There’s a moment in every race, match and ride that no spreadsheet can explain. The split second where the crowd holds its breath, the rider commits, and everyone watching feels it in their chest. That feeling is why sports video content works, and it’s why the brands who invest in it properly are pulling away from the ones who don’t.
This post is for the marketers and marketing managers trying to work out where video sits in their plan. We’ll cover why sport is such fertile ground for brand building, what the research says about how fans actually watch, and how to balance short form and long form so one shoot keeps working for years.
Fans don’t watch sport the way they used to
The biggest shift in sports media isn’t happening on television, it’s happening in pockets. According to GWI’s 2026 global sports research, 61% of sports fans now consume highlights and clips, and 35% watched them on a mobile in the past week alone [1]. Among 18 to 24 year olds it goes further: 74% follow sport regularly, but only 30% watch full games, with 34% preferring highlights over the full event [2].
That’s not fans caring less. It’s fans fitting more sport into more of their day, on their commute, in the queue, on the sofa with the match on the other screen. PwC’s research tracked millennial highlight viewing doubling from under three hours a week to nearly six in just five years [3], and the trend has only accelerated since.
For a brand, this changes the game entirely. The “stadium” your audience gathers in is increasingly a feed, and the brands that show up there with great video are the ones fans remember.
The 95-5 rule, or why brand memory beats the hard sell
Here’s the research every marketer should have pinned above their desk. Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in work published with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, found that at any given time only around 5% of your potential buyers are actually in the market to buy. The other 95% aren’t shopping yet, but they will be, and when they are, they choose the brands they already know and feel something for [4].
This is exactly why sports video content is such a powerful strategy. Nobody watches a race day film because they’re ready to purchase. They watch it because it’s brilliant, because it makes them feel part of something, and that feeling quietly builds the brand memory that decides who they call when the budget lands. Red Bull understood this decades ago: they stopped making adverts about a drink and started making films about human beings doing extraordinary things, and became one of the most recognised brands on the planet in the process.
You don’t need a Red Bull budget to use the same logic. You need stories worth telling and the craft to tell them well.
Short form: winning the scroll
Short form video is your reach engine. It’s how you show up in the feed where 61% of fans are already watching [1], and it’s built for the emotional peak: the overtake, the winning point, the finish line face. The best short form content in sport does one thing brilliantly in under thirty seconds and makes people feel it fast.
The mistake brands make is treating short form as an afterthought, chopped from whatever footage happens to exist. The clips that stop thumbs are planned that way: shot for vertical, cut to the beat of the moment, with a hook in the first second. When we shoot an event, the social edit is designed before anyone picks up a camera.
Long form: the documentary effect
If short form wins attention, long form wins hearts. Nothing proves it like Formula 1, where Drive to Survive turned team principals and midfield battles into global storylines and brought an entire new audience to the sport, many of whom had never watched a race. The lesson translates to any brand: when people spend twenty minutes with your story, the people in it and the graft behind it, they don’t just remember you, they root for you.
Documentary style content, athlete stories, behind the scenes films and season long series are where the emotional depth lives. They’re also the content with the longest shelf life, which brings us to the part most strategies miss.
Build a library, not a moment
The real return on sports video content comes from treating every shoot as an asset library rather than a one off. A single well planned production day can deliver a hero film, a documentary cut, a bank of vertical social edits, stills for the website and paid ad creative, and it keeps converting long after the event itself. The race day film that’s still doing its job a year on is the cheapest content you’ll ever own.
That’s the evergreen approach, and it’s how smaller brands compete with bigger budgets: not by making more content, but by making content that lasts and squeezing every drop from it.
Where to start
If you’re building a sports video content strategy from scratch, start with three questions. What’s the human story only your brand can tell? Where do your people actually watch, feed or long form or both? And what would it take to plan one shoot that feeds every channel for the next six months?
Get those right and the rest is craft. And if you’d like a team that lives for this stuff, on the slopes, on the grid and everywhere between, that’s exactly what our sports video production and sports marketing teams do all day. Book a call and let’s talk about the story you should be telling.
References
[1] GWI, Global Sports Trends and Fan Insights for 2026: https://www.gwi.com/world-cup/sports-trends
[2] Sports Business Journal data via Limelight Digital, Sports Viewership Statistics 2026: https://www.limelightdigital.co.uk/sports-viewership-statistics/
[3] PwC research via WSC Sports, How Changing Consumption Habits are Fueling the Rising Value of Sports Highlights: https://wsc-sports.com/blog/industry-insights/how-changing-consumption-habits-are-fueling-the-rise-in-value-of-sports-highlights/
[4] Professor John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, the 95-5 rule: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/b2b-research/trends/95-5-rule
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