M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment has launched a new specialist service that weaves together elements of both sport and lifestyle. Called Fabric, it will give brands and rights holders fully integrated creative solutions as they look to break into the lifestyle space – an area that increasingly overlaps with sport.

What is Fabric?

• M&C Saatchi Intelligence has identified fashion, food, beauty, health and wellbeing as ’passion areas’ that have grown to dominate lifestyle purchases.

• In Australia, for instance, lifestyle purchases in these categories accounted for half of all online transactions last year, with news stories focussed on these areas exploding by 80% in three years.

• Fabric will be headed up by M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment’s recently appointed head of communications, Krystyna Frassetto, who has over a decade of experience in the sector.

• Launching initially in Australia, Fabric will roll out across London, New York, Johannesburg and Berlin over the coming months.

Why now?

• The switch in focus follows a disastrous summer for sports – one of the worst-hit sectors by the coronavirus crisis, it has weathered cancellations, sponsorship withdrawal and locked stadiums.

• In response, M&C Saatchi is striving to diversify by connecting brands to the aforementioned ’passions’ that have some relevancy to sport.

• Frassetto explained: ”The way we cultivate our passions is evolving. It’s no longer just about a favourite celebrity, team or game. Passions have become an outlet for creative expression, a way to forge a new identity, upskill, campaign for change and even gain a professional advantage.”

• This realisation will see Frassetto lead creative communications solutions for brands that reflect a ’proliferation of fragmented, heightened and often quite niche interests’, which are changing the way consumers discover, engage and share.

• Frassetto concluded: ”With our Australian media industry in a state of flux and the democratisation of creativity, inspiration and influence can come from anywhere.”

• M&C Saatchi is in the throes of change having endured a nightmare 2019, during which senior figures tendered their resignation after successive profit warnings, lost clients and an accounting failure.

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