The UK’s Biggest Summer of Sport Brought to Life by C-Screens

Aside from matters of family, love, and religion, little else raises more passion on a global scale than sport. They stand as the ultimate uniter and divider in the realm of entertainment. With Summer 2024 poised to deliver one of the biggest sporting calendars in recent years, featuring the Olympics in Paris, the Euros in Germany and Champions League in London, a new era of marketing approaches. To examine the meteoric rise of live fan experiences, and what to expect from sports marketing in 2024, IPM sits down with its latest member, C-Screens, the largest provider of Out-Of-Home Screens in the UK. C-Screens will be bringing multiple pop-up screening events, showing live premium sports all day, from iconic bustling city centres through to high end shopping districts such as Covent Garden. Equipped with large state of the art high-definition LED screens and multiple unique activation spaces, C-Screens offers ready-made sporting havens, heralding the future of live fan experiences. But first, let’s remind ourselves why 2024 is so special for sports. 

Summer of Sports 2024

• 2023 set a precedent for the UK, with major sporting events injecting a remarkable £373 million into the national economy, as researched by UK Sport.

• This figure is set to soar with the Guardian heralding this summer 2024 as “one for the ages”, referring to the extraordinary line-up of sporting events.

• The Olympics are set for Paris, with the Champions League final in London. Dublin will host the Europa League Final, and England is a strong contender in the European Championship. The year features two T20 World Cups, The Open Championship, Tour de France, Wimbledon, and the British Grand Prix, among other major events.

• This pivotal moment in sports is also a turning point for marketing. The industry is poised to revolutionise how fans experience, enjoy, and engage with sports.

With this high concentration of major sporting events, fan experiences are expected to reach peak interest during the summer period. Originally designed to extend the live sports experience beyond the stadium to a wider audience, fan zones emerged in the early 2000s around major football tournaments. These unique brand experiences have since become more than just places to watch sports. They are now immersive hubs of excitement, “bringing the party to the people,” as described by the Paris 2024 sports minister, Amelie Oudea-Castera. By combining the power of the big screen alongside a brand activation can provide a valuable addition to immersive experiences. C-Screens partnership with Multiplay attracted bigger than ever audiences with its free, outdoor live gaming event that featured a knockout style football tournament on the giant screens, streamed simultaneously across multiple locations.

The advent of smartphone technology has transformed passive viewing into active engagement, enabling fans to interact through live polls, quizzes, and competitions. As brands continue to explore and invest in dual screening technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), the future of sports viewing promises to offer fans not just a window to watch their favourite sports but a gateway to experience them in an entirely new way.

87% of sports fans use a second screen while watching a live sports broadcast, with some even triple-screening or more…

Sports Business Institute

C-Screens as a modern outdoor broadcaster has a clear goal to entertain consumers and can help brands and agencies facilitate a wide range of brand engagement activations and lifestyle content, as well as offering opportunities with on-site retailing. The effectiveness of these captivating environments stems from the extended dwell time of audiences engrossed in the action on the big screens, providing an optimal setting for impactful and emotionally charged consumer interactions.