Smart Screen Exclusive

By Paul Sweeting

NEW YORK—As with most parts of the media and entertainment business, social media has become an important source of incremental revenue for sports leagues and teams. But according to speakers at the Second Screen Summit: Sports here Tuesday, monetizing their content on social media platforms is not always a straightforward affair.

The New York Mets, like most Major League teams, look to social media to drive both ticket sales and concession stand sales at ballpark, and the team sets specific revenue goals for each, Mets director of social media Will Carafello said. The team also makes extensive use of data to measure the results of its social media efforts.

Data showed that social media posts about the food available at Citi Field at strategic times of the day can drive incremental concession sales, for instance. “We’ll tend to run them around lunch time, or around 5:00, as people are starting to get to the ballpark,” Carafello said.

When it comes to working with sponsors on social media, however, the teams generally have to bring in Major League Baseball because the league owns all MLB teams’ social products. “None of our teams own their own marks on social,” Carafello said. “So if a brand wants to do something [on social media] that uses our mark we would generally have to bring in the league.”

Social media platforms are also increasingly crucial elements of the sports broadcasting business as networks look to deepen their engagement with fans.

“The social media companies – Twitter, Facebook – they need us because we have the content their users want,” Turner Sports senior VP for sponsorship integration and business development Will Funk said. “We need them because they have the scale. It’s really a go to market together situation.”

That scale can cut both ways, however. The most popular and straightforward way to monetize video content on social media platforms, for instance, is through pre-roll ads. But the largest social platform – Facebook – does not permit pre-roll ads in most cases.

“We have made some very unpopular decisions, like getting rid of pre-roll. Advertisers were obviously not very happy,” Facebook’s global head of sports media Rob Shaw said.

“It was a decision that went all the way to Zuck. He just didn’t think it was a good experience for the user. But because of the scale we have, we can make some decisions that other companies couldn’t, like wiping out the most popular way of monetizing video, because we have so much other data we can provide in terms of targeting.”

CBS Sports Digital VP of business development Adam London called ad innovation critically important, for both linear and social media platforms.

“We need to give sponsors something more than just the 30-second spot,” he said. “We need to find ways to integrate them more into the product, so their ads are not just a break in the action.”