Jo Redfern on which audience assumptions no longer hold and what sponsors must do about it
For a long time, sponsorship operated on a relatively simple premise. Brands invested in rights that gave them access to a clearly defined audience, typically delivered through broadcast. The assumption was that if you could reach that audience at scale, through live sport, you could build awareness, association and ultimately commercial return. That assumption is becoming increasingly risky.
Jo Redfern, who specialises in media consumption and audience behaviour, has spent years tracking how this shift has unfolded and is direct about why the industry was caught off guard. Jo will be delving into the shifting media consumption behaviours of different audience groups in a dedicated session at Sponsorship Masters in London on 11 June.
A seismic shift hiding in plain sight
"YouTube has been around 20 years," she says. "But for a long time, sports media almost dismissed it. It really didn't take seriously how it was changing media consumption amongst young audiences."
The consequence of that complacency is now being felt across the industry. The average age at which a child in the UK gets their first phone has dropped to around nine and a half. A generation has grown up consuming media on digital platforms, and their habits are now the norm, not the exception.
For younger audiences in particular, sport is no longer primarily a live, broadcast experience. "For the majority of people under 25, their sports media consumption is primarily on social platforms," Redfern says. Live sport still has a role, but it is a narrower one than many in the industry would like to admit. "If it is a two-hour Tuesday night game for a mid-table clash and there's no stakes, live's not important to them. It's not as valuable as just watching the highlights."
The fight for attention
The economics of attention explain why. Younger fans are not choosing between sport and nothing. They are choosing between sport and an endless queue of content - gaming, creators, streaming, social feeds. A well-edited fifteen-minute highlight package that delivers the key moments fits that environment in a way that a full broadcast does not. "They get the key moments, they get the narrative, and they can move on to the next bit of media waiting on their feed," Redfern explains.
For sponsors, this creates a problem that goes beyond reach metrics. If your target audience is consuming sport primarily through social platforms and secondary content, a sponsorship built around broadcast exposure may be delivering far less than the contract implies.
Critically, this is no longer just a story about young people. "The fastest growing user segment on YouTube now is 45 to 55," Redfern notes. What started as a generational shift is becoming a broad behavioural one, and the gap between where sponsors assume audiences are and where they actually are is widening.
A fragmented and evolving landscape
The industry is beginning to adapt. Rights holders are fragmenting their packages. Christmas Day games to Netflix, season openers to YouTube, precisely because season-long live value is eroding. Many sponsors are already considering a similar shift, targeting specific platforms and moments rather than broad seasonal commitments. As Redfern puts it, sponsoring two NFL Christmas Day games on Netflix may prove "a much more efficient use of sponsorship money" than backing an entire season.
But there is a harder challenge beneath the structural one. Younger audiences, shaped by years of digital media consumption, are exceptionally good at identifying inauthenticity. "They can see an inauthentic sponsorship activation a mile away," Redfern warns, "and they will screen it out, or worse, it's harmful to the brand." That means sponsors cannot simply follow audiences to new platforms and replicate what they did on broadcast. The entire nature of the activation has to change too.
The question facing every brand in sponsorship right now is not just where to invest, but whether the assumptions underpinning that investment still hold. In a market where consumption is shifting this quickly, understanding the audience is not a one-off exercise.
Sponsorship Masters
Jo Redfern will explore these themes in her session, The Fan You Used to Know, alongside Sally Moore, Sponsorship Lead at Sage, at Sponsorship Masters on 11 June in London. The session will examine not just how audience behaviour is changing today, but where it is heading and what brands need to do to keep pace. Register your place here.
