David Richards bought International Sportsworld Communicators, Ltd. (ISC)
from Bernie Ecclestone two years ago, acquiring the worldwide television and
commercial rights to the World Rally Championship, a high octane global
motorsport series which pits man and machine against the harshest elements in
nature in 14 countries around the world. The timing couldn’t be better for ISC
to take the sports and content worlds by storm. Access had the opportunity to
sit down with David Richards, Chairman of ISC, to discuss the future of ISC and
the challenges it faces in the world of new media and digital content.
Access:
 ISC is moving
aggressively to expand the commercial domain of the World Rally Championship
(WRC) into new media. What is driving this new direction and what are some of
the challenges?
Richards:
The main challenge that we face today for the
WRC is in the area of television revenues. Conventional TV revenues, as we know
them today, are under scrutiny and probably are not sustainable at the current
levels for very long. We could chose to be satisfied with the status quo and
wait to see if television income does indeed decline, but we’re not going to do
that.
Conventional television gives us a wide-scale, global audience,
which is great for building awareness and building our brand. But to guarantee
our financial success we need to communicate with the individual consumer.
That’s our main challenge over the next few years—how to talk to the individual
consumer. We not only need to talk to them, but we also need to build a
commercial relationship with them. We have to break new ground so we are
proactively changing our entire business model. Rather than relying on an old
technology and old income streams, we are looking toward the future. We have to
consider what new mediums we can leverage to achieve long-term success. One of
those mediums is new media.
Access:
How receptive are sports fans, like those of the World Rally
Championship, to new media?
Richards:
The World Rally Championship has a large
following among young people. In fact, our loyal fan base has just the right
demographic profile for us to reach them through new media channels. They’re
young, they’re very technically savvy and they use the Internet. Would you
believe half the people that follow the World Rally Championship regularly go
online to get the information about the Championship? So we have a group of
people that are very susceptible to, and very interested in new media
opportunities.
Access:
Are WRC followers ready
to pay for new forms of content?
Richards:
Clearly, to be able to commercialize any
relationship, your efforts must be based on delivering value to the customer.
I’m sure that, if we can reliably identify and understand what the individual
fan really wants, we will be able to package a product that will appropriately
meet people’s needs and desires. This is the task ahead of us, but I’m quite
certain that our fans will pay for that type of content.
Access:
So what exactly is ISC
doing to bring World Rally coverage to fans via new media
technologies? Richards:
The great thing about our product,
the WRC, is that it has a wide range of assets. In addition to the TV and
commercial rights, we have a variety of partners, such as major car companies,
spending heavily to participate in the WRC. We also have a great deal of data
and content that can be converted to a new media format and sold.
With
Accenture’s help we have built a platform that captures all of the data from
our partners, car companies and other areas of the sport. This was the first
exercise. The next step is to build a business model around each of the
different mediums to take advantage of that data; those mediums could include
mobile communication, data services, computer games, online gaming, or
delivering information to those car manufacturers. There is clearly a wide
range of opportunities where we could capitalize on this data, our content, and
we’re only just scratching the surface of that today.
Access:
How important is
technology to the world of motorsports, and specifically, the World Rally
Championship?
Richards:
The WRC is full of technology, particularly in
our cars. They might look conventional from the outside, but they’re far from
typical underneath the skin. And technology seems to ooze from every aspect of
the sport. It is truly a technology-driven, data-rich sport. And it therefore
follows that we should use all the modern methods to communicate it.
Read the
case study.
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