WTA Puts a New Spin on Its Online Platforms

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t say live, live, live, live, video, video, video, video are kind of the mantras around here,” says Matt Cenedella, COO, Women’s Tennis Association. The WTA is launching a massive overhaul of its online and social platforms, and live video is at the heart of everything it’s doing.

The Women’s Tennis Association will launch all-new WTATennis.com on Jan. 1.

The drive to push its tech game forward began three years ago, when the WTA partnered with SAP to create accessible performance analytics that could benefit the athletes. SAP helped the WTA organize the tremendous amount of data it had available and make it useful. Working with a quality tech partner was an eye-opener for the WTA: SAP was able to take a repository of 40 years’ worth of matches, results, and trends and turn it into an analytics tool available to all of the association’s players.

With that experience behind it, the team at the WTA knew that, if it partnered with the right companies, it could create a similar online resource for fans, one that created year-round deep engagement with the players and provided experiences unavailable in any other medium. It spent 2016 selecting partners, planning content and social-media distribution, and building an all-new WTATennis.com platform to launch Jan. 1.

“I think the way that we worked with SAP led us to understand best how bringing in partners could help fast-forward our efforts,” Cenedella says.

After speaking with several contenders, the WTA chose to work with two of the biggest names in streaming, starting with Ooyala as its technology partner. The software supplier is giving the online property the global outlook it needs, identifying the best content to distribute in different geographies. “Simona Halep in Romania is a great example,” Cenedella points out. “The more success that Simona has, all of a sudden Romania goes to the top five of our countries in fan engagement.”

Ooyala and the WTA plan to grow that technology so that, eventually, the WTA will be able to geo-target messages, content, and partner offerings to fans.

The WTA is also working with Microsoft Azure for cloud services, bringing a level of customization and fan engagement Cenedella finds exciting: “This week, we had four Microsoft individuals in our office talking about how their data farming, their analytic tools will help us understand how to continually tailor the messaging; tailor the cadence; tailor the content, the size, form, and function of content for fans, based upon those fans’ enacted or exhibited behaviors on our sites.”

Working with Microsoft, the WTA will be able to serve targeted information to fans, understanding each viewer’s individual preferences. The video player will become a robust companion during tournaments.

Recent experiments with Facebook Live have also been an eye-opener. During October’s WTA Finals in Singapore, the WTA produced 11 of its top 20 videos ever on any digital platform, all without the sport’s key stars. Live-streaming news conferences or behind-the-scenes videos on Facebook brought huge fan engagement. Facebook’s reach is one of the reasons, and the immediacy of live is another.

“Svetlana Kuznetsova, who was a semifinalist in Singapore, cut her hair, cut an inch-plus off mid-match,” Cenedella remembers. “We happened to be right there and were able to quickly push it out socially. What we found was, besides the fan engagement around that content, all of a sudden we had numerous high-profile outlets, the main sports players, reaching out to us, asking, ‘How do we get that content that you’re producing so quickly?’”

During the Finals, the WTA’s Facebook viewers were up over 500%, engagement was up 250%, and social referrals were up 170%. And this was all from the existing WTATennis.com site, not the new platform slated to launch Jan. 1.

Fans who visit in 2017 will see more video than anything else, whether on the website or the new iOS and Android companion apps. This year, the WTA is ensuring that fans have the opportunity to see all its 2,000 matches and 55 tournaments, through either linear or digital streams. It will be a year of experimentation, Cenedella says, with the WTA trying new ideas, failing quickly, and moving on to try something new. Fan engagement isn’t a goal for just one match or one tournament but for the whole season.

“We have 55 events on the calendar in 2017, so we know we need to be set up to actually cover from day one to the season’s end in November,” says Heather Bowler, SVP, communications, WTA. “If you’re talking about a focus, the focus is really about getting fans to follow the tour.”