Private: Intelligence

I was reading an article in Sports Illustrated and it reminded me that ABC’s Wide World of Sports recently celebrated its 50-year anniversary, debuting in 1961 and leading the charge with beautiful sight, sound and motion tied to the emotion in sports.  Wide World of Sports was revolutionary, and it became the template for how sports are covered on TV, and eventually the web.  I remember watching it every week as a kid – and being completely engaged in whatever sport they were featuring that day. 

Today there are many, many websites and cable networks who owe a debt of gratitude to the Wide World of Sports series, from ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” to sites like The High School Rudy Awards.  WWOS created emotion around targeted sports where most people weren’t paying attention, and now that the web has matured we’re seeing lots of great sites take that style and run with it, further highlighting smaller, niche sports.

If you visit YouTube there are 4,420 videos for the Metal Mulisha, who lead the world of freestyle motocross.  There are 34,600 lacrosse videos, many of which feature my beloved Syracuse Orange, all of which cater to a very targeted group of individuals.   There are 24,100 videos for kite surfing – and if I had to hazard a guess I would say that outnumbers the number of total kite surfers there are in the US.    There are even videos for “underwater basket weaving” and “hang gliding dogs”, though admittedly many of these are not very useful.

Wide World of Sports laid the groundwork for the increased price and value associated with sponsoring sports by making it about more than who won and who lost, and more about the human nature of sports.  Sports has always been a valuable tool for a marketer, but that innovation in format created a more highly engaged audience in a wider-reaching array of sports, outside the standards of baseball, football, baseball and basketball.  These days the UFC has eclipsed professional boxing and motocross is catching up to NASCAR, maybe not in terms of total dollars but definitely in terms of value for reaching a targeted audience.   Sports Marketing is a huge business, and the web is creating even more opportunities for marketers to reach a highly engaged, emotionally attached audience.  I would hazard a guess that if Tony Hawk were 21 years old today, he would quickly become one of the most recognizable faces in the world (far more than he is today) as skateboarding has substantially benefitted from ESPN’s X-Games and the myriad of clips the web offers (type in skateboarding on YouTube and prepare to be overwhelmed by more than 585,000 videos). 

What’s interesting is that the aggregate of these sports has not been as effective as one would expect.  There have been attempts at aggregating these assets together in ad networks and publishing companies, but rarely have they set the world on fire.  You would think the advent of video online would have created a vacuum that sucked in all of these videos, and created the chance for insightful, emotional, journalistic overlays with highly engaged, highly monetizable audiences!  ESPN is certainly the lead player in the category of online sports, but there’s definitely room for a secondary tier of sports enthusiast sites and content around their audience, isn’t there?

Regardless of the why or why not of the category, the fact is all niche sports owe a solid fist-bump to the Wide World Of Sports for blazing the trail that allows them to reach an audience, foster an audience and monetize an audience in some way.  The fact that some skateboarders, motocross riders and kite-surfers can earn six figures every year in endorsements confirms that the legacy of WWOS will live on for many years to come.

Thanks for the memories Wide World Of Sports!