“Making sport more relevant” has been Redtorch’s tagline since a board meeting back in 2018.

Since then, the word relevance seems to have appeared everywhere.

The IOC talks about it. People regularly declare certain sports relevant, or (God forbid) irrelevant.

But what does being relevant actually mean?

I think there’s a tendency to equate relevance with attention. And in the Olympic world, that often means attention on social media.

The problem is that post-event metrics – millions of impressions, views and engagements – can quickly become the reward in themselves. Something to celebrate as evidence of relevance.

But how much do these numbers actually tell us?

How many real people did you reach? How many actually paid attention? Did any of your content make its way into long-term memory? And crucially, could people remember which sport or organisation it came from?

Getting attention is important, but it’s only the first step towards building lasting memories in the minds of your audience.

Memory is a complicated beast. Even when something makes its way into long-term memory, it doesn’t mean it stays readily accessible forever. Memories fade, compete with other memories and need refreshing.

Which brings me back to relevance.

For me, making sport more relevant means increasing the likelihood of a sport coming to mind and having a place in people’s lives, more frequently and in more situations.

Achieving this requires good, proper marketing:

• understanding your market
• reaching people beyond your existing fans
• creating things that make people feel something
• making sure they know who created them.

It also means making it easy for people to watch, follow and participate.

And then doing it all again. Consistently, over time.

Building and refreshing memories so that your sport comes to mind more often, in more situations, for more people.

That’s what making sport more relevant means to me.

And it’s a considerably bigger ambition than generating a few million impressions.