LaSource 2020 - The Year In Review
Oxmo Puccino said “2020 is a year that most of us want to forget, yet is one that needs to be remembered”
The sports industry has been (and is still) severely affected by the Covid crisis, most of the sporting events have been cancelled or postponed, the first one being the Olympics. On a positive note, organizations were obliged to accelerate their digitalization and come up with new digital innovations to face it and to keep their respective fanbase engaged.
Zooming on LaSource it was our very first official and complete year as an agency and we are proud to have helped sports organizations develop new innovative solutions, and help our companies continue their growth. For us 2020 has been a tremendous year with lots of new exciting projects and before jumping into 2021, we wanted to take a second to explore what 2020 looked like for us.
Let’s start with Greenfly, the second company part of our advanced model, who joined us in Summer 2019:
The year started off well with key players of the French market joining us
Canal+ was looking for a solution that would enable them to promote their content on social media, throughout their divisions, and Greenfly helped leverage their large and diverse roster of celebrity talent.
Olympique de Marseille wanted to improve the distribution of content to their players and chose Greenfly for that.
See: Success Story: How CANAL+ Drove Its Most Successful Series Launch on Social
During Coronavirus, we worked closely with the DFL to help them gather on the pitch, near-live content from each Bundesliga club. This content is distributed to all the rights holders in near live who now have digital format content available on the fly. It’s a massive success.
We also supported Greenfly with the implementation of the solution for new partners such as UEFA, World Rugby, Racing 92, UTMB, Queens Park Rangers etc. and many conversations are in progress with other sports organisations across the European territory to potentially partner with the Californian based startup. 2021 sounds incredibly promising, with the new +Engage feature launched in November, which is a real game changer for organisations that need to gather huge amounts of content from their editorial teams, fans, and influencers.
See: what is +Engage, the new Greenfly product?
Pursuing Livelike’s growth and our new exciting partnerships across 2020
2020 has been massive for LiveLike, even if the big launch around the NCAA March Madness had to be postponed in March. Here are a few key reasons why:
Fox News: Covered the 2020 US Presidential Election by creating a white label application integrating the Audience Engagement Suite (influencer chat with experts insights, polls, quizzes, live blog etc..)
Sky Sports UK launched a gamified companion experience to enable viewers to interact while watching the Sky TV programs. Features such as Live Match Pick’em (Predictions) reached 90% of participants!
Canal + recently implemented our widgets in their “expert mode”. Official launch was on November the 7th (PSG - Rennes) and allowed thousands of users to interact with the canal plus editorial team. They even used the results of some polls on air from the get go, transforming the editorial narrative from a journalist centric one to a community engaging one. It’s a blast working with such a reference in Europe.
We also partnered with LaLiga North America and we have some new exciting collaborations with LivelikeVR, on top of the new launch of Sky World, we can’t wait to tell you about!
See: LaLiga has partnered with Livelike to host a series of watch parties
And what about LaSource?
It has been a long journey to create our brand and start positioning it on the market. Following Greenfly’s collaborations in January, we worked on LaSource's branding activities. We started to build a website, our LinkedIn page and we started creating B to B content to engage a wider discussion with our pears from the industry. So what about doing a podcast? But also create some video, bite size content, for other categories? At that time, we had no idea of what was about to happen later on this year.
In February we went to the Global Sports Week, exchanged with a lot of experts from the sport industry and beyond - The idea of creating a podcast came from there. A bi-monthly digital show to showcase the sports digital industry and its main actors, a great way to invite some of our clients and experts to share their experience. A terrific idea you would say. Now we had to find guests for the show to begin!
For the anecdote, we also thought about creating a collaborative workspace but decided not to do it for 2020… With hindsight, we were quite visionaries on this one: two weeks after the lockdown began in France. Vision? Or the extra bit of luck you need too?
It didn't stop us from continuing at the same pace on our internal activities, we finalized our graphical chart, launched our first version of the website and elaborated our different offers: Advanced, LeStudio and Transform. Our discussion with Slate in June shaped the final details of our LeStudio offer and we are now proud to help them with their first steps on the European market.
Summer went pretty well even though we were not allowed to enjoy it as we usually do. At least it allowed us to prepare the arrival of our first employee and to finally launch our LeCorner podcast. For the first episode we were delighted to receive Jean-Baptiste Alliot who is leading the Innovation Hub at UEFA.
In September Alexandre Kandelaft joined our team as Product Marketing Manager to develop our marketing activities, brand identity etc… A few days in, Covid stopped him for a few days, but nothing to be afraid of, he recovered well and directly worked on a second version of our website (yes, the one you’re on to read this amazing article!). He puts in place our content strategy, coordinates the work with our LeStudio startups, develops our SDR campaigns, leads the brand positioning of LaSource and of our customers amongst many other tasks
See: What is Slate ? Immerse yourself in the world of Social Media and content creation
The final rush
The last 3 months were really exciting as we started to see our expansion as LaSource! We recorded 10 podcasts with amazing guests, a huge thanks to all of them! It was not always very easy, we had to record one in the middle of constructions as Samuel moved out, special thanks to Charles Fremont for accepting the challenge!
In October we partnered with Colosseum Sports and participated in our first summit - the Sports Tech Nation 2020. We launched our first newsletter, prepared the on boarding of our second LeStudio startup, and ended up with our Transform and Education offers.
See: We have lectured at EM Lyon for the MSc Sports Industry Management
As you can read we are growing at a pace we would have not thought possible in January 2020 and we have plenty of announcements coming up in 2021. We are very thankful to all the great people that worked with us in 2020, we hope that they enjoyed it as much as we did. Now it’s time to take a break and to rest as much as possible so we can start 2021 at full speed!
We wish you all a very nice end of season and X-mas period and we can not wait to share new projects with you!
LaSource team! ✌️