Now over a year old, Premier Boxing Champions is embracing year two with a buffet of video content designed to reintroduce and connect fans to the sport. Recently, PBC revealed that by leveraging Facebook and Facebook Live, television’s top boxing series saw spikes via dedicated content on the platform designed to offer a “fan-first, behind-the-scenes home” that served up highlight and training videos, interviews, and last month featured an exclusive 12 round exhibition match on the PBC page. The result saw growth among both millennial and Boomer audiences, reaching a weekly audience of up to 10 million in 2015. In the final quarter of the year, PBC began to post regular highlights with over 8 million complete views of its 30-second view highlight video clips, which are posted immediately following the broadcast.
Ahead of the promotion’s upcoming slate, which includes April 18 on NBC, April 29 on Spike and April 30 on FOX/FOX Deportes, Cynopsis Sports asked Alex Balfour, Chief Digital Officer, Haymon Boxing, about its growth, the reasoning behind strategic shifts and what we can expect moving forward.
Balfour on PBC’s launch: I was the first hire, so that probably speaks priorities on the importance of digital here and we set out initially to build a website as an anchor so people could find out about us and when fights were taking place. We also worked with some fights to help build their presence and voice on social. We took the view that the number one goal we had on the web was to be the official voice and we felt that we had the opportunity to help fighters make the most of their presence socially. So we build a small team in Vegas and we assigned social analysts to about 30 of our key fighters to support them in making content and to have a clearer and more coherent voice.
On boxing and the Internet: We knew that if anybody wanted to find anything about boxing at all, they would go to the Internet. One of the things we’ve spent a lot of time doing was some rigorous search engine optimization work around all the terms the we knew that people looked for in boxing that were relevant to us as well and we built the site around those terms. Now, we believe that we are the number one or two site in traffic based on the amount of search volume that we’ve managed to capture because of the positioning that we’ve done. We discovered that amongst the top 30 or 40 boxers that people had been searching for, at least half of them are either retired or no longer alive. So, that gave us concrete evidence that since boxing moved exclusively to PPV in most markets in the mid-90s, it had fallen in visibility and most of the known names in boxing were no longer fighting. So, that was one challenge for us.
On Facebook Live: We’ve been pretty active across all the social networks and there were some things from that that caused us to change direction and gave us pause for thought. We ran comparative numbers across all of the active networks, for both paid and unpaid, and we found that Facebook has some of the most detailed data for us to dive into. What’s been really impressive has been the ability to reach a really big audience, and the ability to test different types of content with that audience. What emerged over that span was the video has become the most important content type. So, we moved more and more to promoting our fights using video and then, as of the last quarter of last year, we started cutting highlights across all of our fights and then cutting highlights specifically for all of our networks. We discovered that while boxing has a lower visibility than it did because of the paywalls, and that there was still an appetite for the sport. We discovered that there was a high propensity and higher interest in boxing amongst African-American and Hispanic male audiences and that while there was an affinity for boxing amongst the 55+ generation, there was also an interest in boxing in the under-24s. That is significant, because they are the most enthusiastic fans. There is a need to the audience to be reintroduced to the sport and the best way to do that was to show them fighting so we’ve been shifting away from static content to video to push fighters fighting.
On the future: We’ve done six or seven live workout videos, along with live interviews and press conferences on Facebook Live. In mid-March, we debuted a live fight on the platform, which brought in around 150,000 unique viewers and we think there is more opportunity to do stuff live. In addition, packaging clips and highlights has been working really well. We also realize that, except for the really big fights, to ask people sit down in front of a large screen and commit an hour or two of their time on a Saturday night to watch you sport is asking a lot. So we realize that some people would rather watch it later, or on Sunday morning or even on Monday when they are at work, and we want to make sure that they have the opportunity to watch it if they can’t watch it live. Clearly, however, there is an opportunity to deliver live more often, or even exclusively live, to deepen the range of what we can offer.
