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How the ICC Used Technology to Take Cricket to the USA

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ICC

The ICC is the global governing body for cricket. Representing 108 members, the ICC governs and administrates the game and works with our members to grow the sport – which means more players and more fans in more countries. The ICC is also responsible for the staging of all ICC Events, including the Men’s and Women’s World Cups. This year for the first time, the ICC staged a major event in the USA, which was a co-host for the Men’s T20 World Cup with the West Indies. To ensure the sport leveraged this unique opportunity, the ICC’s Digital team put in place a series of digital strategies.

icc-cricket.com

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In June 2024, the ICC hosted the Men’s T20 World Cup across the USA and the West Indies, the first time a major global cricket tournament had been held in North America, which was a key strategic priority.

There were two key objectives we wanted to achieve by taking the pinnacle event of T20 cricket to a new market:

  • Grow and activate the cricket fanbase in the USA market
  • Grow engagement among new demographics

Clearly, the only way the ICC was going to be able to deliver on these in the short runway we had for the event was through strategic and judicious use of technology across all areas of the business.

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Growing Awareness

Cricket is blessed with a large existing audience in the USA, estimated at around 30 million. Consequently, we were confident we would fill the stadiums, but we wanted to make sure we also generated awareness among sports fans who may not have any connection with the sport.

To do that, we needed to reach them on the channels they use the most.

We particularly wanted to increase awareness in the under 15 age group. We know that if you don’t reach people by that age, you have a very difficult time converting them in the future.

After a successful trial with the Roblox ecosystem for the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup in 2023, we decided to double down on that platform.

As awareness was our key aim, rather than invest in creating our own game, we decided to integrate in three of the biggest games on the platform.

Each of the integrations had branding from the T20 World Cup and key sponsors, but also information about the tournament. To measure the investment’s impact, we created offramps into the ICC Family (our loyalty programme) and surveyed the participants before and after the activations.

Activations were viewed more than 78 million times, with 30% coming from the USA; most pleasingly, our survey of game players showed the awareness of cricket had doubled since we started.

Research showed us that the audience most likely to be interested in cricket were other sports fans, so we organized social media collaborations with the other major US sporting federations, such as the NBA.

These collaborations– which included India legend, Yuvraj Singh, attending India v Pakistan and game two of the NBA Finals on the same day – were hugely successful, generating more than 80 million video views.

This post with Rohit and NBA trophy ahead of the event had 40 million video views.

Overall, we had an 624% increase in new users to our website from the USA across the World Cup, showing the increased interest from that market.

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Explaining the Game

Of all the major USA sports, the one closest to cricket is baseball, so we wanted to create content that would help baseball fans understand our sport.

To help do that, we enlisted a US content creator – Jomboy – who was known for his videos that breakdown the intricacies of sports. He had already been creating videos on cricket, but we gave him access to our video archive to do the same to key moments through the tournament. He also joined our broadcast commentary panel for the New York games, serving as a bridge between the traditional cricket audience and USA sports fans.

See Jomboy’s explainer video here: Jomboy’s cricket guide for baseball fans | T20 World Cup (icc-cricket.com).

Since Apple launched the Vision Pro, we had been keen to create a truly immersive experience. Since its launch was restricted to the US at that point, investing previously hadn’t made sense but, being faced with a USA market, we took the leap. Trialling this new product would generate PR AND demonstrate cricket’s multi-platform potential to current and prospective partners.

Working with Quidich Innovation Labs, we created ICC Immersive for Apple Vision Pro, which leveraged ball tracking data to put users in the centre of the stadium and give them the experience of facing the world’s best bowlers.

Our sales team found this a valuable tool to help prospective partners in the USA get a better understanding of the game, and the extraordinary skill of our players.

It was also fun for everyone watching people in the experience flinch as the first bouncer flew past their nose.

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Growing The Global Fanbase

This was the first senior ICC event in a new rights cycle, which meant a few changes beyond the new location. For the first time there were 20 teams in the tournament, which gave countries such as Nepal, Uganda, the USA and Canada the chance to make their debut.

From the digital side, it also meant we were the official broadcaster in key growth markets for the first time, as we had made a strategic decision to go direct to consumer in markets where we wanted to focus on targeted growth of the game.

To take advantage of that, we built a new website and app from scratch that had our OTT product – ICC.tv – embedded in our traditional tournament website and app. This had been built and deployed in around five months, so it was touch and go to be ready for the tournament!

ICC.tv carried live coverage of the event into more than 80 non-traditional territories, and we leveraged our large social media audience to engage audiences there, and then collect their data when they signed up to watch.

More than four million fans signed up to watch live matches on ICC.tv and watched more than 3.2 million hours of content. The top countries included Nepal, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Germany and France, showing the potential of these new markets.

We also wanted to make sure we reached a new audience among Indian fans across the world and we were conscious that much of our content is in English.

Prior to the tournament we launched Instagram and Facebook channels that would have content exclusively in Hindi. We were clear that the channels should reflect the tone and culture of Hindi speaking cricket fans, not be just a translation of English content.

The Hindi channels generated more than 1 billion views, with the top rating videos coming from non-traditional highlights (such as quirky moments) compared to our traditional channels, showing the fans enjoyed the less serious and more emotional content.

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