Interview with Steve Spencer - Head of Global Brand at DAZN.

Photo of Steve Spencer

As the Head of Global Brand, Steve Spencer manages the brand identity, whether it’s how DAZN looks, how they talk and what they may represent. Steve strives to “create a recognisable and unique identity for the company; grow brand awareness by attracting new customers and maintaining customer loyalty”. He also will help with brand strategies, which aligns with the brand's overall goals and purpose whilst adapting to changes in external environmental changes like the constant changes of social media trends, to keep the brand trending and relevant.

Branding for DAZN

“My workday depends on what project I’m working on at the time.” Spencer stated and added “I have a constant calendar of events”. In his role he works with multiple departments the two most frequent being the creative team and the media teams. “Important days are posting days for example when we send things to the Daily Mail”, another important time for Spencer is when it is review days where they analyse how well they’ve done to attract and maintain customers, as well as increase awareness about the organisation. As the Head of Global Brand Steve also must “manage stakeholders by reporting back to them as well as making them aware of future-plans”.

Branding for DAZN is important because is makes them distinguishable to other streaming companies like SKY and BBC, whether that’s because of logos, colour associations and other visual representations, as well as traits and the values which make the company different to its competitors.

Promoting DAZN through social media

Across all platforms DAZN has a following of over 100 million, and they use these platforms to interact with sports fans globally. At DAZN they focus on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, they do this as this is the most used and popular sites across social media. Often on their channels they will post organic content, by retweeting comments and content already made onto their profile. As well as organic content, they also post campaigns to build up follower engagement and hype around upcoming events, for example in 24/25 they posted about the upcoming Serie A season and showed followers how many matches that would be streamed by them. YouTube is also part of the social mix and is used to post highlights of matches and games, so people who weren’t able to watch the event are able to see the key moments that happened. This boosts viewership and followers as people will follow so they can get similar content in the future.

The importance of his role and the challenges of it

The importance of Steve’s role as Head of Global Brand is that he must make sure the brand has a consistent purpose and the organisation’s identity remains clear beside its competitors. As well as this he must make sure the content being posted is relevant globally and it adapts to consistent changes in trends on social media without compromising the brands values. He’s also got to make sure that the connection with followers and customers are being built long-term because it then ensures customer loyalty, this customer loyalty can then lead to the overall expansion of the company.

The challenges of Steve Spencer’s role is that he’s got to make sure that the campaign and content that the teams he works with is doing well across different areas globally as it may do well somewhere in the world but then in another it's falling flat because it either wasn’t particularly relevant for them or that it just didn’t interest the target audience enough. As well as this, another challenge is the change in social media, due to the rapidly changing trends and popular videos, Steve makes sure the content being posted is innovative, culturally relevant and is keeping up with the market, whether that’s posting DAZN content with a trending sound or following along with a popular trend.

Advice from Steve

“Keep an open mind, as there are many pathways in sports media even if they aren’t obvious yet. But above all, a genuine passion for sport is one of the most valuable assets anyone can bring to the industry”.