NZ Rugby Commercial chief executive Craig Fenton lifts lid on the strategy to take the All Blacks to the world
Friday, 26 July 2024
NZ Rugby Commercial believes it can reach just under 100 million fans.
Renewal of tier one sponsorships post 2027 looms as pivotal moment.
Revenue projection graph is ‘up and to the right’.
Craig Fenton is the most important person in New Zealand rugby you may not have even heard of.
The 54-year-old former Google executive has spent decades in the world that New Zealand Rugby wants to conquer - digital, technology and commerce - but for the past six months has been running New Zealand Rugby Commercial.
NZRC is the national game’s new financial engine, on whose board not only sits Richie McCaw but two Silver Lake representatives, Simon Patterson and Stephen Evans.
The performance of NZRC over the coming years will dictate everything: from NZ Rugby’s capacity to retain its best players, to how much goes into the community game.
It’s an enormous responsibility, but Fenton - the UK New Zealander of the year - is feeling comfortable with what he has walked into.
“It's everything I hoped and wished for and certainly nothing's happened that's not expected in that time,” Fenton tells The Post during a trip to London.
“Having got the feet under the table and spent some time with the team, I'm hugely optimistic on the future that we have.”
To date NZRC’s raison d’etre has been a little unclear, but Fenton says he isn’t selling some “shiny and new” concept that can’t be grasped by the layman.
At its heart, he says, New Zealand Rugby remains a “basic business” founded on four traditional revenue pillars: broadcast (which Fenton now redefines more broadly as “content”), sponsorship, merchandise and ticket sales.
Where NZRC comes in is the strategy, a digital plan to reach huge numbers of All Blacks fans and use them to make money directly by selling them things (merchandising, paywalled content) or indirectly, by going to sponsors with lots of data about those supporters to prove the All Blacks’ reach in order to negotiate bigger deals.
“It’s a numbers game,” Fenton says.
Those raw numbers are large.
“We think there are about one billion people in the world who in some form follow rugby,” he says.
“We think about half a billion are aware of our brands, and we think what business people call the target addressable market is around just under 100 million.
“Fifty million of those come from those ‘second favourite team’ markets of UK and the Republic of Ireland, France and Japan, as well as the southern hemisphere nations of South Africa and Australia.”
To reach those potential consumers, NZR+ has been set up as a media play to churn out content - principally videos.
Fenton says the specific NZR+ platform is just one part of this strategy, but really the big numbers are across social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.
“Since we launched the NZR+ in mid-August [2023], we've reached 33 million unique viewers,” Fenton says.
“The numbers change pretty rapidly, but we've just picked through a quarter of a billion odd impressions across a combination of social and video views.
“That’s north of our annual target that we set ourselves already this year.
“So it's hockey sticking [rising rapidly], surprising us and we need to update our targets on it.”
To the million-dollar question: how do you turn that into cold, hard cash to feed the many mouths in New Zealand rugby.
Broadcast-wise, NZ Rugby is set to renew its deal with Sky TV, but there are no guarantees of an uplift. Even though it is building an attractive inventory for the 2026-2030 cycle (women’s and men’s Lions tours, the Nations Championship in 2026) the broadcast market for rugby in the Anglosphere has been flat.
Hence, the next round of sponsorship deals is taking on a great deal of importance.
“We're a cyclical business,” Fenton says. “The big tier one sponsorships come up for renewal at the end of 2027 for the most part.
“So the job that we have between now and then is to really build that corpus of provable reach so that the team can sit in front of sponsors and demonstrate, with evidence, the audience that they will reach, how engaged that audience are, where they are, how old they are, etcetera.
“That sort of relevance and scale is the the thing that drives sponsorship value and for the foreseeable future, that is the primary intention of NZR+ plus.
“The frontline of fandom is digital, and we need to be there when we're not [physically] there.”
The “backend” of apps such as YouTube collect this form of digital gold, vast amounts of data that can be harvested and used by NZRC.
Fenton is in his element in this world, and says some of the data has thrown up some interesting insights.
“South Africa oscillates between number one [ahead of Kiwis] and number two in terms of the followers of New Zealand,” he says.
“They have a huge population, and they are very online.
“North of 95% of fans globally experience the All Blacks, the Black Ferns, our teams in black generally over video.”
What this will ultimately mean for NZ Rugby’s revenue is something of an inexact science.
The NZ Rugby annual report for 2023 showed total revenue of $277 million, although about $30m came from “other” sources such as grants, leaving the NZ Rugby-generated revenue at about $247m.
The Post understands that NZRC wants to get that to $350m, or above, by 2031 and while Fenton wouldn’t be drawn on specifics, he said the graph was heading in the right direction.
“The revenue projections are up to the right for the foreseeable future,” he says.
“I'm feeling pretty confident and positive about it.
“…we have it in us truly to lead the world as a modern, progressive digital media and entertainment business, the frontline of fandom in rugby…I'm feeling really confident and buoyant about that.”