Q&A: Mike Norrish on BT Sport's digital content strategy

Digital content in a range of formats is helping BT Sport to establish itself in a competitive market. 

I’ve been asking Mike Norrish, Digital Executive Producer at BT Sports, about his approach to content, goals and measurement.

Mike will be speaking on this topic at Shift London next month.

Can you give us a sneak preview of your presentation at Shift? 

Yes, i’m going to talk about our experiences of season one of our UEFA Champions League exclusive broadcast deal, and how we’ve approached the challenge of taking club football’s ultimate competition to the next level, digitally. And show some funny videos.

Could you explain your role and responsibilities at BT Sport?

Ever-changing! I guess first and foremost it’s a social role. The team I lead runs our social accounts across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and we’ve got a pretty forward-thinking strategy which has established social as a key part of our on and off-screen offering.

And obviously the key to doing social well is getting the content right, so a lot of my time – the most enjoyable bit – is spent working with my team on new and novel short form video ideas, graphics, GIFs, live videos etc.

.@Noble16Mark gives @AnderHerrera a helping hand during their @EmiratesFACup tie. 😂 https://t.co/ivjhkEKsjQ

— BT Sport Football (@btsportfootball) April 14, 2016

I’m also responsible for web and app content, creating VOD for BT TV, managing elements of our on-air output such as our new Brand Chants and our graphical news and information service on BT Sport Europe.

How we develop our digital platforms and products is a big area too, and something we did well for the Champions League.

What are the biggest challenges in creating content for BT Sport?

Until recently I would have said social video rights, and not being able to publish native match action, but we’ve had some success there.

Creating preview content is hard, and that’s the really valuable bit for our business as it drives both tune-in and acquisition.

Anyone can clip up a UFC knockout in real time, but to get millions of people sharing your content before a big fight, as we managed to do at UFC 196, and driving thousands of them into the sales funnel from that content, is the really difficult bit. 

There has been talk of peak content lately. Is it hard to attract audience attention, especially for sport-related content? 

Yeah, a bit. Particularly so if you don’t have exclusive content, which we are fortunate to have plenty of.

But I wouldn’t like my team using ‘peak content’ as an excuse for low engagement. Distinct, compelling, shareable content will still get seen.

It’s the identikit stuff sub-Buzzfeed stuff that is all cancelling each other out. But yeah, it’s certainly a noisy space. 

What are the most successful content formats for BT Sport?  

Broadly it’s real time short video – goals, crashes, knockouts. More specifically it’s novel real-time short videos, so the Dortmund players apologising to their own fans after a defeat went crazy, because when do you ever see that?

.@BVB Dortmund stars Weidenfeller and Hummels try to calm angry fans as the club stay bottom after another loss.https://t.co/0fZFz21oIn

— BT Sport Football (@btsportfootball) February 5, 2015

Emotional triggers are what we’re looking for – what forces your thumb down onto that share button. So the Dortmund video appealed to every fan of a rubbish football team who thinks their millionaire players don’t care about the club.

There are lots of those fans, myself included! Formats are hard, but our on-site social coverage – intimate, authentic, sometimes a bit rough and ready but with incredible access, has grown and grown over the last year.

I love our Catch-Up Shows that we do for most sports now. It’s incredible how much you can pack into eight minutes with innovative producers and editors who are willing to try new stuff.

What are the goals behind the content you produce? 

The key question! This is something we drill down into constantly. It’s so easy to lose track of your goals and just look for ‘stuff’ that gets RTs, like, shares, views. But not all views have equal value.

Most obviously, we are a UK only business, so there’s no benefit in a million likes from Indonesia, for example.

We have a straightforward strategy to help inform these decisions – Promote, Engage, Amplify – which we apply to all shows and sports, and all content we produce has to work for one of those three pillars. 

How do you measure the performance of content? What have you learned from this?

If you do the hard thinking about your goals, about what you are trying to achieve, the measurement bit gets easier.

So if our content goal last June for Champions League launch content is to drive awareness of BT Sport as the new home of the competition, then essentially the goal for that content is reach, or eyeballs.

So that’s easy to measure. If it’s driving tune-in, for example, then that gets harder to track, but over the course of a season we’ve been able to produce some really exciting numbers that show social content can drive viewers to linear shows, if done right.

More broadly, by constantly analysing the performance of content you learn what your audience wants from you on those platforms, why and when they want you to be in their timeline, and why and when they don’t.

You learn to be audience-led in what you publish, rather than the other way round. That’s what the best YouTubers have really cracked, and that’s what we’re trying to apply to our slightly bigger and less agile operation.

Mike will be speaking about BT Sport’s digital content strategy at our Shift event in London next month.