Sun Goals: storytelling vital to success, says News UK
Hamish White, the man in charge of developing the Sun’s ‘Goals’ video app – which helped pave the way to placing the newsbrand’s content behind a paywall – has said that storytelling has been vital to its success.
The head of emerging platforms at News UK said the business was looking for an opportunity to build on the Sun’s strong editorial and to build something with “relevancy”. Football, White said, had been the right choice – and a “light-bulb moment” that enabled News UK to put content fully behind a paywall last summer.
However, learning from the mistakes of others, White said it was how the business embedded video content into a wider narrative to “augment” what the Sun had always done best that enabled it to start gaining new customers.
“What [the Sun] does well is tell stories,” White said.
“We tell great stories about news and celebrity and about football. So we went to great lengths to try and reiterate these into our core proposition.
“The vast majority of views we’ve seen – by quite some way – have been embedded in our traditional match reports,” cementing News UK’s view that as newsbrands look to make better returns on expensively assembled content, they must play to their existing strengths rather than merely “playing videos for the sake of it.”
White’s comments were made at this year’s Video Upfronts, which saw leading players from across the online video market present original content, pre-production material and channel opportunities available for advertising or sponsorship, and to highlight branded content potential.
White shared with advertisers, agencies and media owners some of the key learnings from the launch last summer of Sun+ – essentially a paywalled version of the Sun online.
For £2 a week, Sun+ “members” now receive all of the Sun’s news, features and sports coverage as well as the Goals app for smartphones and tablets.
The app gives exclusive access to near-live video clips of every Barclays Premier League goal on the go, before the 9pm football round-up programmes.
“Newspapers aren’t broadcasters, but the world is changing…there are strong passion threads that run through multi-platforms that [News UK] felt ready [to exploit],” White said.
It has been widely documented that News UK boss, Mike Darcey, has been instrumental in ensuring that content is paid for, with The Times, Sunday Times and the Sun now all behind full paywalls – but White says another, less discussed part of the strategy is to drive customer engagement.
“We’re about deeper customer relationships,” he said, “and finding unique video content – and paying for it, if required – is key to that.”
White admits that News UK had to pay “eye-watering” amounts to secure the rights to show premiership goals – but the Murdoch owned business is committed to using video content alongside editorial. White said News UK will add more sports later this summer and after securing two big-name sponsors for the launch – Kia and Paddy Power – they hope to work with them again next year.
“Video is now integral to what we already do,” White added. “We now want to see how much video content is relevant to other areas of the business, for the Sun and The Times.
“But what’s really important is tapping into passion points, things people really give a monkey’s about – and things people pay for.”
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