If you’re between the ages of 13 and 34 and love sports but have a short attention span, Whistle Sports was created with you in mind. The global sports media company doesn’t do live sports per se but “everything else,” says Founder and CEO John West.
“We provide content that we think is really authentic. Behind the scenes, how-to, funny, trick shots. It’s all video-based content.”
Whistle Sports’ mostly short-form video content is distributed across some 2,000 social media channels and says it reaches 350 million young sports fans around the globe, according to West. The company brings brands “into those discussions we have with our fans” with branded social content.
It boasts a network of 500 video creators and social influencers. Advertisers have included McDonald’s, Nike, Pepsi and Under Armour. “We help them create authentic content that’s entertaining but also gets their brand message out in a very engaging way to a large audience.”
West notes the bidding for sports rights programming among the likes of Amazon, Facebook and YouTube for TV channels and observes, “It’s a dynamic environment right now.”
Five years ago, Sports Whistle conducted research and found that among younger demographic cohorts, TV ratings for the top five sports in the U.S. was declining.
“We don’t do live sports for a variety of reason, but one of them is the attention span of our demographic is not three hours long. It’s three minutes long,” West says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.
