Sports Fan Marketing: Why Brands That Only Chase Reach Will Lose

The brand that treats sports fans as consumers to be reached will always lose to the brand that treats them as a community to be earned.

The language of sports sponsorship has always borrowed from media planning. Reach. Impressions. Frequency. Eyeballs. The vocabulary describes an audience that sits passively in front of content, available to be targeted, measured, and converted. It is a useful vocabulary for buying television advertising, but it’s the wrong vocabulary for understanding …