How the Westminster Dog Show is embracing Gen Z’s social-first sports consumption

For the majority of Gen Z, tuning into live sporting events on linear TV has become an obsolete method of staying up-to-date on the latest game or competition, with these younger consumers instead largely turning to social media channels for event highlights and sports news. 

So, the Westminster Kennel Club has overhauled its social media strategy for the 147th edition of its titular dog show to appeal to this digitally-native audience. Rather than use social media as a supplement to the TV broadcast, the Westminster Kennel Club, and its creative agency, GLOW, have instead focused on transforming the organization’s social channels into the primary destination for Gen Z audiences to view the dog show. 

For this year’s dog show, which began on May 6 with a dock diving event and an agility competition and runs through today, the Westminster Kennel Club has teamed up with Fox Sports to directly capture moments from the TV broadcast and upload them across both the organization’s and Fox Sports’ social channels. Though the Westminster Kennel Club and GLOW are also still incorporating some on-the-ground photos and video footage into the organization’s social content, this new emphasis on broadcast clips “aligns more closely with how sporting teams cover their live events,” said Alicia Barillari, an account manager at GLOW, in an email. 

For example, NBCUniversal has partnered with Twitter to post real-time updates from the Olympics since 2021, and struck a deal with TikTok last year to do the same.

As one of the oldest continuous sporting events in the U.S., the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show has had to evolve a number of times over the years to stay relevant with modern audiences. During an Advertising Week panel in October 2022, Gail Miller Bisher, the club's director of communications, said that the organization was “a little late to social [media]” and didn’t establish a social presence until 2010. But the organization has leaned into social media over the past decade and worked with GLOW to monitor trends in younger audiences’ interests and consumption habits, which ultimately led them to this real-time approach. 

“We are an older brand, and dog shows are something that people may question, like ’Why is that still relevant? Why do we need to do that?’” Bisher said during the panel. “Dog ownership and thoughts and behaviors change, and obviously, social media is always changing, so I feel like for Westminster, we’re always trying to catch up and be there at the forefront.”

In a Morning Consult survey of 1,000 Gen Z consumers conducted in December, only 28% of respondents said they watch live sports through linear TV, in comparison to 47% of all U.S. adults who reported doing the same. Additionally, one in three Gen Z respondents said they don’t watch live sporting events at all. Instead, the primary source Gen Z uses to follow sports is social media, with YouTube, Instagram and TikTok emerging as respondents’ top three platforms. 

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“In the past, our team focused on on-site capture to bring a behind-the-scenes look,” wrote Madi Quisenberry, senior social strategist at GLOW, and Sarah Powley, senior social media Manager at GLOW, in an email. “However, with exhibitors and fans posting similar content, we knew we had to provide more and take our live coverage to the next level. We wanted to tap into the way sports audiences consume content, and clipping directly from the streams was the way to do it.”

Since May 6, when the agility championship took place, several members of the GLOW team have closely monitored the Westminster Dog Show’s broadcast to pick out key clips to post to the organization’s social channels, turning some moments into GIFs and uploading other videos unedited. For example, GLOW narrowed in on the agility contest as a “high priority for [their] social feeds,” Quisenberry and Powley said, owing to its potential appeal to “a high-intensity sport audience.” 

Across Westminster Kennel Club’s social channels—including Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook—users could view several dogs' runs through obstacle courses in their entirety. And thousands did, with one video uploaded to Fox Sports’ Instagram account garnering nearly 100,000 likes in under 24 hours. These excerpts from the live broadcast were posted alongside the on-site, behind-the-scenes content that the Westminster Kennel Club had previously centered in its social strategy, Quisenberry and Powley said.