It’s been a while. Holidays plus a very busy return has led to a quiet Dispash period.
Plus there’s been a small matter of a soccer tournament.
Onwards
The underestimation of audiences
For a brief period Australia was united. People collectively held their breath at bars across the country. Streets and schools were covered in green and gold. Matildas backgrounds accompanied every work video call. The national team ended up with a fourth placed finish at the 2023 Women’s World Cup, but their semi-final broke all records for TV viewing in the country.
Free-to-air rights holder Seven seemed slightly surprised by the viewing figures - some advertisers picked up some exceptionally underpriced inventory - as were some in the advertising industry I’d spoken to or heard speak prior to the tournament. Too much of a niche interest, apparently: both soccer and women’s sport were perceived to rate poorly with a national audience.
Even some respected media commentators such as Tim Burrowes from Unmade were unsure if the Matildas would spark a cultural conversation.
But long before the tournament began, there were enough signs that suggested that large audiences were more than just potentially achievable and Women’s World Cup had the potential to pull in high TV ratings.
The base numbers
Soccer has long protested that it has more potential and support than the media perceives. Viewed through the prism of the domestic A League, that’s optimistic. But viewed through the prism of the sport as a whole across Australia, it’s not hard to see why those running the sport feel there could be a breakthrough moment.
The core base is strong. There’s between. 1.5m and 1.9m registered soccer players in Australia, depending on which source you use. Of these 388,000 are women and girls under 24, with 2/3rds of these being 14 or under.
This is significant. The Matildas represent aspirational role models for many girls and young women. And their parents will also be heavily invested in their kids’ interests, even if they’re not that fussed about the sport itself.
So once you double that 388k to include at least one parent or guardian, that’s a very healthy 766,000 people who would reasonably have a strong inclination to tune in.
The other core audience comes from the LGBTQI+ community. A significant number of the Matildas, including captain Sam Kerr and local star Cortnee Vine, are publicly out.
Again, the Matildas are visible role models for this community. And while estimated numbers for people who identify as queer vary, somewhere around 4% seems to be a conservative number to use.
Apply this to the adult population and you have a potential audience of around 840,000. There’s obviously some crossover with registered female soccer players, but it’s not unreasonable to say that there’s 1.5m people in Australia who may have a strong interest in watching the Matildas.
The slightly interested
The core represents a very respectable viewing figure in Australia. Enough to make the host broadcaster comfortable when projecting numbers, even accounting for the fact its unlikely all 1.5m would tune in.
But start looking at the wider, casual fanbase and the numbers quickly become interesting.
There are still, at a minimum, an extra 1.1m registered soccer players who, we can safely assume, have an interest in watching the sport.
Optus Sport, which holds the rights for the English men and women’s Premier League, also has around 1.1m subscribers.
Roy Morgan’s most recent data, meanwhile, puts the number of people who state they support an A League side at 3.8m. This might seem somewhat on the high side to anyone who’s attended a match, but we can take this as a latent, nominal interest.
There’s likely be a high amount of crossover between Optus Sport subscribers, A League supporters and registered players, but it seems safe to say that there’s around another 1m people in Australia who have some interest in watching top level soccer, putting potential audiences into the 2.5m territory
There’s another number that’s slightly harder to quantify in terms of viewing figures.
The most recent census noted that nearly half of Australians had a parent born overseas, while around 29% - or 7m people - are immigrants.
There are also large immigrant communities in Australia. My Colombian colleague told me that Australia has one of the largest numbers of Colombian expats outside of South America - something I can well believe after watching England v Colombia in the quarter finals.
These two numbers are significant because soccer in Australia has traditionally pulled its core audience from immigrant communities. For second generation immigrants, there’s a natural dual loyalty to both Australia and their parents’ country. Expats are also quite likely to lend their support to the Matildas in matches that don’t involve their team.
England’s match against Colombia was an excellent example of ‘second country support’. The Matildas’ penalty shoot out against France meant their match finished close to the England-Colombia kick-off. Outside Olympic stadium, fans wearing English and Colombian colours cheered every successful Matildas penalty and hugged each other in joy when Cortnee Vine slotted home the winning penalty. Less than 20 minutes later, inside the stadium, the Colombian fans booed every touch from an English player.
Secondly, many immigrants - whether naturalised or not - will follow their country of origin in a major tournament. This means there was probably a wider awareness of the tournament as a whole. Again, to stick with Colombia, my South American colleague noted that her ex-pat WhatsApp group had been arranging tickets almost as soon as they went on sale.
Combine this with the rest of the numbers and the potential audience doesn’t look wildly different from the 11m who tuned in for the semi-final. It’s hard to put a more realistic number down, but let’s just leave it as 2.5m+. That’s an audience number any Australian broadcaster would love to pull in.
When numbers can’t explain everything
The numbers themselves hint at the potential support. But there are also a number of cultural elements that fed into the Matildas viewing figures.
The most obvious is the Sam Kerr effect. Very few Australians will have been unaware of Kerr or that she’s widely considered one of the best players in the world.
In a country where soccer rarely makes headline news, Kerr is one of the few names in the sport guaranteed to make headlines. AFL fans know her, parochially, as the player who got away, while any household that owns a copy of FIFA will have seen Kerr’s face on the front cover. The eve-of-tournament calf injury created a further narrative and became headline news. From a pure curiosity perspective, it could have been enough to entice casual viewers.
The second is the general momentum of the sport. Six months earlier, the men’s exploits in Qatar saw matches pack out Federation Square in Melbourne and caught the imagination of the public in a way not seen since John Aloisi’s penalty against Uruguay to take Australia to the World Cup in 2006.
That gave an indication of the level of support for the national side in a tournament played in an unfriendly time zone where reaching the knockouts was seen as successful. A home tournament for a team that could genuinely be considered as a contender for the title? It’s not hard to see that momentum could quickly build. Australians like backing winners.
Football Federation Australia also marketed the tournament smartly. Core audiences, especially families and registered players, had been engaged consistently since the trans-Tasman bid to host was successful.
Money at the FFA is usually tight so taking a multi-year approach gradually expanding the reach into core then casual audiences supplemented with a clever approach to street furniture kept the tournament close to front of mind.
Bins, baggage carousels, and train terminal information screens aren’t your classic channels, but the Go Matildas message was always lurking in the corner of your eye. And by taking the smaller street furniture, it left the bigger billboards and activations to FIFA and sponsors.
Strategically, it was one of the smartest moves the FFA could have made. There was a clear choice not to lean heavily into promoting the tournament (leave that to FIFA) or the women’s game overall (leave that to the sponsors). Instead they went all in to build the Matildas brand with a clear, relentless targeting focus and a simple message.
It also allowed the FFA to piggyback on other brands. Matildas squad members eating a Subway? Increased awareness for the Matildas brand. Visa telling the story of a young girl’s journey to become a Matilda? Tick off more brand benefit. Mary Fowler in Adidas’ big tournament ad alongside Messi and Beckham? Google juice. Innovative? No. Smart and effective? Yes.
The final part is an intangible part of what makes sport so special: the narrative. Impossible to predict, sport narratives have a habit of taking on a life of their own during major tournaments. Part of what drove the Matildas viewing numbers was not just their progress in the tournament but the way they did it.
Facing elimination at the group stage, the Matildas blew away Olympic champions Canada before a testing but ultimately comfortable victory over Denmark in the Round of 16, which also saw the return of Sam Kerr from injury. Then the penalty drama of a prolonged shootout against France. As commentators would say, you can’t script this.
The numbers would have been strong even if the Matildas had ground their way to victory in each match. But the see-saw nature of the campaign and a team that wore their hearts on their sleeves played their part. When the MCG concourses are full of AFL fans watching a penalty shootout, you can be confident you’ve made a cultural impact across the country.
Post-tournament success?
The cliched trope wheeled out before the World Cup was that both soccer and women’s sport don’t pull in audiences. It was wheeled out after the tournament as somewhat of a reverse trope, evidence that this myth was well and truly busted. Job done, everybody goes home satisfied.
But it’s not quite that simple.
Despite its reputation as a ‘niche’ interest sport in Australia, the national teams have always been easy for both hardcore and casual fans to get behind in a way that the more popular domestic struggle to do.
AFL is a uniquely Australian sport with no real international tournament. Rugby league has a smaller number of countries who play to an elite level, meaning Australia’s minimum expectations for a World Cup is to reach the final.
Both AFL and NRL are also heavily state-based, with AFL dominating Victoria, Adelaide and WA, and NRL favoured in Queensland and New South Wales. Cricket is genuinely popular across the country but has so many different formats that dilutes “global” success and makes it harder for the casual fan.
Soccer, though, can reach out to communities across the country, with A League sides in the five main states and a broad appeal across multiple demographics in a way that rugby union doesn’t quite have. The Olympics are possibly the only other event that has the potential to unite the country.
But the club game is different. The men’s A League is occasionally capable of drawing big crowds and reasonable audiences, but is largely ignored and unloved by broadcasters who prefer to focus on AFL, NRL, cricket and tennis. And when broadcasters deliver numbers, advertisers follow.
So while this is an opportunity, as ABC’s panel show Gruen pointed out, we’ve had a lot of brands move to align themselves with the Matildas, but the acid test will come if they continue to support and invest into the women’s game.
Domestically, this has grown, but not to anywhere the numbers the Matildas pull in. Six years ago, I watched the domestic final being played out in front of a very empty Moore Park on a baking hot afternoon. Last season, over 9,500 fans headed to Parramatta for a prime time evening kick-off between Sydney FC and Western United. That’s an exceptional number for a domestic match, but a long way from the packed stadiums the Matildas have enjoyed for many years.
This season, the A League Women’s season has its own separate opening round, kicking off with a Sydney derby featuring the only local Matilda Cortnee Vine (Western Sydney’s Clare Hunt, the only other domestic-based player in the World Cup squad having just signed for Paris-Saint-Germain). A record number of U16s free passes have been registered. There’s fewer middle-of-the-afternoon kick-offs under blazing hot sun. It’s progress.
And yet, there are still challenges. Bar Vine, the Matildas’ star names play abroad. Both the AFLW and Women’s Big Bash cricket seasons have been scheduled to run at the same time as the A League, diluting the potential audience and advertiser spend.
Attracting fans to regular season matches has been a challenge, even when clubs put on double headers with the men’s games. Most domestic games are locked away on Paramount+, one of the smaller (in audience numbers) streaming services. Judging by the amount of double spotting that occurs during all A League games, shifting ad inventory is a challenge.
This may well be the year that, fired by the World Cup, the domestic game explodes. The will is certainly there and networks and advertisers will be watching numbers with interest. The Matildas have shown that women’s sport can grip Australia. The national team almost certainly will continue to do so. But what happens underneath that is anybody’s guess.
Interesting things
When brands go dark part 2
One for the marketing nerds who read this. A while ago the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute published research examining what happened when brands stopped advertising. Now the Institute has a follow-up in the Journal of Advertising Research, replicating the study. It’s a very academic read but worth bookmarking if you’re one of those who has to make the case for your marketing budget each year. LINK.
Is Threads a failure?
Contrarians on the internet like to proclaim “x is dead” almost as soon as it arrives (they may have had a point with Meta’s ‘metaverse’). Mutinex co-founder Henry Innis makes a very simple but compelling argument that Threads doesn’t really make economic sense for Meta - although never rule out the possibility that it was launched just to hasten the demise of a competitor. LINK.
AI is “not ready for primetime journalism”
It’s possible to hold two positions that AI will substantially change creative and media industries (although how is another question entirely) and that it’s some way off actually being able to do what people who don’t work with AI on a day-to-day basis think it can do. Journalists don’t think it’s ready for serious reporting - although it’s probably in their immediate interest not to highlight AI’s virtues too heavily - while MSN seems to be leading the way in how not to use AI to write news stories and nobody can quite agree on what is a good or a bad use of AI in journalism. Part of the issue is that most (publishing) businesses think of AI as a like for like replacement rather than attempting something different, such as speeding up analysis of large datasets, while the quality of the output is largely determined by the quality of prompt. This isn’t to say AI can’t do some basic news writing to a ‘good enough’ standard, but my own experience is the more complex and subjective the topic that requires original research, the more AI struggles. LINK.
Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
I’ve lost count of the number of note taking apps I’ve used then abandoned over the years. Casey Newton at Platformer has a very good summary of why productivity apps create a problem of too much data. Which is fine, if you have the time to sort through it all before making a decision. Most people don’t have that luxury. I’ve reverted to a mixture of pen and paper plus notes and Google Docs, which probably isn’t efficient, but is helpful. Really, though, I’m still mourning the loss of del.ic.ious and Netvibes from 20 years ago. LINK.
Playing us out this edition, a live version of Blur’s The Narcissist. The track’s definitely a grower, as is the whole new Ballad of Darren album, sounding familiar yet also reflective. Given Gorillaz also released a new record earlier this year, Damon Albarn’s been a very busy man in 2022 and 2023. Puts the gaps between Dispashes to shame.