This audience is younger, more diverse and cheaper to reach than yours

If you plan media or deliver brand activations for a living, the next two minutes are worth your time. We're building the Inclusive Sport & Culture Festival in Liverpool for May 2027, and the audience research behind it overturns something some marketeers still believe.

There's a profile the whole industry is chasing. Under 35. Ethnically diverse. Hard to reach through broadcast. Immune to anything that smells like advertising. Everybody is bidding for them through music, gaming and creators, and the rate card shows it.

That profile describes the audience for Olympic and Paralympic sport rather well, and the ISCF sits squarely on that pathway. It's an audience that has changed faster than its reputation has.

The numbers

UK Sport's Fan360 research tracks people who engage at least monthly with Olympic or Paralympic sport, across a nationally representative sample of UK adults.

Under 35: 52% of the engaged Olympic and Paralympic audience, against 30% of UK adults.

Ethnically diverse: 28% of the engaged audience, against roughly 17% of UK adults.

Disabled: 16% of the engaged audience, against 18% of UK adults.

Source: UK Sport Fan360, 2025. The base combines Olympic and Paralympic engagement, so this describes the audience for the whole pathway rather than Paralympic sport alone.

Over half under 35, against 30% of the country. More than a quarter ethnically diverse, against roughly 17%. On the two attributes you're paying the biggest premiums to reach, this audience over-indexes hard.

And look at the disability line, because it dismantles the assumption everything else rests on. At 16%, this audience is broadly in line with the country. This was never a small audience being served back to the people it's about. It's a mainstream one, and it has been all along.

The appetite is proven, and it's growing fast

Paris 2024 settled the other half of the argument.

The 2024 Paralympics delivered 763.3 million hours of coverage consumed by viewers worldwide, 83% more than Tokyo, with the live audience up 40%. That happened largely because European broadcasters, Channel 4 among them, put substantially more of it on air.

Give people the chance to watch and they take it, immediately and in volume. The demand was always sitting there. What changed was the supply.

Which means the growth in this category isn't speculative. It's been demonstrated, at global scale, within the last cycle. The question for a brand isn't whether the audience is coming. It's whether you're in position when it arrives.

What we've built to meet it

The ISCF lands on Liverpool's waterfront from 2 to 8 May 2027, and the audience thesis above shaped every decision in it.

Four Paralympic-pathway sports, with the Boccia competition counting towards qualification for the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games, so the sport carries genuine stakes. Two of the four, Para Athletics and Para Canoe, out on the waterfront in the open air and free to view, putting elite competition in front of thousands of people from across Liverpool and further afield. More than 25,000 spectators are expected across the week.

Alongside it, an arts and culture programme worth over a million pounds, funded by Arts Council England and delivered with Culture Liverpool, led by D/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists, carrying equal weight with the sport rather than sitting as a fringe around the edge.

Two audiences. One week. A city centre. Free at the point of entry for a large share of it.

For a brand, that combination is very hard to buy anywhere else: a young, diverse, city-centre audience, attached to global sport competition where Britain is taking the lead to fill the gap between Paralympic cycles with something real at stake, and to a body of new art being made by disabled artists over the year leading up to it.

Get the budget question right

One practical note, because it decides how well this works.

Inclusive sport often gets funded from CSR, ESG or foundation money. That's the budget willing to move first, and the people holding it have been making the internal case for years. But work tends to get scoped to match the budget it comes from, and reputational money buys reputational work: smaller creative, looser integration, a shorter run.

The ISCF will be a valuable marketing opportunity, with social responsibility at its heart, not the other way around.

Look at the numbers above again. A mainstream audience, younger and more diverse than the country, with demonstrated and growing appetite, reachable through a property delivering four Paralympic-pathway competitions alongside a landmark cultural programme, as well as an integrated social impact programme designed to drive tangible progress. This all belongs in a marketing conversation, and the strongest partnerships we've seen are the ones where the marketing and impact budgets sit in the room together. That's what we're building with the ISCF. Something new, impactful and powerful.

The bigger prize

There's another ambition under all of this that we think will drive real value for our brand partners.

We want Liverpool 2027 to become the template for how events get built in this country. Not a specialist event for a specialist audience, but proof at full scale that designing from the outset around the widest possible range of people produces a better event for everyone. When you make something work for people with access needs, you make it work better for the family with a pushchair, the older visitor, and the person who just wants to know what they're walking into before they book.

Some of it is already running: paid roles and apprenticeships on the delivery team recruited to open doors rather than filter people out, a volunteering programme, and a schools programme delivered with Liverpool City Council. Opportunity and growth, aimed at changing who works in this industry as well as who watches it.

Come with us

Partnership conversations are open now across multiple tiers, for both the ISCF in May 2027 and the IWBF European Wheelchair Basketball Championships that September, both delivered by UKEL in Liverpool.

Together we can achieve great things, so please get in touch with alastair@ukel.co.uk and let's talk.

The Inclusive Sport & Culture Festival takes place in Liverpool, 2 to 8 May 2027.