DAZN, a global sports streaming platform often referred to as the “Netflix for Sports,” has rapidly evolved its business model to embrace advertising as a core revenue driver. With an audience of over 300 million regular viewers, DAZN recognised the opportunity to complement its subscription offering with a sophisticated, data-driven advertising ecosystem. By transitioning from a traditional publisher model to a scalable programmatic approach, DAZN has unlocked significant new revenue streams, achieving over 150% year-on-year growth in programmatic video revenue.
As a business built on subscription revenues, DAZN was entering relatively new territory in developing a global advertising strategy. The company was expanding rapidly across multiple regions, each with its own advertising landscape, regulatory environment and commercial dynamics.
DAZN needed to define not only how advertising would operate within its platform, but also which parts of the value chain it should own versus partner. At the same time, any solution had to scale to support hundreds of millions of users and accommodate ongoing international expansion.
Crucially, DAZN wanted to differentiate itself in a competitive market, creating a modern advertising proposition capable of attracting premium ad spend while maintaining a high-quality user experience.
BCi Digital worked closely with DAZN to define and deliver a comprehensive advertising strategy and technical solution. The engagement began with a detailed requirements capture process, ensuring a clear understanding of DAZN’s objectives, constraints and growth ambitions.
This was followed by an in-depth analysis of DAZN’s existing business processes, identifying how advertising workflows could be integrated and where organisational changes would be required. From this foundation, BCi Digital assisted DAZN’s internal teams in designing a scalable system architecture aligned to DAZN’s multi-market needs.
Key partners were identified across the advertising ecosystem, with integration requirements defined to ensure interoperability. BCi Digital supported vendor selection for critical components and led the integration of partner and vendor solutions into a cohesive platform.
The programme was underpinned by rigorous system testing, ensuring the solution could operate reliably at scale and deliver consistent performance across territories.
BCi Digital provided end-to-end programme delivery, combining strategic, technical and operational expertise. This included programme management across multiple workstreams, governance structures and technical oversight.
The team led business analysis and supported partner identification and system architecture design, ensuring alignment between DAZN’s commercial objectives and technical implementation. BCi Digital also supported vendor selection, over saw the integration and managed a comprehensive test strategy across all components of the solution.
Over a 3 year period, BCi Digital helped DAZN integrate multiple systems into a flexible, scalable advertising management platform supporting many of their existing markets, with the ability to expand further.
The solution enabled DAZN to collaborate with leading industry partners including Google, integrating with multiple ad exchanges to drive competition and maximise yield.
A key part of this evolution was the integration of enriched audience data through a partnership with Kantar Media (now Fifty5Blue), enabling more sophisticated targeting and measurement capabilities.
Key results include:
In addition, DAZN was able to introduce more free-to-access sports content, supporting a “freemium” model that attracts new audiences and drives conversion into paid subscriptions.
The transformation of DAZN’s advertising capabilities has positioned the company to compete effectively for global ad spend while maintaining its premium sports offering. By building a flexible and scalable architecture, DAZN can continue to expand into new markets, onboard new partners and evolve its commercial model.
Advertising is now a core pillar of DAZN’s growth strategy, supporting both revenue diversification and audience expansion through innovative viewing models.
Whether you are launching an ad-supported service, scaling programmatic revenues or expanding into new markets, BCi Digital brings the strategic, technical and delivery expertise needed to succeed.
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