Through the years, the sport has gone through several modifications and innovations over time. The way of watching, assimilating and interacting with it is also changing and, with that, broadcasts need to change too.
The streaming revolution, even sports series and movies are increasingly in the daily lives of those looking for this type of content (and even those who are just looking for something to watch).
A clear and current example is the movie ‘King Richard: Raising Champions’, which gave the award for best actor to American Will Smith. The film portrays the story of the duo and the father of Serena and Venus Williams and the trajectory of the two and the overprotective father they have.
Bruno Maia, sports innovation executive and author of the book “Inovação é o Novo Marketing – Insights de negócios para o futebol pós-Covid-19″ (2020), is an expert when it comes to new ideas in sports and how it works. can be explored.
For two years, Bruno has been dedicated to the creation and development of Feel the Match, a company that develops new image properties for sport, crossing it with other pop culture disciplines.
These and other subjects were addressed in an exclusive interview that Bruno Maia gave to the iGaming Brazil portal.
Read the full exclusive interview below.
iGaming Brazil – How did the idea for the book come about?
Bruno Maia – The idea for the book came from a personal research process on innovation and technology in sport. It started when I was Vice President of Marketing at Vasco. A quick realization that there was a very long delay in these discussions of new business models in the Brazilian market, the sports market where I was entering. This also had a lot to do with my history before the sport, I was always very connected to technology in my business, and I started to study a lot to update myself and I thought it was important to promote discussion, take, share this knowledge to try to update a little p that was talked about in Brazil.
I started writing some articles on Linkedin, on my personal blog and when I saw it there was already a large volume, I was still determined, studying more and when the pandemic came I thought about doing an MBA outside Brazil, remote at that time, with a specialization it, but it was unfeasible. So I started to pick up some menus of important courses that they had in the world of this and study on my own. When I saw it, there was a large volume of things and I thought it was worth releasing the book and it ended up on the market at an important moment, many changes in business structures began to come, in regulation, etc., I think it came at the right time.
iGaming Brazil – How could clubs explore their brands more with the increased visibility that streaming offers (such as documentaries about a season, training broadcasts, etc)?
Bruno Maia – Streams are the first layer of a new way of consuming content and that, with the development of what we call Web3, will change a lot. The gaming industry was one of the first to show that you had content and variety, depth of content, with your own cryptocurrency creations, with which you buy avatars and other game elements, and you create other content from that, this Play-to-earn that we see booming today, and I think they are languages and new ways of consuming image, image rights, consumption of intellectual properties and the like that will develop a lot in sport, will change a lot the way in which the people consume and also sell and buy rights and assets.
Feel The Match came about more or less with this idea. The clubs’ first thing is to hire people who are specialized or interested in specializing in this, and they accept the risks of the new models, understanding that they do not, at first, give the same money as the old models, but that they are the transition bridge to the that it will make money in the future and that it will maintain the survival of the business; not only for streaming but for all the businesses that are emerging and that take advantage of the stories and emotions that a football club is capable of generating.
iGaming Brazil – What can these changes in habits lead to in the content distribution structure, especially among younger generations?
Bruno Maia – I think the change in the way of consuming content in younger generations has already happened. The main one, in my opinion, is that today, sport, especially football, I consider a stage of a journey of entertainment that young people have. What do I mean by that? In the past, all our emotion, all our entertainment, when you were young, turned to football on the weekend on television. Journalism promoted that game, people at school discussed the expectation of that game, and the next day we talked about that game again until the next game arrived. We didn’t have that much variety of things to consume at the same time.
When cable TV came along, this began to change, but football still played a very important role, it is a subject that holds attention and stays on the air for a long time, easily holding the audience. But when streaming arrived, with a fraction of attention, much more diversity, we live in a time today where niches are increasingly strong so if you are vegan and you like and like boules played in East Timor, you can find this competition in East Timor on the internet to watch.
So all this leads us to comfort and to a very large personalization of our way of consumption. The sport is still there, but it’s competing with everything else at the same time, all your interests. I think the challenge is to make football talk to these other layers of entertainment. Something that American entertainment has been doing for a long time, sport has been treated as entertainment for a long time. So this change in the behavior of young people, which is the result of the technological innovations of our times, of the access we have today, affects the behavior of this person, and obviously the sport has to adapt.
Football has always thought that the world should adapt to it and it took a while to realize that no, it needs to adapt to new demands. I don’t even know if he has noticed as a whole, he started to connect and make small moves to adapt because this consumer already exists, he is already there making choices and often leaving football behind.
iGaming Brazil– We are witnessing an increase in clubs joining the SAFs in Brazilian football. Would this be the “only salvation” for these clubs?
Bruno Maia – I think the SAFs in Brazilian football are a new moment, a new chapter. We need to go through this process of professionalization, of professional management, the associative model did not work, it reached a place where we engendered clubs and created structures of power that were too complex to be broken. We have success stories like Palmeiras and Flamengo, for example, or positive momentary successes, but at the same time a cyclical history, we have already experienced peaks of great clubs that, in the associative model, later managed to lose everything. I think it was a change that came to happen, it needs to happen, it will happen.
I don’t think it’s the only salvation, I don’t think it’s a rule for all clubs or that everyone has to take notes at the same time, but I think it’s a market trend, it’s a business trend for the very survival of football so that so that we can have investments again and so that football can be modernized, putting it in line with everything we say, with the changes in the world, even in consumption, putting the focus on the business more than the political structure, than the power structures that associative entities also ended up generating.
So it’s not the only salvation and I don’t even think SAF is salvation, there are dozens of examples of unsuccessful SAFs, but I think the tendency of you to have clubs with a structuring of external investors is a trend and we’re going to live the consequences of that in our consumer life in football in the next ten years.
I usually say since the time of the book in 2020 that football would change in ten years what had not changed in 100. It’s been two years since I launched the book and this thesis has been confirmed, the changes of the last two years are very profound and I think it’s just getting started.
iGaming Brazil – How do you analyze this explosion of sports betting houses in Brazilian football?
Bruno Maia – I analyze the explosion of bookmakers not in Brazilian football, but as a worldwide phenomenon, a very strong industry, which with the growth of digital entertainment becomes even more powerful, it is an investment that has to be considered, we have to have very careful in the regulation of this, to guarantee transparency and care with the suitability of the games, as well as to arrive at an economic model that is stimulating for large companies to be here.
I think that in the worst of ways is for Brazil to be in the middle (in the middle of the way), not having an economically interesting structure for the biggest investors who would be here, naturally they will tend to help with the regulation of the market. And also not having a level of control because you are left with middling players and more exposed to fraud and interference that would not be nice for the sport, so I think the concern to create legislation that is interesting for Brazil to compete with the large bookmakers and at the same time for that to happen.
iGaming Brazil – From a marketing point of view, how can clubs use these bookmakers to engage fans?
Bruno Maia – I don’t see much connection with using marketing to engage betting fans. Marketing is a tool for you to engage consumers in any product. What I think you can have are very early models, not very complex, usually sponsorship and some revenue generation for users and clubs, but still very unimpressive.
I believe that in the world we are living in, and Fell the Match, for example, is a Web 3 company focused on Web 3 driven, in a more shared economy, in a logic of division of developing solutions together for a greater good, for a more collaborative universe, a blockchain universe, all this with a principle of transparency of sharing and collaboration, I believe that betting models can also have a little more of that together with clubs to be able to get to this place.
But I also understand that this is a construction. There is a maturing market, Brazilian football is very broken, the betting market has a lot of money and so the possibility of buying a valuable asset at a bargain price still means that there are so many betting people investing in Brazilian football to the point that you I can’t even understand how many bookmakers there are, the universe is so polluted, but as I navigate and people create more habits, I think maturity will come naturally and the more shared it is, the more naturally fans will engage.
iGaming Brazil – What fronts will these bookmakers be able to open after the regulation of sports betting in Brazil?
Bruno Maia – There are several fronts that bookmakers can open, but I think that in Brazil it can be the use of physical facilities if there are releases for casino, provision of games in physical environments, many clubs have property with underutilized use, that have important values in the urban centers where they are and that can generate more revenue, connect bets more to the club, so, for example, it is a universe that can be developed.
I think we also have a culture of statistics, new fans who like to follow the statistics that influence betting. This is a narrative language, because we have channels that broadcast with a focus on statistics and performance. Anyway, I think we can work more and more on this to offer a more customized experience to the different types of fans we have in football today.
And without a doubt, the betting culture, the gaming culture, the data culture, it permeates, it is there with an entire generation that grew up playing video games, enjoying football, more playing games than watching on television, so everyone is very next, the game, the betting, the Web 3, these new forms of content distribution. Everyone is touching, touching, and without a doubt will continue to shape the next generations of consumers and help football evolve according to what our time is asking us to do.
iGaming Brazil – This new generation is not used to listening to games on the radio, or watching open TV channels. Netflix, Youtube, Podcasts and other platforms are gaining more and more space with teenagers. Is there a format that television can adopt to attract and recover this audience, or do you believe that TV will increasingly lose its place?
Bruno Maia – In my view, the issue is not format, but business model. The TV model will serve an audience well, as radio never died, nor did the newspaper, nor any previous media. In the 1950s, radio would be useless to try to be TV. What helped was to understand what radios were in a world that had TV, after all, until the 50’s it didn’t exist.
The TV needs to understand what works best on it that isn’t as effective in streaming. And there are several formats that are hers. I don’t know if football will be in it or if it’s a type of content that will be much better experienced on streaming. Perhaps time will show that. In that case, there will be nothing to be done. Just watch sports in a different way (for those who got used to it at another time) and that will be standard for new generations that won’t have this reference.
iGaming Brazil – How would you define yourself?
Bruno Maia – A guy passionate about the craft of communication, who understands this profession as an instrument of human connections through the technologies that are accessible. Innovation is an ever-present area in my career as new technologies become accessible over time and we need to decipher, translate and transform them.
My life moves on this thread all the time. Sport is a potent language of love and human connection, just like music. No wonder, they were the two areas where I practiced my vocation the most.
