21// The Long and Short of Race Coverage
A Trailmix of news, quotes and ramblings about trail media
Hey pals,
Hope you’re all having great weekends :)
It’s pitch season at the day job so my consumption of running news has been fairly light over the past month. Today’s news isn’t exactly fresh, but hopefully you’ll appreciate the analysis.
This week, Transgrancanaria goes live and Hoka goes to the moon.
Cheers,
Matt
A YouTube livestream has fast become standard for flagship races with ambitions to grow. That’s great for fans who already know about the race, but YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t make livestreams easy to discover. The traditional next step is to then look for linear TV media rights deals, which Trangrancanaria did two weeks ago.
By most measures, the production was a success. The event was streamed across Teledeporte for 11 hours over two days, which was then pushed to local channels such as TV Canarias and Esport3. 1.5M tuned in to watch with the peak when Courtney Dauwalter crossed the finish line to claim a course record.
With Transgrancanaria attracting 1.5M live viewers on Teledeporte and UTMB seeing 2.9M across L’Equipe, we’re beginning to see the audiences trail running can pull on linear TV. Both UTMB and TGC didn’t receive money for their media rights deals, but undoubtably both will be using these figures in their sales pitches to show the value trail running can bring.
This is all positive steps for the sport, but there’s a mysterious elephant in the room. Live TV viewership is on the decline and the audience is aging. This is the case in Spain, France and pretty much everywhere. Trail running is seeking linear TV media rights deals, when the distribution of that format is waning.
Sport is one of the main reasons linear TV viewership is still high. In the US, 2022 NFL games made up 88% of the most viewed TV shows. In Italy, linear TV viewership declined when Series A (the top Italian football/soccer league) moved online to DAZN. Trail running should benefit from this demand for more sports coverage from broadcasters, but without much TV experience it will still be a risk to cover what is a niche sport.
Then we have the issue of age. Younger audiences not only don’t watch as much linear TV, they don’t watch full competitions, instead preferring the convenience of highlights. When a competition in trail running can last 24hrs, thats an issue. TGC and UTMB both made a significant effort to increase their short video output around the races to cover this base. The single short video of Killian Jornet running to victory at UTMB racked up 2.1M views on Instagram and another 142K on TikTok, almost equalling the same viewership the entire race received on linear TV.
The future of race coverage in trail running isn’t as easy it used to be. To reach all demographics, flagship races need a full production team for the linear TV and online livestream, a short video team cutting up clips and capturing the behind the scenes and finally an editing team to create the highlight reel.
When race organisers aren’t currently receiving significant profit for facilitating any of these formats, this is a sizeable gamble that at some point this will all pay off. Where the pay out will come from is currently unknown.
—
My post last week about journalism in trail running seemed to have struck on something in the community with five times as many people reading the post than are subscribers.
Buzz Burrell had the comment of week summarising the history of online media to a tee - you get what you pay for.
—
Despite Born to Run 2 being quietly released last year, the hype from zero drop zealots seems to have died down to a quiet murmur. Big bouncy Hoka has taken over running shoe retail and continued its journey to running shoe dominance after a 91% YoY growth in Q3 revenue, returning over $1bn in the past 9 months.
You don’t have to be following market share reports to know that Hoka’s are pretty much everywhere. When you’re next on a run, do a tally of how many runners are wearing Hoka’s. It’s likely to be a lot. If you count roughly 25% of shoes, you’re about there.
Only Brooks sells more shoes than Hoka in the specialty running category, and thats only by a few percentage points; it’s hard to see Hoka not leading the category by next year.
Even Decker, owners of Hoka, can’t anticipate how much Hoka will grow. On their investors call, Hoka CEO, David Power (strong name for a boss), refused to say how much they expect to grow in 2023 and purposefully increased their inventory levels by 32% YoY to keep up with the unexpected demand.
Allow me to be boring business bro for a minute. Purposely increasing your inventory levels when every running shoe company and retailer has been struggling to offload their shoes is a ballsy move. Hoka even increased their prices towards the end of last year and the demand did not drop.
How high can Hoka bounce?
Can it grow to Nike levels? Probably not, it would need to 40x its last quarter, but Hoka are attempting a similar trajectory to what Nike went through. Last year Hoka followed in the foot steps of Nike when it expanded to more general sports shoe retailers, such as Dicks and Foot Locker, to increase its distribution and uptake in non-running audiences. Power was keen to state that they’re not going to increase that distribution too much to avoid diluting the brand (i.e the story of Puma).
It’s likely Hoka will try to stay in its lane as long as there is market share to take, with the occasional pander to a generalist audience with its quirky colourways. But there are only so many runners. At some point you have to broaden your appeal to the generalist market and balance catering to your core audience’s needs whilst satiating the demand of non-runners.
The question then becomes, how low will Hoka go?