PGA reboot seeks to diversify fanbase through digital refresh

The organisation’s stellar digital reboot includes a website update, and an app with real-time data, video features, with plans to integrate more augmented reality tools, in a bid to attract more fans.

Rowin Caron of Netherlands plays a shot during the first round of the Astara Golf Championship, as part of the PGA tour. Photo: Buda Mendes/Getty Images

An updated PGA Tour website coming Tuesday and an app introduced in November feature new or expanded golf elements such as deeper statistics and real-time data, more video features, and gambling odds and links to betting sites, a nod to the arrival of legal sports gambling in more states.

The organisation plans to add features in the coming months, including more augmented reality tools.

It says its goal is to continually improve its digital properties to diversify its fan base and keep up with how fans are watching golf.

The changes come as professional sports strive to draw younger fans who are showing less interest than older generations. Twenty-seven per cent of Gen Z consumers said they watch live sports on a weekly basis, compared with 48 per cent of Millennials and 46 per cent of US adults overall, according to a November survey from research company Morning Consult.

The PGA Tour, a membership association for touring professional golfers that co-sanctions tournaments, is familiar with the dynamic. Thirteen per cent of Gen Z respondents said they viewed the tour favourably, compared with 27 per cent of US adults and 33 per cent of Baby Boomers, according to a survey from Morning Consult’s Brand Intelligence unit in January.

But younger players are taking up the sport. According to data from the National Golf Foundation, the junior cohort of players between 6 and 17 years old experienced the largest percentage gains of all demographic segments in the pandemic era, with 3.4 million playing on a course in 2022. The organisation also said in 2022 a record 3.3 million people played on a golf course for the first time – with newcomers being more diverse than the overall participation base. Beginners are 45 per cent more likely to be non-white and 35 per cent more likely to be female, compared with current golfers, it said.

Joohyung Kim of Korea, winner of the 2022 Wyndham Championship and one of the one of the youngest players to ever win on the PGA Tour. Photo: Eakin Howard/Getty Images/AFP

The PGA Tour has also been contending with the upstart Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, which last year began hosting competitions that organisers said were formatted for faster and more exciting play.

The organisation’s new app includes an Instagram-like “stories” feature that shows short, vertical video clips of shots on the course, text cards to highlight stats and other content types.

“Golf is not a short game,” said Derek Fridman, a design partner at digital agency Work & Co, which worked with the PGA Tour on its digital reboot. “We started to work together on the idea of sort of making things bite-sized, even making transitions to vertical versus horizontal video – that’s how we get our entertainment and how we get our news and a host of other things.”

Changing the type of content that the PGA Tour presents as well as the way it presents it is necessary to appeal to young viewers who consume media differently than their parents or grandparents, said Mark Beal, a Rutgers School of Communication and Information assistant professor who formerly was a partner of a sports public relations and marketing agency and is an author on Gen Z.

“They’re not sitting down and watching a four-plus hour telecast of a golf tournament,” Mr Beal said. “As the consumer gets younger, they’re shifting more to what’s in their hand, their mobile device. For them, it’s about giving (them) something that is user-friendly, really efficient, really real-time.”

Sports leagues on the whole are chasing social-media platforms’ ability to gather fans and monetise them, said Charlie Beall, vice-president of digital strategy at sports, media and events company IMG and its digital sports arm Seven League. That can include creating products fans find valuable as well as creating revenue opportunities such as better and more targeted advertising and sponsor messaging, he said.

“To an extent, sports themselves failed to capitalise on that digital relationship with their fans,” Mr Beall said, adding that there’s a sentiment in the sports industry that social-media platforms grew in part because of sports fans, and sporting organisations effectively gave content such as highlights and player interviews to those platforms for free. Golf in particular suffers from an accessibility problem, because there is a perception that it demands relatively large amounts of time and money to play, Mr Beall said.

But the battle for time and attention is not unique to golf, and all sports need more frictionless, efficient ways for people to engage with them, Mr Beall added.

Golf is doing that through shorter formats, urban golf entertainment venues and stronger collaboration with video game publishers and other media companies, he said.

Golf fans traditionally got into the sport either because they played while growing up or took it up while in the latter part of their careers when they could afford it and had more time, said Scott Gutterman, the PGA Tour’s senior vice-president of digital operations. Now potential fans might also arrive via video games or the Topgolf chain of driving ranges, Mr Gutterman said. The Tour will also be featured in a coming Netflix series, which the organisation hopes will interest new fans.

“Really over the last five to 10 years, the future golfer is that type of person, right?” he said referring to people who became fans through activities such as video games or Topgolf. “It’s a bigger audience … so how do you get that person?”

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