Tory Clarkson, new data & intelligence lead at Whisper looks at how the company and England Rugby have approached the Women’s Rugby World Cup
It takes 28 million grass seed to re-sow the pitch at Twickenham.
Fans will drink over 800,000 pints of Guinness over a whole season at Twickenham.
Women take 90 seconds to use a public toilet, men take 45 seconds.
You learn some quirky stats when you’re working as insights lead at England Rugby, helping to prepare for the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup. When I joined in 2020, our team was set the task of using data to answer three questions: ‘Should we bid for the World Cup?’ ‘If we go for it, how do we win the bid?’, and ‘If we win the rights, how do we make a success of it?’
The broadcast partnerships, via World Rugby and Six Nations, were identified as critical to the Red Roses’ increased visibility. TV is mostly the public’s first way into rugby. Our research said that the problem in 2020-21 wasn’t that people had negative views of women’s rugby; it was that they had no views whatsoever.
Women’s Rugby wasn’t on the public agenda. It was not something that people could easily or casually access.
Skip forward to Saturday where the Red Roses’ World Cup semi final against France was on primetime BBC1.
On Saturday afternoon, I was sat in the Cymru Broadcast Centre in Cardiff, shadowing the Whisper Cymru team as they produced the BBC’s coverage of the Red Roses semi-final. It was an amazing experience, even if I did have to keep running out of the gallery to avoid coughing down the line to the studio at Ashton Gate.
Strategy and creativity played out in the gallery: balancing decisions made on the back of in-depth research and analysis with incredible editorial judgement in the moment, as fans and players reacted to the ebb and flow of the match.
Our insight told us that fans wanted to know who the players were, and that they were more likely to engage with rugby if they think it will be exciting and good quality. Throughout the tournament, the Whisper production pulled stunning, skilful plays into clips in the days leading up the matches; they told the moving back-stories of the star players in special features. They brought in the best talent to analyse the matches as they happened.
It is this blend of the art of storytelling combined with the science of audience and fan data insight that is driving Whisper’s delivery and execution for the biggest broadcasters, streamers, and events. As we move into an ever more fragmented media landscape, this appreciation and understanding of how these two disciplines work together will become even more important.
The aim is to bring fans closer to the live experience through whatever medium they are using. This has its own difficulties in the moment; it was so loud in the stadium that the presenters had to strain to hear the production team through their earpieces. And so many people were interacting with their phones in the stadium that getting signal to see the images of stats graphics sent through over WhatsApp was a struggle.
Things have moved on a lot since 2020. But, as the cliché goes, these are now good problems to have.
Tory Clarkson is data and intelligence lead at Whisper, which she joined in August
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