Last month, UK YouTube group Sidemen took on YouTube All-Stars in the latest of their series of charity football matches. However, according to Ed East, Founder and Group CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, it wasn’t the on-field activity which really captured the attention - despite an entertaining match ending in a 7-8 victory for Sidemen FC. Instead, it was the off field impact that caught the eye.
The rising success of influencers as live entertainment
In the same week as the YouTube Allstars v Sidemen match, the England men’s team took on Germany at Wembley in a crucial final warm-up game before the World Cup next month. And yet, despite the importance of the match, viewers were more interested in the former over the latter.
The England match averaged 3.7 million viewers on Channel 4, peaking at 6.1 million. While the charity game achieved 2.5 million live streams on YouTube and has reached 22 million total views so far.
Although direct comparisons between the stats is nuanced because England-Germany was on terrestrial TV as opposed to the Sidemen v YouTube Allstars game which was streamed online, the difference in the scale of the audiences demonstrates a shift in the media consumption habits of consumers and a rise in the popularity of live influencer entertainment.
Additionally, The Valley, Charlton Athletic FC's stadium, enjoyed a 27,000 seater sell-out for the charity match - dwarfing the League One side’s current highest recorded attendance this season at 17,046.
The speed at which tickets for the match sold out and the size of the online audience streaming the game, suggests that the sequel charity match could be played in a far bigger stadium next time. Possibly even Wembley, a 90,000 seater stadium which England failed to sell-out in their game to Germany in the same week.
This phenomenon is explained by the sheer scale of the influencers’ popularity - with the Sidemen boasting a combined following of more than 35 million subscribers - and the growth of the population of sports enthusiasts among the Gen Z generation. They are digital first and consume media in a different way.
The brand opportunities to partner spots with creators
Speaking at the Leaders In Sport conference ahead of the charity match, Jordan Schwarzenberger, manager of the Sidemen, summarised this new trend, saying: “this is not so much about seeing incredible football, it’s about seeing their favourite people”. His comments are indicative of a younger audience which is less interested in watching a team play than their older counterparts and instead are much more interested in the individuals within the team.
Gen Z favours personality and authenticity in the same way that has led sports stars to garner huge online followings and given popularity to fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries such as Amazon Prime’s ‘All or Nothing’ series. Sports stars are praised for sharing their genuine thoughts in their post-match analysis and those who don’t use agents for their social media content garner generate more meaningful fan engagement.
But it’s not just football which is benefitting from this growing trend. We’ve seen success in other sports including boxing when, in 2019, YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul took each other on in the ring for a second bout - selling two million pay-per-views, one of the top-five highest selling fights in history.
As well as being one of the first examples of the appetite for live influencer sports collaborations, the fight was one of the clearest demonstrations of its ability to translate into revenue.
Again, there was a reminder of this potential at the Sidemen vs YouTube Allstars match, with queues forming for the Sidemen pop-up superstore at 10am - 5 hours before kick-off.
It’s no wonder therefore that sports brands are increasingly looking to partner with influencers. Adidas, for example, already has “a long-standing approach of working with and championing social creators”, including the Sidemen.
It’s clear there’s huge potential for sports brands and brands with a creative brief around sports to tap into the popularity of influencers for a range of campaign objectives - from generating engagement to driving sales.
What charities can learn from the match
The match was incredibly successful from a fundraising point of view, raising over £1million in total. The figure is a testament to the impact influencers can have for charities, as Billion Dollar Boy uncovered in our recent joint research with Meta.
In an analysis of over 300 ads by charities, Meta found that less than 1% were using creators in their campaigns. Together, we launched a first-of-its-kind experiment: Creators for Causes, to lift the lid on whether co-creation with platform creators related to the cause drives more intent to act towards the cause than campaigns using just the advertiser voice alone.
Meta non-profit partners Malaria No More, B Corp, The British Red Cross, and Give India participated in the research, using ten creators in the process and publishing 26 emotive social media posts.
The results demonstrated the success charities can have with influencer campaigns - especially when the creator is carefully curated to match the specific cause. The Malaria No More campaign, for example, generated 7.5 million video views, leading to 24.7 million campaign engagements, 1.4 billion campaign impressions and had an organic digital reach of 540 million. This translated into a higher than average action intent compared to the industry benchmark for non-profit content across all campaigns.
Sports and charities - an influencer match from heaven
All in all, the huge success of the Sidemen v YouTube Allstars charity match was another resounding endorsement of the impact influencers can have in both a sporting context and for charities.
However, as the popularity of sports and charity collaborations grows, it will become an increasingly challenging relationship to navigate. In an ever more crowded market, standing out is crucial and the most effective way to achieve this and deliver the best possible results is to ensure the partnerships are authentic and the campaigns are aspirational or inspirational.
Finding the right influencers and designing creative campaigns that capture the imagination will be key. Get it right, and the revenue and fundraising opportunities for brands and charities can be significant.
