CONCACAF Debuts New Website, Mobile App for 2017 Gold Cup

A digital ‘war room’ in Miami and four traveling social crews power digital experience

With 25 matches across 14 cities over 19 days, July 7-26, the CONCACAF Gold Cup is the largest international soccer tournament to take place in North America this year, and organizing confederation CONCACAF is taking a large part of the event’s digital and social-media efforts into its own hands.

CONCACAF has launched a new mobile-first website for the 2017 edition of the Gold Cup.

In advance of the tournament, CONCACAF has unveiled a new website, launched a new mobile application, and bolstered its staff to erect a digital “war room” at the organization’s home facility in Miami and to deploy four social-content teams that are traveling all of the sites across the tournament.

According to Jean Manuel Jimenez, director, digital products and emerging technologies, CONCACAF, the new website was designed around a mobile-first experience. He notes that 65%-70% of the federation’s online traffic comes via a mobile device.

“We definitely took a look at the research,” he says, “and designed a user experience that applies well for a mobile experience.”

The website also features a dynamic live mode, which prompts visitors to live game scores and data immediately when they arrive on the homepage.

CONCACAF is also making a concerted, cross-platform effort to get viewers more involved in the event by opening the voting for Man of the Match completely to the fans. The federation has designed an algorithm that filters players having the best performances at approximately the 70th minute. In the live mode, the site can populate those top performers and allow fans to vote whether they are on the website, the mobile app, or a social-media platform. In addition, the team in the digital war room can do a manual override and add a player to the voting ballot if a substitute comes on late and has a profound impact on the match.

CONCACAF’s robust digital strategy includes a strong social-video campaign.

On the content-creation side, members of the CONCACAF digital and social-media teams have some fun new tools to play with. The group has rolled out a new Grabyo video platform that has opened the door to branded-content opportunities. The software makes it simple for social-video editors to quickly add graphic slates, lower-thirds, call-to-actions, etc.

For the first time in the history of the tournament, CONCACAF is also deploying full digital- and social-content–creation teams that will be onsite at every venue and match throughout the competition. Each crew features five producers that generate and capture content live, leveraging various agreements that CONCACAF has with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the tournament.

“There are guidelines they are following to create content that puts the fan first,” says Jimenez. “So our content producers will get inside the fan sections as a chant is going on and driving that culture of the match and bringing it to a live moment in our social-media platform is definitely something that will happen.”