Pilot Health, a Mens TeleHealth brand targeting sensitive men’s health issues launched and operated by Eucalyptus who recently raised $8M in an investment round lead by Woolworths and Blackbird Ventures, has teamed up with six Football Federation Australia state governing bodies, purchasing advertising space within their Men's National Premier League (NPL) live broadcasts for the remainder of the 2020 season.

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This is a landmark moment for the likes of Football NSW, QLD, NT, TASMANIA, WEST and SA member federations, utilising the power of a standardised broadcast look and feel with sponsorship display, tracking and reporting powered by LIGR Live to aggregate their online audience and monetise their live broadcasts.

"It is really exciting to be able to partner with the Australian Football Federations utilising LIGR Live’s platform to deliver this first of its kind advertising. At Pilot we are always looking for new ways to reach our audience and the LIGR platform allows that, while also supporting the second tier of football across the country in a seamless, fast, aggregated process."

Tim Doyle
Co-Founder, Eucalyptus & Pilot Health.

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This partnership highlights the value of aggregated live sports audiences, in particular at the second tier & grassroots level, where fans are hyper localised, passionate and loyal to their teams. Australian football has the largest combined registered participants in Australia, and to be able to target those participants and fans of football is a particularly powerful proposition to innovative brands like Pilot, looking to put their name in front of their target demographic within content that they are passionate about.

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By utilising LIGR Live’s platform to standardise their broadcast quality, the state federations are able to sell specific percentages of advertising time within a game, as well as specific events during the game such as Goals, Team Lists, Cards etc... They are also able to track every sponsorship action and report back to Pilot on how many times their campaigns have displayed, how long they were on the screen for, how much of the screen they took up and what actions their campaign was attached to. When combined with the aggregate view and engagement data collected by the football states across Youtube, Facebook and NPL.TV, you now have a commercial model that can be valued, and scaled rapidly to attract and capitalise on further commercial opportunity from brands looking to target Australian football fans.

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The campaign with Pilot was able to be closed, and delivered across the national NPL live broadcasts in a matter of minutes in a completely self-serve manner, operated by the member federation staff who login to LIGR every weekend. This is a case study on how technology innovation within the live stream and broadcast space has allowed sporting bodies to broadcast professional looking games at scale, cost efficiently, while attracting, distributing and capitalising on external brand and commercial partnerships.

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Brian Meinrath, Head of Commercial at Football NSW, believes this is just the start of Australian football working collaboratively to deliver value to innovative brands across its broadcasts.

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“With all major NPL competitions now having a standardised approach to live stream presentation, it presents a fantastic opportunity for aggregation of our broadcast sponsorship inventory across the states. In addition, Football NSW and Football QLD launched the NPL.TV OTT platform this season and the depth of audience data we now have at our disposal can only support our ability to meet the needs of broadcast sponsors”.

Brian Meinrath
Head of Commercial, Football NSW

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A partnership through broadcast, technology innovation and sponsorship is a win-win-win for both brand, technology provider and sports organisation. Proving there is opportunity for sports organisations to work together and build a sustainable, commercial operation by owning and producing their own content and subsequently monetising their fan engagement.

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“It is maybe the most encouraging sign of LIGR’s value as a company moving forward, to be able to provide a distribution network for brands to access live grassroots sports. It is naturally hard for brands to do multiple small deals across multiple sports organisations. Being able to have a single, white labelled platform that aggregates those opportunities simplifies the process for brands that show a keen interest in live amateur sport, but have no way to enter the playing field effectively. Pilot’s interest in the Australian football’s audience has put money directly back into the member federations which is the ultimate goal of LIGR. This is an exciting step forward for LIGR, football in Australia and brands that want to target these audiences”.

Luke McCoy
Co-Founder & CEO, LIGR

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