The Power of Storytelling in Sports: The Method Behind the Magic

all right well we are at the top of the hour so let's go ahead and get started shall we uh welcome back everyone uh we are ready to kick off our second speaker of the day who is renata pola cicio i hope i got that right i practiced and she is vp of research and insights of espn uh she's going to be giving us a talk called the power of storytelling in sports the method behind the magic i'm very excited about this one so i'm going to shut up and i'm going to hand off to renata um reminder real quick for everyone use the q a use the chat ask questions throughout uh we will keep an eye on your chatter and be sure to to circle back and try to get all questions answered so with that i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and again shut up [Laughter] thank you bill thank you for the introduction and thank you for having me i will then share my screen and hopefully everyone will be able to see it can you can you guys bill can you see me see me and the presentation great it looks great so again thank you for having me thanks everyone for being here with us as bill said i want to share a little bit with you about a study that we have done at espn to really understand what makes for outstanding and memorable sports storytelling so we know that sports really have all the raw material that we need for amazing stories fantastic and memorable characters high stakes in a lot of the games big rivalries and we know that all this raw material can create amazing epic stories from rex she reaches to rebirth stories to tragedy stories sometimes and and and we all know a lot of those stories that we love and and then we remember so well and although this plots and and can be so successful we also have players and athletes that really become bigger than men and women right they become heroes and sometimes villains depending on what side of the table you are right before our eyes but because sports can create fantastic and memorable stories it does not mean that they always do and this light is just a joke but it's it's three examples of stories that were rooted in sports that may not be as fantastic honestly i don't think summer catch is all that bad but that's all to say that we know that just because sports can do that it doesn't mean that sports always show fantastic memorable and outstanding story so the question that we were looking to answer is what makes a sports story powerful really outstanding and memorable so as as bill mentioned our challenge was really to put the method behind the magic so the ask that we had from our internal clients was to create a unique perspective to create an actionable framework and a tool that our content and story teams could and can use and you have really a source of thought leadership inside espn and outside so our approach was to define the main attributes the main characteristics of the best stories in in sports and really measure our proficience across those attributes so then we we went to really design how we can do that and the main challenge as i mentioned to you how we can measure all that so we started with a qualitative phase we talked to experts from espn and four experts from the industry as a first really first step then we invited 56 fans across the u.s to participate in in diary so that means that we gave those 56 fans homework every day for a week we mainly show them pieces of contents or stories and ask them to tell us a bit about how they felt about those and then we had eight focus groups with fans both in the east and west coasts and after all this qualitative phase we already understood we already identified 18 main qualities that according to fans described again according to them the best sports stories and i you don't need to read all of them we will get back to them but that was the quote and then the big challenge really came how do we measure all of that how do you ask fans why they like a story or why they dislike a story and ask them to quantify that so that was the big big challenge we designed a survey oh sorry about that my computer is misbehaving sorry about that um so we invited 1200 sports fans to participate in a survey and it was super important to design the survey in a way that we could really get authentic and reliable responses so what did we do we selected more than 60 actually almost 70 stories so actual stories that were broadcasted on espn and other media outlets so the way we went about it was to show fans actual stories and ask fans to rate those stories according to the 18 attributes that i just mentioned to you and we'll dig into them in a minute and four main kpis to be honest we tried to come up with three main kpis but we couldn't so we went with four that really are the main kpis that drive our business in terms of storytelling so the first one is pure entertainment value how entertain mean that story is for you the second one is how much that story drives brand affinity to espn or whatever media outlet is telling the story the third one is league affinity a lot of our business is a partnership with leagues right with sports leagues so how much brand affinity then story drives to the league that is our partner in that story and fourth recommendation power so how likely are you to recommend and share the story so we use those four kpis the 18 attributes and we wanted to cover a lot of leagues so we wanted we really wanted to understand how the attributes relate to the kpis but how they vary from league or sport to sport so we covered the nba the nfl mlb nhl mls tennis and golf so imagine it was a big big endeavor to really select almost 70 videos that were they represented that really could represent the 18 attributes as a whole so all of them had to incorporate the 18 attributes not all the videos had all the 18 attributes but as a group they had to have the 18 attributes they had to cover all those leaks that i mentioned to you and they were from espn and competitors after running the survey we applied what we call stroke on a structural equations modeling so a regression model pretty much a predictive model to really understand the relationship between the attributes the leagues and the kpis a big challenge but we got there so without further ado those are the five qualities of powerful storytelling and in sports and i will dig into each of them a little bit uh in a minute but here you have them so the first one is relatability it makes us scared because we can relate somehow to the story the second one is substance the third one is pro pro and and that is an important one uh provocation so we react in an emotional way because the content is provocative so we form an opinion we form a perspective the fourth one humor pretty self-explanatory and the fifth one conversational it makes us feel part of the com the conversation and we want to participate so the five qualities we were very happy after we ran a few models a few regression models but we were very happy to see that the five qualities together and those five qualities that i just mentioned to you they are act they actually incorporate the 18 attributes so the regression model divided the 18 attributes into five main qualities that you just saw and those 18 attributes and five qualities together predict the majority of how a fan reacts to a story so we were very happy to see that the 18 attributes together predicted or explained 77 of the reasons why a fan finds a story entertaining 74 of the reasons of what makes a fan like the brand behind the story and 64 of the reasons why a fan will like the league behind the story and 66 of what makes us want to share a story so we were very happy when we found those numbers because we know a lot of the reasons why you like or you dislike a story is personal it's very subjective maybe it's because the story is about a college that you went to or maybe because the story is about a sport that you used to play with your dad so there is a lot of personal history that goes into one you like or you dislike a story so we were really very happy when we saw that the model could predict over 60 percent of the reasons you know in a very straightforward and in quantifiable way of why we like or we dislike a story but we know that some of those qualities play different roles and larger or smaller roles in predicting how we feel about story the exact role of each quality of the five really depends on the kpi that you want to move so what's your goal what is the intended impact of that story do you want to drive brand affinity do you want to drive recommendation is this a social media story that you want our fans to share but as you can see in this graph relatability is by far the most important one what i mean by that is the quality that has the most potential to move all the four kpis that we investigated and then after relatability you can see that the other qualities it really depends on on the kpi so substance especially important if you want to move brand affinity especially important for espn humor to drive league affinity provocative or provocation to drag league affinity and to drive conversation uh any conversation especially important to drive brand affinity and recommendation as we know so as you see relatability is really essential to any story and i'll dig a little bit deeper into what that means in a minute but we say that relatability is essential to any story long format stories have the luxury of time and they can really introduce and bring together all five qualities but most of what we produce is shorter format so we don't have the luxury of time so i i tell our content teams that if they have to remember only one slide of this presentation that's the slide that relatability elements are essential to any story whatever sport you're covering whatever format or duration or time that you have they should always try to include at least one element of relatability in every story they tell and then they can play with the other fours the other four and add impact depending on what kpi they want to drive so i'll keep going and then i think it's just more productive to to see if anyone has any question in the end uh and now we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into each of the five qualities and show you a little bit of what that means so relatability the most important quality really means creating that personal connection showing the human side of an athlete of a sport of a story because when we can connect personally with a story we invest more of our time and our energy we engage with both head and heart so it's really about showing people in human authentic ways revealing that their humanity and their passion and we saw that the most relatable stories connect with fans at three main levels first level is personally it makes the superhuman the super athlete feel more real feel more human and because i can see that idol of mine with a more human lenses inspires me to release my potential i get inspired because you know what that big idol mine is is a person as well so i can't get there so it's highly inspirational the second one is an emotional connection it really brings the emotions of others into the story and because of that emotion sometimes drama sometimes suspense we immerse ourselves in a deeper way to the stories and the third one the third level is mentally so it's bringing that fresh new dynamic perspective that makes us care then makes us lean into a story we saw that when you bring a fresh new perspective to fans they tend to connect to relate and connect more with the story when it's brand new when it's the first time they're hearing about that story or or that athlete or at least that angle of of the story so i'll give you some examples and important to say that the examples that i'm going to show you are real examples that we used in the in the survey so as the the the main internal client of this of this project was content teams and creative teams we tried to incorporate as many examples and as many videos as we could so the examples that i'm going to show you were really incorporated were part of our survey and they ranked really high in each of the qualities that they're gonna that i'm gonna bring to you so this is a video that ranked really high in relatability and you you hopefully understand why so i hope you can all uh not only see but here the video bill please uh let me know if you cannot i thought that it was important to the community of humboldt that i don't bail on them hockey is where we live where we can best meet and overcome our pain and wrong and death is just a place where we spend time between games so this is hopefully you were able to see and hear it this is an e60 story about a hockey team in colorado that had a terrible bus accident and most of the team died so they had to rebuild the team from scratch after a terrible accident so there was a lot of emotion so this is an example of just by seeing the passion of others we we vast emotionally we connect because we can relate we kind of feel their emotion and on the right you can see what i just showed you but uh relatability is by far the most important predictor of all the four kpis and you can see the numbers so uh at least half if not more than half uh of importance of what predicts the kpi comes from relatability moving to substance uh substance is not just knowing what happened but why it matters right it's really if i give you the context of why you should pay attention to that story that substance it brings understanding through context through facts through analysis and there is a quote from one of our groups from this gentleman on your left that i think explains really well what that means the more you know the more you want to watch and that's so true for sports the more you understand the rules or the more you understand what's going on in the field or in the court the more you want to watch the more you invest and that's a very simple but great definition of what substance is and we saw the substance uses context uses insight to build understanding in three main ways so the first one is what we call close-up current is really showing you and explaining to you giving you a statistics in fact what's going on now so hey this is what's going on now and that's why this matters the second one is bringing the history so is is helping you understand why what i'm showing you today or what's happening today matters because of history so really bring in the history and and kind of summarizing and explaining the history to help you understand the present and the third one is scientific insight it's really providing that science but that new and interesting perspective uh that you probably didn't know but it's an interesting fact that will make you care and actually connect more with the story so i'll show you an example here um i am a big tennis fan i don't play tennis but i love watching tennis uh this is a video that you hopefully see how scientific insights can offer a unique way to provide a fresh and new perspective emitting a loud grunt might help psych you up but it's not the noise that helps physically what helps is the short powerful exhalation of breath that comes with the grunge studies have shown that when a tennis player exhales quickly and forcefully core muscles tighten and the upper body becomes more stable and can more efficiently transfer energy to the ball in fact using this breathing technique can increase ball velocity by about four percent but if you do grunt loudly the timing can definitely have an effect on an opponent so as a tennis fan i knew that the grunting really had a psychological effect on opponents but i had no idea that it actually added velocity to the ball up to four percent so that is really a new perspective that i didn't have and and it makes me pay more attention to to that in when i when i watch tennis so it's really that fresh perspective that helps you uh even enjoy the story or enjoy the sport even more the third quality is provocation is being provocative and it's important to really understand what that meant to us that means that after you watch a story you are moved emotionally so you have an you feel something and that feeling helps you shape in your opinions and your perspective so through bold statements or really touching some important more than ever social topics that help you shape your opinions through emotions so one good example that we have in-house is debate is this impassioned debate that help us clarifying or forming our own opinions through feelings love it or hate it so uh i don't know if you if you know those folks this is this is ft uh from espn and it's a it's a fantastic example of debate um stephen is mid to the left probably one of the most famous ones and he's very opinionated sometimes you agree sometimes you disagree but that helps you forming your opinion and i want to show you a video that is not from espn is actually from vice sports and it's a beautiful video i'm going to show you just a a little clip the the whole story is longer than that but that shows how provocative stories that aren't afraid to have both statements and just show darker realities makes us connect so so much police and firefighters were on hand at the stadium but did little to stop the fans lobbing flares and fireworks into the sky as if they knew this spectacle was just far beyond their control in spite of the outpouring of violence at these games the derby persists it's become an outlet for young men with a fractured national identity and hopeless economy leaving them searching for meaning through rivalry so this story is actually called the most dangerous rivalry in the world and it's about the soccer league in serbia and it this is a brief summary but it really tells how important soccer is for fans in serbia how much it means to them but how dangerous it is to attend and to attend the game to play the game so it's a beautiful beautiful story but i want to call your attention to the sentence on your right we heard when we were talking to fans of the qualitative fan phase we talked to younger jnz fans and we talked to older millennial fans and we heard from them that they expect that all brands not only sports brands but all brands should take stance you have opinion this generation this younger generation really told us with all letters we want brands to have opinions to take stands i may agree i may disagree and that's fine but i want you to take a stand have an opinion and show action when we talk to the older generation and we talked about sports they kind of have a contrary opinion they think that our job is to give them the facts is to give to tell them the context and what's going on but not be biased not have an opinion to help them form their opinion but not to have an opinion so we saw we had a we had a challenge back then and then we went to the quantitative and we saw that provocative content has seven times more impact on entertainment value for gen z so our quant really confirmed what we heard in the call and pose is a big challenge for us and for any brand how do you understand and really cater to generations that have such different opinions about that chances expect us to be provocative and have opinions and take stance while the older millennials expect us to give them the facts to help them have an opinion but not not be biased or opinionated moving to the fourth quality that's humor uh if any of you are sports fans you may agree that sometimes watching sports can be a pretty intense and why not stressful uh experience especially when your team is playing especially when your team is losing it can be a pretty stressful and intense experience so humor comes to really alleviate and kind of provide a break from that intensity um that and that stress that that you know watching sports can be so a great example again uh at home here he is again uh that light playful lighthearted moments really help uh fans feeling uh released from that stress it helps them forming their opinions but in a light-hearted way i know the big free agent signing i wanted to be the first one to get you a julius randle jersey i hope you rock it you rock it with pride molly i thought they were supposed to get kd and kyrie the knicks i think they would have got kd if he didn't get hurt the taj gibson he's from jersey that's where he wanted to go how's he gonna recruit guys it got hurt good player whatever again from first take that authentic lighthearted uh segment that really brings humor in a very authentic and light-hearted way and that's super important they say fans say it's more than jokes than pre-recorded jokes it has to be authentic it has to be genuine otherwise it's not funny and again attention to the stat on your right we found that humor is 1.4 times more important for entertainment value for two specific sports soccer and baseball and you may be asking why our fans especially the youngest one said well soccer and baseball can be pretty slow and long games right nothing happens so humor comes to add that entertaining just entertainment to some games uh when they feel it's too slow low scoring and then nothing happens so especially important to that kind of of game or sport and the fifth and last quality conversational is really having stories that invite us to participate that we feel we are part of the conversation and because of that we connect deeper um this is an example from sportscenter this is scott van pelt and he has this amazing ability to speak to you through the tv you really feel that he's speaking to you and you feel that you can almost answer him you feel you're part of that conversation the second quarterback taken was that guy daniel jones and look i don't know anybody not associated with duke who watched as much of them as i did this year i always seem to have a side honor against in winners they were always in that noon what i like to call jefferson pilot window whatever the case was at no point in any of watching duke play football that i feel like i was watching the number six pick in the nfl draft his last home game they lost 59 seven to wake forest he threw for 145 yards and a touchdown i know he had a good ball game but the number six pick in the whole draft so he a fans really feel that he he's talking to them and they can almost almost answer so they connect the two stories and he's our anchor for his first sports center i will share a little bit of the impact at espn and then i want to talk about an example um so we saw that espn leads in the most important storytelling qualities so you can see here espn on on the red and then three other brands um and so we were very happy to see that we have the lead in in the most important storytelling qualities we also asked fans who they think tells uh sports stories uh the best and espn ranked number one so we were very happy but we know we have challenges and opportunities ahead of us so the just really summarize the opportunities to maintain espn's lead in sports storytelling which we heard from fans with stories that continue to dominate in substance really continue to build that trust and provide the context that fans appreciate so much on espn today but differentiate our stories through relatability so really create different fresh dynamic stories exploring the breadth of relatability through different approaches it's not only the what we call the back story is not only showing the family of the athlete is there are many many ways to to add relatability to a story so explore those different ways and differentiate our stories through reliability and the third one probably our biggest opportunities to deliver more light-hearted and provocative moments so within our brand within our brand dna so still be an espn integrate more light-hearted moments and being more provocative being bolder and show in our opinion especially for the younger fans again feeding our beloved style our dna or voice when in a more lighthearted way and bringing more provocative moments and then i want to talk to really uh starting to wrap up i want to talk about a great example that we had recently uh this was not part of this the of the study but it was inspired by the study um and i don't know how many of you had the chance to watch the last dance last dance was a 10 episode series about the chicago bulls and their last season at the nba as this group that you see here so let's has the luxury of time it's 10 after 10 and one hour episodes so they really had the luxury of time and they were able to integrate all the five qualities that i just showed you but i want to mention the most important one here because it is a masterpiece of storytelling because it's so relatable and for many many reasons but i want to point out three first it shows michael jordan in a different more human light so you see that michael jordan was not the perfect person that they want to portray he was according to many fans the the best player in the history of of the nba but he was also vulnerable he was also stressed out he was super competitive he actually thought about quitting and they quit once came back but he actually quit once and retired once and went to baseball so he shows michael jordan as a human not not as a god so it really humanizes us and that's so inspirational so that's the first point that i wanted to make the second one is that the director did a fantastic job in not only showing the technical reasons why the bulls won that championship he showed the human interaction really the behind the scenes of the of the whole team to understand how that team won the championship and that is so relatable it's what what's happening behind the scenes that matters so much on top of of course the technical skill that that group had and the third one he went beyond jordan if you watch the the series you will remember that there is an episode that is actually focused on pippen instead of jordan another one that that talks about rodman so by bringing other characters he really even increased relatability it's not only about that man is about the group so bringing the other characters helps creating relatability and many different ways but i i wanted to mention that because it's a fantastic story it's a fantastic example of brilliant storytelling that we are we were very proud of moving forward really wrapping up i wanted to show you a screen of what we created to make this actionable this is the espn optimizer green but it was our partner on that so it's the greenberry spn optimizer it looks a bit scary but what you have here is the five qualities and the 18 attributes on your left and our content teams can play saying what is the kpi they want to move right here uh on this upside um menu here then the league or the sport the story is about what device what's the demo that they want to reach is it a younger gen c or or an older an older demo and then by clicking optimize they can see what attributes they should prioritize in that story again depending on the kpi the sport and the demo mainly they can play with the optimizer and see what happens if they prioritize or focus more on one or the other quality so it's it's really a way to make it actionable and help them uh bring in a little bit more science to what they do so well that is telling so internally we have been doing internal workshops and presentations to the content and marketing teams the results are now a critical piece of what we call the content green light process as you can imagine there are so many ideas but we need to prioritize them in terms of of resources and budget allocation so the the insights and the results here are part of that process now and the marketing teams are already incorporating the learnings to create better campaigns i won't take more of your time telling you about all the campaigns but there was one in the beginning of the pandemic that was all about relatability it was all about empathy and empathy is pure relatability where we told fans hey we know you miss sports we miss it you so we know why you feel because we miss sports as much as you pure empathy peer relatability uh we are sharing the results in in webinars like this but we had a client presentation that was longer is that was a whole morning with a unit frontier s pen cody and espn solutions so we really had a a great morning with with our partners presenting the insights and brainstorming about it and hopefully after the pandemic those insights will travel we are already actually testing doing an internal test in the uk hopefully we'll expand that to an external test we are hoping to replicate the approach in international markets because we know that some of this will change depending on the culture depending on the market and the next stop will probably be in the after after the pandemic if everything goes well so thank you so much um thank you for being with us now if you have any questions i'll be i'll stop sharing my present my my screen and i'll be happy to take any questions oops bill i'm trying okay all right so i can see you uh happy to take any questions let's see i'll pull up the q and a and while we wait you mentioned i guess the the possibility of rolling this out internationally um what i don't know what challenges do you anticipate super excited about it super excited uh we know so think about india which is one market that we had plans and again kovit is changing everything but it's a market where we had plans on having this travel the culture is so different than the culture here the motivations that people have are different the sports that they care about are different like cricket is huge in in india soccer is huge outside can you hear me i think i froze for a second yep for just a second but you're back soccer i think was the last thing you said so i think relatability will i bet relatability will still be as important in every market that that we go to uh maybe what relatability means changes a little bit but the importance of the sports and the difference by sport that i didn't explore so much in this presentation because it would make it super long but we were really careful and see okay what matters for soccer what matters for tennis what matters for golf we go down and drill that that will change market by market so the culture and the way people connect to sports and different sports than the us will make this a fascinating a fascinating study outside of the us i look forward very cool uh let's see we had one question come in oh no just comment from liz we thought this was super helpful in his life thank you good thank you thank you and i would definitely echo that not a very very informative presentation mp2 here and i think although everything that we did it was about sports so all the videos that we tested was sports and we talked to fans about sports i think a lot of this applies to all content sharings and all kinds of story uh power of relatability and empathy and and all of that i think applies to not only sports did have another one come in from nicole uh who were the key stakeholders in defining the 18 attributes and did you involve outside departments like marketing creative team or was it originally defined by the insights team nicole that's a very good question actually the 18 attributes were defined by fans so we talked to fans in the qualitative phase and they told us in all the conversations that we had with them the diaries they we came to the set of 18 attributes after speaking to fans so that is consumer pure consumer insight but what i want to mention is the kpis the kpis were defined with our internal clients mainly content and marketing team so what how do we define a successful story what does that mean to us what a good story means and then we came with the four kpis that was with our marketing and content teams yes very good all right it looks like karen has a question uh two questions actually number one curious about how you arrived at your current role can you give some context to your background uh kerry thank you good question uh so i have been with espn for five years now leading mainly the international and global markets team um but i started more than 20 years ago with research with advertising agencies so uh probably the first half or a little bit under half of my or my work life is advertising and communication so supporting with research but supporting advertising teams creative teams and then media teams and then i work in the media i have been working in the media industry that for 20 years uh supporting also content teams so i i've been with turner for 10 years and now with espn45 uh always supporting the again the advertising team but the content and what we call the product teams when we talk about digital so uh uh a super cam i'm super curious i'm curious if you tell me something i'm like why can't i tell you why and if you can't i will try to find it out so i think that that part of me really uh made me be interested in working with consumer insights and and still is my passion is my purpose so that's how i got here hope it answers it answers your question and karen's second question uh was can you describe the collaboration efforts from the point of gathering insights to execution that's a group of teams and other departments involved that's a great question i think this this so this was a big collaboration between content and mainly content and marketing and us uh we really so we we had a kickoff um workshop a full morning with them with the content and marketing teams and us and and our partner on that because we really wanted want to understand to make sure we understood what they wanted to answer what they wanted the deliverables and the insights to be and second that they they they would respect what we found so we wanted them to be on board with the methodology and what we were trying to do again our challenge was to measure it right to really put the the method there and um content teams sometimes don't love all of those numbers so it was important to have them on board and make them understand what we were trying to do so they would respect and understand and be open to you know hearing and listening to the insights in the end so that was pre let's say it was the first phase then on the second phase they helped us for sure selecting the videos um all the heavy lifting was ours so we were the ones trying to create this huge matrix of 70 videos that incorporated all the 18 attributes and all the sports leagues that we wanted to measure that were aid so um so that have lifting was was us but it's but with the help of the content teams and in the end we uh a big challenge was how to make the presentation engaging for them if i knew that if i had a presentation with lots of tables and charts and numbers i would lose them after two minutes so this is a summary of the presentation but i have presentations with a lot of videos to the content teams uh examples so these are examples of videos that ranked really well in each of the attributes but we also had examples of videos that didn't do well so they were trying to be provocative but it in the survey it really it shows that it didn't work fans didn't think it was provocative or they were trying to be relatable and so we we showed them a lot of videos and a lot of examples to really make them not only see the numbers but really understand what we meant and what fans meant by each of the attributes and and the videos really made it possible to run the quant because it's impossible to ask just as people rate from one to ten how important relatability is for you people can't answer that kind of question so it was key to run the survey but it was also key to have a format of presentation that was engaging to the teams and especially the content and marketing teams standing and i think that may wrap up our q a and make sure scroll down i didn't miss anything nope i think that's everybody so i'm going to on behalf of the audience since everyone else is behind the scenes give you the round of applause thank you um thank you yeah that was that was fantastic thank you for sharing really appreciate it uh it looks like we got about 15 minutes so this is a good opportunity for for you guys to grab a bite to eat we are going to circle back at the top of the hour uh rada is going to do her best to hang around for other presentations and be available but she does have a day job to get to to the extent possible but definitely appreciate it and thank you thank you thanks everyone thank you for having me thank you