As the current Men's ICC T20 World Cup is underway in the USA and West Indies, Manifest chats with Finn Bradshaw, head - digital, International Cricket Council, to learn how the governing body is using digital to reach out tot he cricket fan, which includes partnerships with likes of Roblox, and more...

Edited excerpts: 

The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup has started - what are the plans the you have to reach out to cricket fans on digital?

It’s the start of a new rights cycle. We are into a four-year deal with the likes of Disney Star, which is great.

From a digital perspective, we are going direct to market in a lot more territories. In more than 80 countries, fans can watch the games for free on ICC TV. That’s not something we have been able to offer before.

We have also worked on a rights deal with the BBC. I grew up listening to radio broadcasts late at night, and I think it’s got a place in the heart of cricket fans which might not be the same as other sports.

We want to reach out to more fans and make sure that more people enjoy the game of cricket. That’s part of getting the World Cup to the USA. Secondly, we want to reward those fans who are dedicated to coming to our platforms. We’ve launched Hindi Instagram and Facebook handles for the first time and that’s not just about translating from English to Hindi, but creating content specifically for the Hindi-speaking fans.

We have also launched Fan Passport which is like a rewards programme equivalent to a frequent flyer programme for fans. They get rewarded for playing fantasy games, the predictor contest or even a Roblox game and unlock content, experiences and things like that. It’s just a whole lot of upgrades and improvements too.

Last year during the Men’s ODI World Cup in India, you stated how you wanted to reach out to the 10-year-old along with Gen Z. While activities like partnering with Roblox could help there, do you think that the 10-year-old now isn’t as interested in the sport as a 10-year-old was about a decade ago?

Every sport in the world is challenged by how to reach younger people. When I grew up, there weren’t many entertainment options, so my generation was probably going to watch cricket on TV. I’ve got an eight-year-old son, and I don’t think he’s ever watched broadcast television in his life. He’s either watching Disney+ or playing games on the iPad or PlayStation. So we want to make sure wherever the children are, they are aware of cricket and experience it.

Our strategy with Roblox is to partner with the big games that are popular with the youth to incorporate cricket into them. It gets children used to things that happen in cricket and gets them to follow it. We need to increase awareness. Our social media handles and the audience across those channels are much younger than other sports. It’s partly because we are popular across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which are countries that have young audiences.

We have a strong audience in the 18-34 group. But the last thing we need to do is sit here, do nothing and suddenly 20 years later wonder where did all the fans go. Our role in digital is to understand what’s changing in the world, how people’s behaviour is changing and how we need to adapt to meet them.

India would rank by far number one in terms of fans following the ICC on digital. You mentioned Pakistan and Bangladesh too which are big markets. Given the USA has a mix of these South Asian cricket fans, would it be among the top three markets in absolute numbers?

No. But it’s in the top five though after India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the UAE. The interesting thing from the brand perspective is that the USA is a very wealthy nation. So when you’re talking to sponsors and brands who might want to talk to cricket fans, to be able to offer both the scale and the affordability, is a big opportunity which other sports won’t be able to offer.

In terms of content, with the new rights cycle and more content on ICC’s digital handles, will you be offering older games from the ICC World Cups to catch up on?

Yes. Currently, a lot of them are on Facebook for the last World Cup. The plan in the future is to provide that online home for cricket fans as part of our offerings. We have rebuilt our website recently and this is the first big tournament after the revamp. We know we have a little work left to fill out all the content, but the thinking behind rebuilding the website was that most other sports have one platform for live streaming and one place for everything else; we wanted to combine it all in one place. To do this it does take a lot of time and we need to spend the next 12 months filling out all the highlights from the previous editions. We want to make the content easy to find and also have the best experience for them.

It’s been four years since you took over this role. What were your targets when you took over and what’s been achieved?

The first target was to reach more fans. Last year, on the channels that we control, we had more than 26 billion views. I don’t know if anyone can compete with that, especially a national federation. We feel like we have done a really good job in reaching more fans and making it easier for them to engage with cricket.

We also wanted to know more about the fans – who they are, where they live, and what’s the best way to engage with them. All that data is so important. It helps when we enter a country like the USA so we find it easy to tell fans that the World Cup is on and they can watch it. So a lot of our KPIs have been about collecting customer data and getting a better understanding of fans for better experiences. We are starting to use that data to inform whether it’s marketing campaigns or new products or sharing the content we create.

Influencers have been a big part of the marketing strategy for previous World Cups. Are you following that strategy for this tournament as well?

It’s reduced for this tournament due to logistic issues like visas etc. There will be a few, but not as many as we had during the tournament in India. We had a huge programme there last year. 

What we’re doing this year might be smaller but the impact will be more. There’s an American content creator Jomboy who has been explaining the game of to the Americans. He’s part of our commentary team. That’s a real innovative step forward. It’s making an influencer a meaningful part of the strategy.

85% of the digital spending for brands is spread across Meta and Google. Would that be the case for the ICC?

Facebook and Instagram are the greatest digital marketing platforms ever created if you want to reach targeted audiences. That’s where we put a lot of our money. Our audience is just massive there and we know more about them. You also need to do the normal stuff like search marketing on other channels. It’s not either or, it’s a blend of things. We are lucky, we are not trying to sell insurance to the consumer.

But your competition would be YouTube channels, cricket websites, news websites, influencers etc...

That’s why we keep trying to evolve and change things. There’s power in partnerships. The partnership we have with Meta proves it’s better to do things collaboratively with both platforms and creators. It’s sort of the constant challenge of digital – social media is an amazing marketing tool, but you want to have that direct relationship with the fan. We know people want to watch things on Instagram, but we want them to reach our app too. So we create great products there.

For women’s cricket - do you follow a different mantra to grow the game? Are you considering a different handle for women’s cricket like you launched one for Hindi? Or it’s the same fans watching and interacting with both men’s and women’s cricket?

We know the people who are most likely to become women’s cricket fans and they are existing men’s cricket fans. So we want to use the audience that we have on our existing channels to create awareness around women’s cricket. We also never have two tournaments running at the same time. So we have a balance there.

We build up the audience because they’re passionate fans of cricket – if you’re an Indian fan, you’ll end up supporting both the men’s and women’s teams and we want to leverage that.

Social media allows brands to engage with their fans. The ICC doesn’t do that. Is that something you’d want to change or is it a strategy you want to retain?

The challenge is that we are at a large scale now. We are at more than 100 million followers, and we don’t want to have tokenistic interactions with fans. The resource efforts to engage with our fanbase will be crazy.

We are looking to create communities with our fans. Our NFT partner Fancraze is a highly engaged and strong community. We are creating bespoke events and experiences with fans. We are doing an event in New York that’s exclusive for the ICC family where they get to meet Ricky Ponting and Ravi Shastri. It’s a small group of people who’ll get to do that, but it’ll be an experience they’ll cherish forever and we want to scale these experiences.

This article first appeared in the June print issue of Manifest. Subscribe to Manifest here.