The Changing Future of Triathlon? Industry Takeaways from the TBI Conference

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The Changing Future of Triathlon? Industry Takeaways from the TBI Conference

As much as the Triathlon Business Conference at times resembles a high school cafeteria, with everyone trying to decide which table is the cool table,...

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ChristineCogger

Is there anyone at this conference who is not from the USA? I mean, TB "international" and all...

Ryan Heisler

@ChristineCogger plenty from America's hat and then a fair number from Europe.

ChristineCogger

Interesting. Their SoMe output makes it sound very USA-centric.

Ryan Heisler

Let's face facts: by far, the most revenue generated on tri is based in North America. By nature, it's going to be US-centric. But a constant theme was needing to tap international markets and grow beyond the M30-45, white, $108K average income demographic.

DHansenTri

Loved the statement about age groupers doing anything you want for a 20% discount. Couldn't be more true. And why not promote that approach over sponsoring professionals? Seems like a way better deal to get wider representation of your products with more people wearing / using because they can get it at a discount, and you're driving sales overall, possibly enough to reach better economies of scale and greater profit.

BrandonMarshTX

Re: What women want, women's only races, etc. Is it a case of what was old is new again? With the exception of the manicure comment, a lot of this has been tried in regards to women's only races. There are still women's only events, but many production companies have seemingly scaled down or halted them. Austin used to have 3 in a year. We have 1 I think...spa girl.

Please do not take this as a dismissive comment, but if it didn't work in the past, will it or why will it work now? Are the comments about 'manicures at the expo' in jest or is that a real drawing point? I am genuinely interested because many times when I see a comment like that (as a male) or one related to 'simply' adding 'pink' many of the female responses are that it is sexist or somehow demeaning...

Having been around long enough to know, many of the women's only races have been acquired in the past, only to be stopped or seriously scaled down a year or more later. For the good that happens when a race is saved (IM Maryland for instance), how much more of a hole is left when that race subsequently goes away?

Kelly O'Mara

BrandonMarshTX said:

Please do not take this as a dismissive comment, but if it didn't work in the past, will it or why will it work now? Are the comments about 'manicures at the expo' in jest or is that a real drawing point?

IMO, I don't think it's going to work. Not if you just do things the same way you've been doing them -- as you said, it didn't work in the past. Again, IMO, I think the problem of not appealing to women isn't going to be automatically solved by throwing together some women's only events or having manicures (and, yes, that was an actual example someone gave about something they're going to have at their women's triathlon festival events), I think the problem is in the framing/marketing. If it comes across as men being condescending -- like, 'oh you ladies need a women's only thing and I'm sure you're worried about getting your nails dirty' -- then it doesn't work, and it really doesn't play into the whole marketing appeal/point of triathlon in the first place. Why would I buy into that? If, instead, it comes across as genuinely female-driven, and that tends to mean from a point of empowerment, then it works -- like the Nike Women's Marathon races (though that's a very different thing, but you get my point). That can still include women's only events and manicures, but the marketing and tone and language need to be different. Which really is the real problem with why triathlon puts women off.

DHansenTri

My thought purely for increasing participation, but not truly for what I'd consider enhancing the sport:
Focus on that "fun" aspect of triathlon. Stop increasing fees to do a relay over individual racing, involving friends = fun. Add a "for fun" category, rather than age group, of racing whereby the objectives are a little different. Not just overall results, include other categories like team that wears the craziest costume, team with the fastest splits, slowest splits, most un-aero or slow bike while still being competitive, etc. Throw a "pit stop" in each sport whereby team members would have to complete a challenge. Make it the same challenge and let them compare against each other, make it different so they can argue... whatever. The point is to make it fun. Shit, you could even do a beer sprint (instead of a beer mile) and add that to a triathlon festival weekend.

uli

Ryan Heisler said:

Let's face facts: by far, the most revenue generated on tri is based in North America. By nature, it's going to be US-centric. But a constant theme was needing to tap international markets and grow beyond the M30-45, white, $108K average income demographic.

Do you have any numbers to back that up? From what I see as bike race operator in South America, I'm not so sure. And there is just as much money.

BrandonMarshTX

@Kelly O'Mara Thanks for the reply.

Man, I do sound like #grumpymarsh. Maybe as I figure out just what it is I'll do when 'I grow up' I can be a disrupter in a good way instead of just an 41 year old grumpy guy asking questions behind a keyboard.

Apparently, pros still suck. And, I was kind of disheartened to hear that the PTU was not there. As an individual pro, I considered going the last few years and thought it might be worth it. But, it was an expense that I didn't feel I could absorb. Cost vs benefit and all. Write-offs don't feed you. Next year/This year with it in Dallas I'll plan on going.

Brooks Doughtie

A few ideas.

1) Challenge is coming back to US in 2017?!?!?! Ummmm ok

2) PTU not being there. That's a joke, anyone who's a pro and a member should be asking why not 1 person was there. Apparently PTU prez needed/demanded full expense paid trip in order to attend. Fair enough, but when pros get shitted on, dont give me any excuses. You have an industry business meeting and not 1 person from PTU was there. I think the last thing in Kelly's post was almost like PTU should get a nice pat on the head for "trying" but that's about it.

3) @Kelly O'Mara was there any discussion on youth/junior development and/or NCAA impact? I ask because that's what is exploding. Youth in the sport, and was just curious if any talk on how NCAA may be impacted and/or sponsors into that??

Kelly O'Mara

@Brookes Doughtie - Yeah, there was talk from USAT about pushing youth dev. and that mixed team relay is the future (and some discussion of NCAA, but only in the context of women's promotion). The issue seems to be there's this gap between developing youth, and then those youth turning into young professionals that have money to spend. No one seemed to think 20-somethings were going to be a big target market, because they don't have money. (Not that I don't know tons of 20-somethings who are spending money they don't have.)

@uli - Yeah, there were lots and lots of #s showing the US is the biggest market by far. It's a $2.8B market with 575K active racing athletes, according to the TBI survey, so it just totally dwarfs everything else right now -- even things that are growing massively.

halvard

Good to see that Norway with Norseman and Rockman took 3 prizes. Viking power

Brooks Doughtie

@Kelly O'Mara well done on a great summary. TRS is rounding into a really solid entity within Tri.

Aaron Webstey

With our two best writers being scared lil' ol' women, I wouldn't bet on this site winning a TBI award any time soon. Agree that this is a great article though.

BrandonMarshTX

Aaron Webstey said:

With our two best writers being scared lil' ol' women, I wouldn't bet on this site winning a TBI award any time soon. Agree that this is a great article though.

I mean, who is keeping track, but TRS did get a tweet quote or mention from @TriBusinessIntl

Ryan Heisler

The theme of my article forthcoming is: basically, pros, start proving the ROI to race directors and the brands that sponsor you. Otherwise, the AG Clubs are going to continue to eat your lunch into irrelevancy.

Rich Allen was initially supposed to be on the panel Kelly hosted. He backed out (and I have no reason to doubt that statement from Jack Caress at TBI).

@BrandonMarshTX your name came up quite a few times as somebody worthwhile to speak at TBI next year.

The industry is horridly positioned to try and capitalize on any momentum from an Olympic year, especially in the US with a potential sweep of the podium by the women in play. Nobody has a plan. It's insane.

KBG

@BrandonMarshTX From several conversations this past week, I think TBI is coming around to see the importance of TRS.

uli

Kelly O'Mara said:

@uli - Yeah, there were lots and lots of #s showing the US is the biggest market by far. It's a $2.8B market with 575K active racing athletes, according to the TBI survey, so it just totally dwarfs everything else right now -- even things that are growing massively.

Who provided these numbers? I have extensive experience in cycling and running when it comes to South America. I live and work in NYC and Italy so I think I have a decent grasp on what's going on in NA and Europe, I'm much more hesitant to trust these numbers.

I recently spoke to a leader in the world of running (based in NYC and London) and asked about their expansion plans. I almost fell off my chair when they said "North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa". As long as it's English speaking, they can cope...

Go to Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Santiago or Sao Paolo on any given Sunday and report back to me. They are 2-3 years ahead of Asia but not more.

Not that I loved her reply. Some of the biggest players really are ill equipped when it comes to acting truly global. They are living back in the 1990s.

BrandonMarshTX

Ryan Heisler said:

The theme of my article forthcoming is: basically, pros, start proving the ROI to race directors and the brands that sponsor you. Otherwise, the AG Clubs are going to continue to eat your lunch into irrelevancy.

I see this a lot. I've tried to make a case on other sites, even sending an email rant to a couple of folks about it most recently. Obviously I am sensitive to the plight of pros though becoming less so, unfortunately. And sponsors. And retailers. The last to me is important, and that's where I dislike the age group teams. I get that the world and business, etc. is changing. Some of the disconnects that I see, and that I suspect few are able to answer are these:
- Can the ROI of age group teams honestly be quantified any better than that from pros? I want to be educated on this.
- Can a sponsor (or pro for that matter) quantify the ROI of a pro? I get that sponsorship is a line item expense. We likely sold more gear through our local shop than by using any of the 'codes' that we might have had as pros. I can't tell you how many Cervelos we sold through ATC, was it 1 or 10 or 50? Or how many saddles? Etc. etc. etc. I know that the numbers through web links are very unimpressive.

It is easy to pile on pros. Rev did it, like 3 times. WTC does it. Sponsors do it. It's hard to pile on sponsors because there are good and bad. And race producers. Because you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you.

An open ended question to the industry. With the exception of companies who have licensing or expo deals or other production deal (awards, food come to mind) with Races. What is the ROI from a 'GoPro' sponsorship of Kona? Ford? Subaru? The ROI for Foster Grant? How about Vitacost's past sponsorship? K-swiss?

Shit, another grumpy post by a guy behind a keyboard. I really 'should' get back to trainingpeaks or something.

James Lange

My wife did a women's only super sprint in 2011 and that experience turned us both into triathletes. Success! However, her sister, step-mom, and a family friend also did it and for 2 of them it was one-and-done, and the third came back 2 of the next 4 years to do that race, but she's never considered doing another event (or upgrading from a mountain bike). So according to my exhaustive research (peer reviewed by my wife) women's only events are 25% effective at bringing women into the sport. Maybe I'll try and get a plenary at next years TBI conference to present my results.

Ryan Heisler

@BrandonMarshTX now we're talking.

There are readily available tools on the digital content side that both pros aren't utilizing, and even if they were, I don't think most of the industry is actually using. Which is amazing, given the fact that more often than not the only expected ROI is brand awareness/ROI.

For races, it makes more sense IMO for them to have ambassadorships, in that you can actually showcase race registrations as a bottom-line improvement. And having been on that side of the fence before, I can tell you that there were significant improvements in race registration numbers in years with certain people on the team, and others where people didn't do what they should have. It's actionable and able to be measured.

In your example with retailers, I think you can correlate sales lift to pro relationships. But that's on a local level. I don't think bike brands will ever see much ROI beyond "brand exposure," but based upon certain media coverage goals, e-mail deployments, etc. you can generally see a good impression based goal come out.

But you can also look up demonstrably what the average CPM for other forms of media are: print, digital media, etc. for these brands. And you can present to them: look, it's going to be more cost-effective for you to sponsor me, because I can beat those CPM goals. And then utilize appropriate tagging/tracking in place to measure what you drive to web.

You should be able to easily measure the number of visitors you drive per month to your sponsors owned digital properties, and then they should be able to actively measure what those people do on their websites. Often times, this is where the AG teams eat pros lunch; local events + social media presence winds up influencing local sales.

I feel like this is an opportunity to leverage: being able to give people these tools, prove out ROI, and have brands be able to actively measure their ROI in both digital and traditional mediums to make the best choices for growth.

@uli: growth in that marketplace is likely going to come from the run side of the house, and then spill back over into multisport. But I think there's an overwhelming industry trend to stay North American-centric. I think that's part of the reason you see such a collective "meh" at the idea of any sort of capitalization on Rio momentum. It's staggering.

Jennifer Post

DHansenTri said:

My thought purely for increasing participation, but not truly for what I'd consider enhancing the sport:
Focus on that "fun" aspect of triathlon. Stop increasing fees to do a relay over individual racing, involving friends = fun. Add a "for fun" category, rather than age group, of racing whereby the objectives are a little different. Not just overall results, include other categories like team that wears the craziest costume, team with the fastest splits, slowest splits, most un-aero or slow bike while still being competitive, etc. Throw a "pit stop" in each sport whereby team members would have to complete a challenge. Make it the same challenge and let them compare against each other, make it different so they can argue... whatever. The point is to make it fun. Shit, you could even do a beer sprint (instead of a beer mile) and add that to a triathlon festival weekend.

Sweden has seen a huge growth in triathlon. Mainly due to Lisa Norden's Olympic Silver. That got the attention of the masses. What's different is most races have two AG classes. One is competitive and one is recreational. Recreational class nearly always includes some type of corporate team challenge that really drives the numbers. Having two distinct classes makes a difference because the competitive AGers have their time to shine before giving up the course to those that just want to test themselves and/or do something fun with friends and colleagues.

uli

Ryan Heisler said:

But I think there's an overwhelming industry trend to stay North American-centric.

You define the industry as NA based ("stay"). This is where it all falls apart. There is also an industry that has nothing to do with North America. We've seen this in Europe and it happens again. No doubt, triathlon heritage will always been NA based and modeled off. But that's where it ends if English speakers don't open up their minds enough.

uli

Ryan Heisler said:

For races, it makes more sense IMO for them to have ambassadorships, in that you can actually showcase race registrations as a bottom-line improvement.

Did you read that ESW piece on marketing for races? They suggest giving codes to ambassadors to track race registrations. I wouldn't make our ambassadors sell entries.

Ryan Heisler

@uli Yup. The basic premise is some trackable registration code.

That being said, utilizing your ambassadors through encouraging participation through other methods (e.g., group rides, etc.) and then instead of a discount code, merely using proper URL tagging, you could still track the number of registrations that person generated via any type of generic social media posting that they did. Measurable brand awareness, site visits, and then see if they generated email signups, race registrations, etc. or see where these users dropped off and be able to re-analyze your checkout process, product pricing/offers, and more.

If the run or tri industry in another country is generating billions, by all means, enlighten me on the marketplace. And I say country rather than region, simply because it's tough to grow economy on a single potential campaign or movement when there's not the volume to necessarily support it.

AlwaysCurious

At the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Marsh:

I think a major problem is triathlon's focus on buying so much CRAP--gear, components, "nutrition", clothing, accessories. This feeling of needing to spend $5000 on STUFF just to show up at a race.

Why is it a problem? Because there are so many manufacturers that any age grouper (or team) who wants to feel so pro can get "sponsored". They sell their soul for $40 worth of gels.

Which leads to no big non-endemic sponsors who can actually pay for great television coverage and pro prize purses. Because RDs themselves have gotten used to the free schwag model. "Wow, you'll give me a pair of wheels? Sure, you can be the title sponsor for my 800 person race. I'm so blessed!!"

We are the problem, people. Let's stop buying stuff, demanding schwag at races, and wetting ourselves at the prospect of a free pair of sunglasses that we can instagram as #sponsored.

Show up on your old gear, race your heart out, and maybe get a green banana at the finish. Let the pros worry about having all the top notch gear. You'll have just as much fun, will have some money left in your bank account, and will make RDs (and Ironman) get off their butts to actually find some non-endemic sponsors.

Yes, I'm grumpy about the Old White Men running our sport into the ground.

Brooks Doughtie

Show up on your old gear, race your heart out, and maybe get a green banana at the finish. Let the pros worry about having all the top notch gear. You'll have just as much fun, will have some money left in your bank account, and will make RDs (and Ironman) get off their butts to actually find some non-endemic sponsors.

________

I'm not understanding how technological advances in equipment is keeping RD and IM from finding non-endemic sponsors.


Boring racing and no media in the sport is far more important to figuring out than cutting back on tech gains.

But it probaly felt good, so good on ya!

uli

Ryan Heisler said:

Measurable brand awareness, site visits, and then see if they generated email signups, race registrations, etc. or see where these users dropped off and be able to re-analyze your checkout process, product pricing/offers, and more.

I'm not a fan of measuring everything. I don't like the pressure that it puts on the ambassadors. We choose people we like and let them be themselves.

Ryan Heisler said:

If the run or tri industry in another country is generating billions, by all means, enlighten me on the marketplace. And I say country rather than region, simply because it's tough to grow economy on a single potential campaign or movement when there's not the volume to necessarily support it.

I don't have financials. But please know that there is never a single correct number other than participants (look at results, don't listen to RDs).

Region? The big LatAm cities. All of them. Have you been to one recently?

AlwaysCurious

I didn't mean to single out tech gains--just the overall orgy of consumption and schwag. But tech gains are for sure part of that orgy--"buy a new frame for $5000 to save 5 watts!" Instead of, you know, riding the bike I already have a little more to gain those 5 watts.

Brooks Doughtie said:

________

I'm not understanding how technological advances in equipment is keeping RD and IM from finding non-endemic sponsors.


Boring racing and no media in the sport is far more important to figuring out than cutting back on tech gains.

But it probaly felt good, so good on ya!