Since its inception, WAVE.tv has had a guiding mission to champion fandom. Today’s sports fans are vastly different than previous generations. They seek out highlights first, prefer athletes and creators over teams and leagues, and live entirely on social. This simple insight pushed WAVE.tv to create a portfolio of media brands, catering to a wide array of genres and fandoms. At the core of this strategy was Snapchat with the following goals:
- To expand WAVE.tv’s presence on Discover by delivering highly successful sports programming built for the platform, highlighting great UGC and new ways for fans to engage with content from leagues & rights partners.
- To establish themselves as a tier 1 media partner. The entire portfolio reaches over 400M unique viewers monthly with 5B monthly video views, up from 2.3B views last June. They also have 72M+ followers and subscribers, who are highly engaged with all content.
- To demonstrate to top sports leagues, legacy/digital media, investors and brands, that WAVE.tv understands the young sports audience. They are proving that young fans care about sports, but they just need to be engaged in ways that haven’t been done by traditional media.
- To start looking at leveraging the power of fandom in order to energize its audience in a new arena.
- Snap’s audience is right in the sweet spot of the next-gen sports fan. In 2020, WAVE.tv set out to be THE dominant publisher in all of sports.
WAVE.tv was founded on the insight that young sports fans watch sports differently, and they need programming that appeals to their tastes. This distinct perspective and strategy was what started the relationship with Snapchat, who wanted to turn the Discover platform into a can’t-miss content destination for this same audience.
WAVE.tv knew that through original shows on the Discover network, they would be able to deliver a new kind of programming for the sports industry, built for the previously underserved young sports fan. The successful strategy for developing Snap-specific sports programming has allowed WAVE.tv’s network to grow from 5 shows to 14 shows in 2020 alone, with a total, unduplicated network reach in November 2020 of 62.9M.
Take ‘Gym Heroes,’ which had 30.9M unique viewers in December and showcases incredible fitness journeys of everyday people; ‘Phenoms’, which focuses on female powerhouse athletes; or ‘No Limits’, that highlights the impressive accomplishments of athletes with disabilities who are deying the odds; WAVE.tv’s network of Discover Shows has successfully taken themes we know fans want to see and turns them into a program that they keep returning to week-after-week.
With WAVE.tv’s 14 shows running across Snapchat Discover, there is something that captivates every fan.
Despite the pandemic, WAVE.tv's partnership with Snapchat Discover has only grown stronger:
- In 2020, WAVE.tv original shows running on the platform have grown from 5 to 14. Three of these shows were just greenlit and launched in December -- Lil Legends, TBH and Off Track -- proving how their shows have resonated with the Snapchat Discover community.
- They also launched a special Snapchat Discover Show this year around the US Election titled ‘Be The Moment’, which focused on sports icons and their political activism. The seven-episode series encouraged GenZ and Millennial audiences to get out and vote, with stories coming from NBA analyst and ESPN host Jay Williams, WNBA star Brittney Griner, NFL players Anquan Boldin, Malcolm Jenkins and more.
- The WAVE.tv Discover network reached 62.9M monthly active viewers in November 2020.
- WAVE.tv was featured in Snapchat’s Q2 earnings report as a top publisher on their platform.
- WAVE.tv was featured at the 2020 Snap Partner Summit as being one of two companies innovating for digital natives on their platform.
Video for WAVE.tv on Snapchat Discover
