iSportconnect Lausanne Summit Delves Into Modern Sports Engagement

Opening up the day’s events we had David Dellea, Director of Sports Business Advisory at PwC, presenting the company’s 2019 Sports Survey.

This was an intriguing analytical look at multiple deep-dives into the world of sport. The importance of innovation within established sports organisations, the key challenges of direct-to-consumer distribution and how sports federations should focus their resources going forward.

Our first panel of the day was moderated by iSportconnect’s own Jay Stuart, with panelists Daniel Marion, Chief of Information and Communication Technology at UEFA, Anand Narayanan, Head of Digital Marketing at Panasonic.

This discussion centred around how brands are storytelling to their fans, particularly how content is changing in the modern world and how best to deal with creating and promoting new quick-fire content.

Ed Barton, Chief Entertainment Analyst at Ovum, then gave a presentation showing where the evolution of sports entertainment will go, specifically within the next decade.

Following a fantastic lunch, Anna Hellman, Director of ThinkSport gave a brief introduction ahead of the afternoon session, which opened up with a panel covering ‘Fans, Data & The Sports Market’.

For this panel we had Guy Horne as our moderator with speakers Cyrille Jacobsen, Chief Marketing Officer at Freeride World Tour, Joe Kyle, Marketing Director for Goodform, An Dang Duy, Chief Information Officer at IAAF, Dhaval Ponda, Global Head of Business Development at TATA Communications.

The afternoon session came to a conclusion with a presentation from Wim Sweldens, Co-Founder of KISWE Mobile. Wim spoke about the ever-changing world of sports broadcasting and how to bring people back together watching sport.

Once the second networking break had concluded we had another panel, this time on the subject of Rights Holders and

which was moderated by David Dellea of PwC. Speaking on the panel was David Hopkinson, Global Head of Partnerships at Real Madrid, Alexander Brown, Commissioner of Major League Lacrosse and Christian Volk, Director of eFootball and Gaming at FIFA.

iSportconnect’s 2019 Lausanne Summit then came to a close with a presentation from Marie Owens Thomsen, Chief Economist, CA Indosuez titled ‘The World Economy: Rolling with the Punches’,