24// UTMB Enters Partnerships with Outside & L’Equipe

On UTMB’s new partnerships with L’Equipe and Outside

Hey pals,

It’s fair to say after an +80 hour work week, I am knackered. But with UTMB announcing two new media deals I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about them. Who needs sleep anyway?

On the surface these are great deals for ultrarunning, but they don’t give me confidence in UTMB’s vision or media strategy, or that the deals actually benefit current fans.

As always, email me with your opinions on the deals, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Hope you enjoy,

Matt

Earlier this week UTMB renewed its media rights deal with L’Equipe in France and entered a distribution and content partnership with Outside.

Off the back of a successful trial year, L’Equipe has increased it’s coverage of the UTMB World Series from livestreaming 5 races across it’s online platform, L’Equipe Live, to 11. This includes a showcase of the first two hours and final six hours of UTMB 100 on their broadcast channel (hopefully they’ve learned from last year to time when the ‘last six hours’ actually is after they missed Killian Jornet crossing the finish line for a motocross race). In addition to this L’Equipe will create a documentary around the winners of the past 20 UTMB 100M and a special edition magazine.

The L’Equipe deal wasn’t much of a surprise considering they brought in 2.9M viewers last year. As dedicated readers of Trailmix will know, the Outside deal wasn’t completely unexpected, but it’s a nice addition. The deal is similar to L’Equipe’s - Outside will host the same 11 livestreams on their Outside Watch platform and app, with replays across their FAST channel. The distribution will be geo-fenced to the US and Canada. Additionally Trail Runner will produce content before, during and after select UTMB races.

In typical UTMB fashion, the press releases gave very little away. With few reporters covering trail running, we also had no interviews with the Polleti’s on the backstory or motivation to these deals. Regardless, after talking to a few people more knowledgeable about the deals and reading between the lines, these two partnerships start to paint a picture of UTMB’s ambitions, and struggles, to build its profile and the sport of ultrarunning.

Let’s start with where these deals are based - France and North America.

France is UTMB’s historical stronghold with its largest audience so a deal with the biggest sports media institute is an obvious move for both parties. Trying to build the profile of UTMB in France shouldn’t be difficult considering France has the 2nd largest number of people who have competed in an ultra running event and five of the largest ultra running events by attendance happen in France. But why is there not a pan-European deal with, say, Eurosport, to capture a much larger audience with the same production cost in markets that also have large ultrarunning audiences?

The L’Equipe deal builds on the previous year, but is also not much larger a commitment. To host more live events on their online platform is a nice boost to distribution, but is not a significant investment from L’Equipe considering they run multiple live events at the same time online already. Then consider that the broadcast commitment hasn’t really changed from last year, despite seeing 2.2M people watching during those short few hours.

Perhaps L’Equipe’s reluctance to increase their commitment to UTMB and the lack of pan-European deal hints towards a broader insight that ultrarunning is still not considered a valuable asset for media companies to show. UTMB’s myopic focus on France reveals a blind spot of the Polleti’s that will hamper their media growth.

With the US having the largest number of people who have completed an ultra running event, a US deal was always on the cards. The deal with Outside was fairly obvious considering Ironman also have a deal with Outside to livestream their 70.3 events in the US and Canada, and Outside have the largest English-speaking trail running media publication, Trail Runner.

The deal is built with content in mind. By partnering with Trail Runner, UTMB will be able to increase the volume of articles, and in turn ‘hype’, before, during and after the event delivered to an audience who are already trail and ultra runners themselves, in an environment that is trusted. It’s both a deal about reach and influence in the world’s largest market.

When I emailed Zoe Rom, editor of Trail Runner, about the deal she was quick to state that this deal by no means effects their editorial independence. “UTMB will in no way be able to influence our content, outside of an agreement that we will do previews for events - but they can't influence how/when/why we do them.” Zoe responded in an email “There is an editorial firewall that won't be violated, and no partnership will change that.” With so few outlets publishing about UTMB and holding their often confusing decisions accountable, it’s great to hear that this deal will not be effecting Trail Runner’s output.

As mentioned earlier, this is not Outside’s first livestreaming deal, they also have deals with US Ski & Snowboarding and Ironman. Its quite revealing for what isn’t mentioned in the UTMB deal when compared to the other two recent deals.

The most notable differences are the scope and commitments. In the US Ski & Snowboarding deal, they shared archival footage and the ability to create unique content with athletes, coaches and experts, bundled a Outside Plus membership with membership to US Ski & Snowboarding, and added scope to expand the partnership to Web 3.0 products (remember NFTs?).

The Ironman deal was notable for being 5 years long - the length of UTMB’s partnership was unmentioned. Considering the L’Equipe partnership also did not state how long it would run for, it is likely this partnership is only for this year.

Why not go for more years? Ironman already have over a year of working with Outside, Outside get more content for their video channels (no one i spoke knew if any money changed hands for both the L’Equipe deal or the Outside deal, so lets assume its free) and UTMB get guaranteed distribution in one of their biggest markets. This lack of ambition from UTMB suggests a hesitancy about their media strategy and plans for growth.

This hesitancy is more evident when you start to think about how many platforms they now have livestreams on. Neither L’Equipe nor Outside have any exclusivity around UTMB’s media assets. Therefore the same livestream thats on Outside, will also be on YouTube and ‘UTMB Live’ (minus the live chat). For a viewer in North America, which platform do you go to? Well, despite signing this new partnership with Outside, UTMB want you to go to their website.

I’ll save going into detail about why this makes sense for UTMB in the long run for another post. To keep things simple - by sending people to their website UTMB encourage more people to create accounts on UTMB.com, increasing the amount of email addresses they have, in turn adding more people to their lead generation funnel and learning more about their audience than they would through a 3rd party. Regardless, for the French or North American fan of ultra running, this three platform quandary makes little sense.

Who benefits then? UTMB increase their surface area, creating more visibility for their brand, and the likelihood that new audiences will find their livestreams. L’Equipe and Outside get more content for their video channels, increasing their ad space in new categories. UTMB sponsors also get greater distribution of the ads in trusted spaces (in turn UTMB can charge more for their sponsorship packages). Once again, these deals are about increasing UTMB’s revenue, with minimal benefits for the fan.

I don’t want to leave too sour a note here - I do believe these deals are a great step in the right direction for ultra running. On the long road to professionalisation, UTMB needs to build a case that the sport can deliver value for media owners and sponsors, whilst building a fandom, and these deals are fairly risk-free ways of doing so. My primary concern is whether UTMB has the right expertise on hand to build ultra running’s profile in the general public, without losing the support from the sport’s current fans.