Trade Desk study: sports fans lean on CTV and the open web.
Research from The Trade Desk Intelligence and PA Consulting says sports fans use connected TV and open-web sources far more than social media to follow their sports. Saudi Arabia is one of the seven markets in the survey.
According to Campaign Middle East, the study, titled How the open internet fuels modern sports fandom, surveyed 3,550 fans in Saudi Arabia, the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The Trade Desk's own page confirms the seven-country scope and the headline finding: fans are 1.6 times more likely to turn to the open internet, such as sports news sites or club apps, than to social media. It also says fans follow four sports on average across the year and that 82% say reliving winning moments drives their engagement.
Campaign Middle East reports further figures. CTV was the only channel used across the whole cycle from build-up to off-season; 84% of fans hold a CTV sports subscription; 80% call connected digital channels essential to their fandom, against 62% for walled gardens such as social platforms and search; two in three use an open-web source as a second screen during live events; and 87% say using one connected channel leads them to another. The study groups fans into five mindsets, from Feel-good Fandom to Connected Community.
Some details are unclear. Campaign Middle East gives the 83% CTV figure two ways, once as fans calling CTV their go-to source and once as fans calling it important. Neither source gives a separate result for Saudi Arabia, the fieldwork dates or how the sample was drawn, and the full report was not on The Trade Desk's insights page when we checked. The Trade Desk sells CTV and open-web advertising, so the framing suits its business.
For Gulf marketers the timing matters. Terry Kane, The Trade Desk's managing director for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey, points to the Formula 1 finale, the DP World Tour's Gulf swing, the AFC Asian Cup in Saudi Arabia and the FIBA World Cup in Qatar in the next year. Sponsors planning around those events now have one more argument for budgeting for the weeks either side of the event, not only the live broadcast.
Why it matters
It gives Gulf sponsors a data point for spreading sports budgets beyond match day and beyond social feeds, though the research comes from a company that sells CTV and open-web ads.
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