A New Game Plan

ESPN Star Sports goes on the offensive with a major revamp in its first big play with digital media. Marcus Chhan reports.

ESPN STAR Sports (ESS) is in a privileged position because unlike some companies who are left twiddling their thumbs not knowing whether digital media will be important to its business, ESS knows it has to be a player in this space because sports is a significant driver of online and mobile consumption. Cue the revamp in early June of its online platform espnstar.com, which mainly serves the SE Asia and India markets. VP of digital media for ESS Jason O'Sullivan tells Marketing what you see in the revamp is just Round 1.

"I strongly believe websites need to be redesigned at least every 2 years because of the nature of the business - things are constantly evolving so we need to enhance the offering to the consumer," O'Sullivan says. He added, "The product will be developed over the next 12 months. One of the things we are looking at is the area of community. This is hugely popular in terms of online usage today. How it fits in with a sports organisation - it's something we're going to look at. Whether we set up a community of our own or work with a third party will be part of the ongoing analysis".

Fans of ESPN's soccernet.com will be familiar with what he means when he talks about regular redesigns. The popular online football destination, of which O'Sullivan was responsible for prior to switching to ESS, experiences regular site enhancements. "We were already thinking about what we were going to do for the Euros [which happens two years after a World Cup tournament] as the referee literally blew the final whistle at the World Cup Finals," he reminisced.

Since arriving at ESS over one-and-a-half years ago, he says "every single digital media product across all territories" had been reviewed
and the department restructured "into a more defi ned unit in terms of product content and operation". "We're working very closely with the TV production team. When I joined, digital media was separate. So the key as far as I am concerned, is digital media is core to the entire business. We're media organisation so we need to have a website which represents the quality of our brand," he says.

A quick type of espnstar.com in my internet browser brings up the redesigned site, and some obvious changes can be seen like the new layout, more editorial columns, blogs, but its the inclusion of an embedded video player which jumps right at you from the get-go. The video player is actually a real step-up for the site, which in its previous form did not provide a rich media experience for the user. ESS now produces content specifically for its online and mobile platforms. "We've got a completely different content management system - the way in which we
are managing feeds is now all automated. We get a number of news feeds coming into the building and the key was to automate the publishing from the news feed onto the site so that there's very little human interaction in this area. We're trying to ensure we increase the depth and the breadth of our coverage without having to increase our editorial team three-fold," he says. Going forward, the site, which currently displays the homepage differently depending on a user's regional geographic location (SE Asia or India), may explore offering country
specific services. ESS already offers localised language services for mobile in Indonesia.

As this article goes to print, it remains to be seen if the enhanced site will generate a huge windfall of ad dollars for ESS. The company's SVP of advertising sales Charles Less certainly thinks it will, and tells Marketing he "expects online multimedia revenue to increase somewhere
between 80% to 100% next year". According to him, "Our forecast is very bullish."Less says, "Having something we believe is going to be one of the best sports experiences you'll have online in Asia, is going to be attractive to more advertisers and if you talk about growth budgets, one of the biggest growth budgets is in this [digital] space."