Ligue 1 side, Olympique Lyonnais are one of the most successful and most supported teams in French football, following a recording breaking stint of seven consecutive league titles, and have been regulars in European competitions over the past two decades. They are also one of Horizm’s early clients, among the first to embrace the potential that our real-time, granular-level digital insights could bring to their commercial strategy. We caught up with Olympique Lyonnais Deputy General Manager, Harry Moyal to find out more about the role of digital in their commercial strategy, why he chose to work with Horizm and how it is benefiting the club.
Hi Harry, thank you so much for taking time out to speak with us.
As the sporting world slowly recovers from the impact of COVID, where do you see the biggest opportunities for the club to grow revenues and build new revenue streams?
So clearly COVID has been a perfect storm in the industry, affecting everybody, and unfortunately OL has been no exception!
Now we’re trying to recover from the storm, and we are seeing a couple of clear opportunities to increase our revenues and create new sources of revenues.
The first one is everything related to crypto – the overall use of blockchain in our current line of services but also potentially in creating a new sources of revenues. Clearly NFT comes to mind, but there are several other use cases that can be interesting.
And the second one is working to better monetize all the digital inventory that we are continuously creating all year.
Thinking about the role the club’s digital channels play in your overall commercial strategy, how has Olympique Lyon’s use of digital changed over the past few years and what impact has Horizm’s platform had on your approach?
There has been a significant emphasis on digital and data at Olympic Lyonnais – since 2015 we have developed a strategy focused on collecting as much data as possible about our fans and then seeing how we can best leverage these data points.
We build 360-degree profiles of our fans so that we are able to create meaningful interactions with them, depending on who they are and where they are in their lifecycle of fanship with OL. So, in that spirit, we try to collect data on ticketing merchandising, but also on media and content.
We decided to adopt Horizm’s solution – I think it’s now almost two years ago – because the data it provided gave us an unprecedented way of understanding how good our content strategy is, platform by platform, and the ability to compare our performance with our peers, so that we can see what’s working and what’s not working, what has to be adapted and define what are the best practices that we could adopt.
Which feature – or features – of the Horizm platform have you found the most valuable and why?
First off, I’d like to mention that I’m probably logging into the Horizm platform every day!! The first feature to highlight is the ability to have a really granular understanding about the economic value of the inventory that we’re creating.
Leveraging the way Horizm is quantifying the value of our inventory, based on current platform prices, is extremely useful and insightful for me because it enables me to have better discussions with sponsors and my team.
The second one is the latest addition to the platform, the Intelligenz module, because it enables me to see more clearly where we stand compared to our peers, how much our progression is above or below market growth. As well as enabling us to get the balance right in terms of the quantity and quality of content we produce.
What was the business case that made you choose to work with Horizm in the first place?
The business issue it solved at the beginning, and the primary motive why I decided to engage with Horizm, was the fact that we were creating more and more content, and it was articulated more and more into recurring themes. I was convinced that the valuation that was put on this content in sponsorship contracts was below market value and Horizm enabled me to clearly see what the fair value of this content was.
You have recently renewed your agreement with Horizm. What are your expectations of the agreement and what it will bring to the club over the next 12 months?
I see two areas of development. The first one is to continue to beef up the Intelligenz module because, it’s really the best vision about what’s going on in the industry at the moment but there are new KPIs and way of comparing and extracting data that could be implemented.
The second one is probably about helping me finding partners for my digital assets. I’m convinced that Horizm’s leadership shares the same vision that I do about the evolution of the industry so being able to build on this vision and attract and explain to sponsors what it could mean for them is probably one of the things that can make a dramatic change over the next 12 to 24 months.
Want to learn more about how Horizm’s platform as benefited the club? Read our Olympique Lyonnais Case Study
