leagues connect with your fans directly and give them something they love and they're yours forever so that that's yeah that's a big Focus I think for me it's more about personalization how do you make the experience personal to that individual that individual fan what do they want from it how do they get closer to the athletes the team and you know

37. 16:16

    that's some of the stuff that we're really working towards is to create that direct Affinity fandom within it and I guess some something we're trying to do you know LGB have opened up um participation agreement which is what all teams sign up to to allow a DA to form and participate and you know a DA is going create a team that will compete within our league and in some ways a dow is Ultimate fandom right that's you know

38. 16:39

    you really showing that you want to be part of a team is by owning a team and having a say within that team and um I think that's where we're trying to change the D slightly similar to how other sports properties like like link Stow try to do are doing as well yeah right I mean I think it's all about collapsing the distance between the fan and the athlet are the rights holder and whether that technology is crypto AI or

39. 17:02

    something else I think the uh it's all in service of of that uh destination so I think with the remaining time that we have let's speed run through kind of like the what what we have left let's talk about the future Matt what are you most excited about with respect to SGP over the next 12 months is there any sort of like Alpha you can leak or share with the audience here well we're excited know this season 4 has been our

40. 17:25

    biggest season with you know for those S on the scissor real we've had 10 teams 13 um events and we're hope for season five that's going to grow and be bigger um but what I really look forward to seeing is you know how can working with near Oracle and potentially other partners in the future how can we reimagine Fan Experience in the fan engagement platform and I'm really excited to see what you know what we can

41. 17:48

    do as a partnership group to to get fans closer to Sport and engage fans in a different way great and Amor can you tell us a little bit more about how oracle's working on the future of The Fan Experience um as we were talking I think even before getting into the stage we understand and we know that the fandom behaviors are changing fans does not want to be passive audience to consume Sports they want the interaction that you're offering the want the interaction from the data that Oracle

42. 18:18

    are presenting with uh Liv line in the sale GP kind of broadcast they want the ability to see the game from different angles from the athletes I mean again I don't know if you guys have seen Ben Foster when he had the GoPro camera in the last I mean again if somebody's watching rexim and the documentary it's so cool this is a change in the fandom and again from an oracle perspective

43. 18:43

    technology and data is an abler but equally as well when we work with SGP when we work together with Sam when we work with Premier League or Coro racing they push us we push them we want to keep pushing the boundaries in order to deliver an immersive Fan Experience that is able to connect with those fans no matter who they are no matter where they are and no matter what their age

44. 19:05

    they are on amazing and uh Noah question for you yes Captain's call your partnership with the ICC how do you think that's going to evolve over the next 12 to 24 months and how do you intend to reach a a bigger audience in terms of distribution and marketing great question so um over the next 12 months we will be launching version two of our game which will include live in game play so right now it's just pre-

45. 19:30

    predictive but imagine you know across in in June the T20 World Cup is happening in the US and the Caribbean games uh in T20 in that format last about three and a half hours how do you keep a fan engaged for the entirety of that how do you give them bite-sized moments of like just overwhelming dopamine right across that so that's what we're going to be launching we're going to have a ton of different connections on the nft side of things the Loyalty side of things and something that I think is brilliant when it comes

46. 19:54

    to the distribution side not to uh toot our on horn but um again meeting fans where they are at the end of the day is the focus so we're building a lot of different rails into streaming providers into Smart TV platforms and so on so that we can create digitally native experiences where the fans are and to your point um the only way to interact with live sports right now is through fantasy or

47. 20:18

    gambling and at the end of the day you're ignoring a large Market of people that are quote unquote Sports light right these are people that are excited about sports or around sports but have no idea what's actually going on how do you get someone comfortable with this in kind of a noninvasive way where we're not saying give us your credit card you know you might win money um so that that's a huge focus and I think that uh seeing how that uh evolves not only with

48. 20:41

    our company but the broader Market um I think is going to be a game changer yeah it'll be exciting to see and I'll leave this with a parting thought that comes from there's an old Steve Jobs quote where he says start with the customer experience and work your way backwards to the technology and I think that's what we're all trying to do up here on this stage so thank you for tuning in uh watch this space uh there's a lot of exciting things uh coming coming down the pike so thanks a lot and thank Youk

49. 21:06

    the panel thank you thank you cheers