The groundbreaking gamification platform founders discuss the pull of live sports, the promise of big data, and how their power-to-the-people vision and fan-first commitment ignited a broadcasting revolution.
For a true fan, the experience of watching a live televised sporting event is total. Every nerve, every muscle, every emotion is fully alive and immersed in the experience. “Audience engagement” is a holy-grail metric in the world of media and entertainment, and few audiences are as deeply engaged as sports fans. They don’t just watch the action unfold across the screen. They need to be a part of it.
Technologies proliferate that satisfy this need, and fans use them all. When a huge moment happens, you grab your phone and shoot off a text to friends to celebrate, commiserate or trash talk... hit up Google to double check a player stat... jump over to Instagram to see what the team account is posting... hop onto X to blast out your hot take and read everyone else’s... and pop back into texts to see how your boast landed. The problem is that all that activity takes fans away from the thing they care most about—the game itself. It also peels viewers away from broadcasters, sending their ad-consuming eyeballs and data-rich conversations—in a word, their engagement—to someone else’s platform and pocketbook.
As lifelong sports fans, Benn Achilleas and Jonty Whitehead knew well that urgent need to act, respond and connect while watching a game. They’d also experienced the frustrating paradox of having to look away from the action to be fully involved with it. But through the lenses of their respective professional backgrounds—Benn’s in engagement and gamification and Jonty’s in broadcasting— they saw something else: an opportunity to create a new and better experience on both sides of the screen.
Two years and a pandemic later, Sport Buff exploded onto the biggest sports broadcasting stage of all: Qatar 2022—the pinnacle of achievement in international men’s soccer and one of the most watched sporting events in the world. The response was instant and massive. Broadcasters watched every meaningful audience metric skyrocket. And tens of millions of viewers all over the world went wild at the chance to discover new information, test their knowledge, share opinions, connect and compete with friends and fellow fans in real time without ever having to leave the match environment or miss a moment of play.
Today, Sport Buff has been adopted across a vast and ever-expanding broadcasting landscape–including territory even these visionary founders couldn’t have anticipated conquering. And they’re just getting started. The Maven Report editorial director Sheila Lothian recently connected with Benn and Jonty to hear more about Sport Buff’s meteoric rise, amazing ride, and what a fully gamified, data-driven, AI-informed viewing future might look like.
Sheila Lothian: The Sport Buff origin story is such a powerful one—in part, I think, because the idea stemmed first and foremost from your being fans and realizing that fan experience could be better. What was the timeline from that “aha moment” to Sport Buff launching?
Benn Achilleas: Jonty and I had known each other for many years at that point. We definitely shared a good love of football and other sports. He was based in LA with Fox. I was in London running a mobile gaming company. We would be watching football across different broadcasters in different countries and time zones and have an opinion we would want to share. And we constantly found that we were being forced to use these other platforms, which were taking us away from the actual action.
Jonty Whitehead: From my side, that sports broadcast side, there was real frustration. I’d spend all this money on rights and yet every great goal or funny comment in my studio would be discussed and dissected elsewhere, on other people’s platforms, on Twitter and Instagram. The data that’s produced by that conversation should be owned by the broadcaster. With my broadcast background and Benn’s engagement background, bringing those engagements within the broadcast seemed the most natural thing. It was an “aha moment”: Why isn’t anyone doing this? Well, if they’re not doing it, let’s do it.
BA: We saw the opportunity. And there were a lot of around-the-coffee-table moments in Jonty’s apartment overlooking the Thames. But at some point, we had to make it a reality. We bootstrapped it ourselves at first, built out different versions, tested different ways of doing it and then took some early-stage funding. When we had it ready to launch, the pandemic hit and suddenly all live sports were canceled. So it was, “maybe we’ve got something here, but now we haven’t got anything to run it over.” But our first proper year in market was 2022.
Our original activations were with challenger brands and sports where they are more forward thinking inherently because they need to be. We were pioneers in bringing this engagement to women’s soccer in the U.S. across the NWSL Twitch streams. But the real validation came with Qatar 2022. Suddenly we were on the global stage, delivering this to tens of millions of viewers watching all over the world—from the “aha moment” to a kind of “oh wow” moment where our idea around a coffee table had evolved into something that millions of people around the world were choosing to do.
JW: I’ve been involved in this event numerous times on the broadcast side. They always have this meeting prior where the great and the good of the broadcast world come in and they’re shown the services that will be on offer, be they the cameras that will be used or the digital services, etc. For us to be included in that demonstration, in that environment, in that meeting was a real wow moment for me. And as Benn said, it was a relatively quick space of time from “aha” to getting into this world that I’d lived in, but on the other side of the table in a completely different capacity. You have to be really proud of those moments.
BA: It’s also good when you’ve put thousands of hours into building a product, with good partners that you know have been able to deliver at scale.
SL: The incredibly personalized experiences Sport Buff delivers depend on a huge amount of user data. I’m sure you want to continue to grow and innovate on that level. How do you balance innovation with concerns around data security and privacy?
BA: There isn’t really a balance. At the end of the day, you need to respect and appreciate the user data and privacy. That comes along with the responsibility of delivering a product like Sport Buff.
We really respect that fan experience. From day one we understood that this is about an enhancement to that experience and something the audience needed to be able to choose to do or not. For some people, Sport Buff makes total sense, and they want to do it. Other people just want to watch in the traditional way—and that’s absolutely fine. Everything we do is permission-based. We put our efforts into curating and creating a great experience for those people that want to play Buff. This has always been a key thing for us [with partners]: either you’re in or you’re out. There’s no point chasing after certain partners who are not going to be able to implement that vision.
Being based in London, we’ve been exposed to the GDPR side of things, so we’re always looking ahead to how we can create the right kind of protections. But ultimately, you have to respect data privacy. We’ve always had that respect because we’re fans first. We look after people the way we want to be looked after. That is a key part of our growth and roadmap as we go from these cool engagements to interesting transactions and making it relevant for that audience. So, as you’re watching, not only can you predict, you can also purchase match tickets, jerseys, flights, even place bets. There’s so much more responsibility coming. So, we need to make sure that we’re really clear in how we do that.
SL: Generative AI is the inescapable topic of the moment. How do you see AI driving growth for Sport Buff moving forward?
JW: There’s not a day that goes by where we’re not discussing AI and how we can adapt and use it within our solution. For me, the exciting thing is, you have your World Cups, and the broadcasters are trusting you with engaging their fans and that experience needs to be curated by the experts within our curation team or the broadcaster’s team, and that’s understandable. This is new, and they want what’s delivered to the viewer to be the best it can be. But there are also, say, second division Norwegian leagues where games are covered. They are plentiful, but they are a niche audience. Within those environments, you’re getting data from providers that can produce AI content that taps into questions around who’s run furthest in that first half, for example, or who’s going to score the next goal.
AI can really help us scale up and produce content that sits right across huge tracts of live sporting content—tennis, golf, all these challenger and tour events. The ability to use AI to drive engagements across content is really, really exciting to us.
BA: This reaction at scale is where AI gets really put to the test with us. Part of going into Qatar 2022 was making sure we built a big data lake to put millions of predictions and polls and quiz answers from fans all over the world and being able to tag that up. That has become our repository and we’re able to start training models off the back of it. Right now, we have Buff running in 17 different languages. When you think of, say, the next World Cup, there’s the opportunity in real time to be able to push these Buffs in 25 different languages to fans around the world, leveraging all that content we’ve already looked at, so we know the most engaging questions, but then adapting that with AI in real time based on the sports data that’s coming in. That goes well beyond what any human or team of humans could do during a live event. It allows the professional human curators to spend their time focusing on creating extra special moments or Buffs.
It also enables personalization. When we’ve got that Buff stream coming through of all these different Buffs, you can be watching the same game with your husband, but you might be more into quiz content. He might be more into prediction content. We can adapt that Buff stream on the fly based on your history to-date. We can adapt those questions around you and your interests—say, U.S. men’s national team players with a touch of Manchester United in there. That level of personalization is just not possible without AI.
SL: You touched on working with partners a moment ago. Tell me more about how your partnerships have shaped your trajectory and what you look for in a partner.
JW: As Benn said, very early on in our journey, it was those challenger brands: e-sports, women’s football, people that are looking to innovate and excite a younger audience. The reason I stepped away from my traditional broadcast career is because the way sport is produced is the same now as when I started back in the early 90s. It’s a passive lean-back experience. Surely that should have changed. Most other content and the way that content is delivered has changed.
We look for broadcasters that want to change, that want to do things in a different way. Why can’t the viewers help choose the analysis that you’re going to look at during halftime, or what questions to ask the goal scorer at the final whistle? The audience has never really been heard from in production. When people get that, when you have advocates within broadcasters who are wanting to change—and we have many—we can tap into their readiness to get involved and do things in a slightly different way. As soon as we hear that validation, we know we’re on the right lines.
BA: We know Sport Buff is going to be ubiquitous. This is going to be the way everyone will be interacting with the content they’re watching, and we’re going to provide these amazing experiences for audiences. Of course, as founders, we want that right now. There is always, especially in an early-stage company, that tendency to chase the logos. What we have found, though, is that sometimes those big organizations and brands are very protective and quite slow moving: this person needs to speak to that person and suddenly there’s a committee.
We were really fortunate with some of our customers and partners, like FIFA and Premier League. They’re forward thinking and making things happen. But an important part of our learning journey has been to identify early on: is this a great client now, or is this a great client later? Because as a small company, we’ve only got a certain amount of time, energy and effort. We work 25 hours a day, eight days a week. We can’t spend our time chasing everyone. We need to focus on the ones that will move now, and then start unlocking more. It builds momentum on its own—that sense of FOMO. And then those broadcasters that might not be ready to move now will move in six months or a year.
In broadcast, you can’t mess up. It’s going out on the big screen, and everything has to be perfect. Social media is a lot more reactive. It’s more about being fast than polished, and that gives it a level of authenticity. Sport Buff sits somewhere between both worlds. It’s in that broadcast-type production world, and it looks great. But it’s also got the immediacy and authenticity of social. For some broadcasters, it really resonates. Other broadcasters like the “separation of church and state.” Another big thing for us has been working with partners who appreciate that this is where it’s going and how it has to be.
SL: What is your favorite Sport Buff moment?
JW: That’s easy for me. Back in the early days—we’re only talking about a couple of years ago here—but we’d been through this huge RFP process to provide fan engagement for Qatar 2022, and it had been a long process, many late nights and time spent pulling our hair out. Benn was in correspondence with the people who were deciding on who would be appointed. Over Zoom, because again, this was during the pandemic, he called the management team together with a very glum face. And we all thought, “Ohhh, this isn’t gonna be good news. We’ve had the decision and it’s not a positive one.” Then suddenly out of nowhere, his face lit up and he said, “WE’VE WON THE WORLD CUP!” It was that moment that validates everything, stepping away and taking a massive cut in wages and all that, to be part of something.
BA: One of my favorites was very recently, just before going into the Christmas period. We were working with a broadcaster in Belgium called VRT. They wanted to use Sport Buff in a different way across this live event called The Warmest Week. It’s a way to bring family and friends together, and it’s also a charity event, raising money for children who weren’t looking at the brightest kind of Christmas. To coincide with that, we launched a new feature which would ease reactions on screen so people could send heart hands and heart emojis. And it absolutely blew up. There were hundreds of thousands of reactions going on. It just really got me. It was like, wow. This is really special and really nice, and we’re a part of it.
SL: Did you ever imagine that being the kind of thing Sport Buff would be connected to?
BA: No. And that’s the really exciting part of how we evolve as a business and a product. Once you start putting Sport Buff in the hands of the customers, they start using it in different ways. Even with our reactions feature, the client VRT said, we’d like to set up a way for a corporate partner to make a donation based on how many reactions are sent. Then they used the Buffs we have for announcements and transactions—where normally a broadcaster would say, “subscribe for the pay-per-view fight” or “purchase tickets”—to drive donations over the broadcast. The functionality exists, but suddenly it’s being used in a very different context, in a different way and for the powers of good. It shows again that when you work with good partners, good customers, they embrace it. And then they build on what you’ve built.
