Dive Brief:

• Turner Sports is launching Turner Ignite Sports, a new offering that brings sports fans to brands through four areas of expertise including its licenses and partnerships with recognizable sports properties, involvement with live sports events, creative services for content and data analytics and targeting, per a company blog post.
• Turner Sports’ partnerships include NCAA, March Madness, the College World Series, Bleacher Report and ELEAGUE, and its almost 1,000 live sports events include March Madness Music Festivals, March Madness Fan Festivals, Bleacher Ball, CES Sports Business Innovation, and TNT Road Show.
• The services provided by Turner Ignite Sports combine with Turner’s owned and operated media to make it easier for marketers to connect with consumers across channels by putting those four areas of marketing expertise under a single umbrella.

Dive Insight:

The Turner Ignite team has been working with brands on branded content, social optimization, audience targeting across Turner’s entertainment, news and kids properties and the new sports product brings those services to a sports fan audience.

The moves shows how broadcasting companies are trying to work more closely with marketers as viewers migrate away from linear TV and as the agency and platform landscape becomes fragmented. The shift in viewing habits has been particularly pronounced in the sports category over the past few months, with ESPN's subscription count dropping as well as NFL ratings. At the same time, the options for viewing content online continue to grow as Twitter, Snapchat and others sign deals with major sports leagues, helping them attract advertisers. 

Turner has an array of popular sports content and through the new Ignite strategy, the broadcaster hopes to work with marketers to build campaigns that reach viewers no matter what devices they are using to keep up with their favorite teams. 

Turner has been active this past year with new marketing initiatives. At last year’s CES show it announced a new native advertising unit and in March it partnered with IBM to begin using the tech giant’s Watson AI tech in its Turner Insight ad intelligence platform to optimize TV campaigns. And last month it announced it was extending a partnership with Snapchat to create additional original content for the social media app.