Archie Woodhead, From the Cheap Seats

These technologies are making a fan’s location more relevant in sport

fromthecheapseats — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 07:06:42 +0000

Communicating to sports fans based on their specific location can significantly improve that interaction for fans, rights holders and brands, whether this is based on which country a fan is in, in what context they are watching (in the stadium, at home, in the pub) or simply being able to reach fans on the move as they follow their favourite team.

Much more could be done to embrace new technologies, particularly in mobile, that enable rights holders to maintain a relationship with their fans 24/7 and provide greater commercial opportunities.

Fans at Home

It is no surprise that there is so much marketing waste when it comes to shirt and perimeter board advertising. Many lead sponsors of Premier League football clubs do not even have an interest in the UK market. Traditional sponsorship assets are less relevant for global rights in a world where advertisers expect highly targeted, flexible and measureable campaigns.

Perimeter Board Advertising: Supponor has developed technology that can display different messages on in-stadia perimeter advertising to different TV audiences even though they are watching identical feeds in every other way. This will have an immediate effect on the club / league’s ability to sell more effective partnerships. If this technology can develop further using a data led approach then fans could soon be seeing feeds personalised to them based on their online searches or TV habits.
Mobile Apps: According to Nielson 80% of the TV audience uses a second screen when watching their favourite programmes. Fans are looking to extend their TV experience with additional content, arguably making TV / perimeter board advertising less viewed. Rights holders could identify fans “on the sofa” and deliver specific content to those fans, enabling them to participate in the TV experience by voting for man of the match or try of the month. Linking the TV to the mobile enables fans at home to actively participate in the match rather than passively consume content.

League vs. Club Sponsors

Product category exclusivity is often sold as an additional benefit of a sponsorship. However, as leagues and clubs sell rights independently, this can result in two competitive brands trying to reach the same audience – one through the club and one through the league. As both expect “exclusivity” in their category, seeing their main competitor next to them on the perimeter board advertising can create friction.

As a marketing platform, mobile removes this problem immediately. Fans can be segmented by location and the content managed in a way that club sponsors can be displayed to the fans in the stadium and on the same piece of content, league sponsors could be displayed to fans watching on TV, which is usually the domain of a central right.

Local area marketing

Sports matches have a huge economic impact on the local area but rights holders often find it difficult to capitalise on this. There are two areas where we could see growth in the next few seasons:

Rewards schemes: If fans can receive benefits from all their transactions ranging from cafes to travel and redeem these rewards with their club then each party benefits from the retailer’s association with the club. Rewards 4 Group have delivered a successful scheme with the Jockey Club and now boast over 1 million members collecting points from over 4,000 retailers. By creating local associations who would not be able to afford sponsorship packages a club benefits from matchday footfall outside of the stadium and even further afield.
Location Technology: Rights holders who have invested in native iOS / Android apps can also use location technology such as iBeacons or tracking Wi-Fi hotspots to provide relevance to their fan communication. Take Guinness’s sponsorship of the Pro12 – fans that walk into pubs serving Guinness on a match day could be rewarded with offers direct to their phone using location technology and further establishing Guinness’s association with the league.

Fans are consuming sport wherever they go and the more technology can be embraced to enhance that experience the more value rights holders and brands will generate.

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How Sport Sponsorship can Develop more Valuable Digital Rights

fromthecheapseats — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 22:39:50 +0000

In 2015, the UK became the first country in the world where digital took over 50% of total ad spend (emarketer), greater than the combined efforts of TV, print, outdoor and radio. However, this is not the case in sport sponsorship where digital benefits are often a footnote to a rights schedule.

Advertisers are accustomed to the benefits of digital – it is targeted, flexible, trackable and quick to activate. If sport sponsorship could mix these advantages with the natural passion a fan has for a club or league then the value of sponsorship rights could be dramatically increased.

The next five years are going to be an interesting time for sponsorship and it is essential that rights holders not only retain their digital assets but nurture these too. Without embracing and investing in technology, clubs risk becoming less relevant to their fans and losing touch with an ever changing commercial landscape.

Here are four examples of how digital rights can improve sponsorship:

Product Launches

Currently sport sponsorship does not lend itself to short term campaigns. It takes a long time to sell and is difficult to activate, usually involving experienced agencies at no small expense.

Take a product like a new Hollywood film; the marketing team behind the film’s release will not want to be tied into a 3-5 year period of spend which is common for sport sponsorship. Rights holders should instead offer a digital package that enables a concentrated two month campaign rather than ignoring these substantial marketing budgets.

Targeted Advertising

All brands understand their customer demographic. When sponsoring a sports club or event there is often a large amount of ‘waste’. If, for example, a financial services company is looking to target consumers aged over 35, with a household income of £X and live in a specific location then this might only make up 10% of a club’s fan base.

A sports club with well-established digital rights and could take a lower rights fee and enable the financial services company to target the 10% of the fan base that they are interested in. This then frees up the remaining 90% of fans for a different company to target.

Direct Engagement

One of the fantastic things about sport is how willing fans are to interact with their favourite team or event. Vitality, a life insurance company, use sponsorship to encourage fans to calculate their “Vitality Health Age”. Whilst fans are unlikely to directly download an insurance app or visit an insurance website, if the Vitality Health Age Calculator is integrated into the England Cricket app then these fans are able to interact with an insurance company in a digital environment that they enjoy being on.

Local Affiliations

There are many companies local to a sports team who would like an affiliation with the team beyond the level a hospitality package can get them but without the marketing budgets of pan UK brands. A local car dealership for example could have a dedicated section of a club’s official app for their clients and employees. The dealership would generate value through pointing their clients to sponsored content in the app but would not need to access the wider fan base.

Currently these local sponsors take some signage around the pitch which reduces the value for bigger sponsors as well as creating a more cluttered commercial environment. A digital approach would provide these companies with the advertising they need but without affecting bigger sponsorship rights.

It is a simple fact that we are consuming ever more digital media, particularly on mobile where in the UK we spend two hours on our smartphones every day (Ofcom). As a result, digital media can and should be an integral part of every live sport event and we are starting to see a shift in sport sponsorship to cater for this demand. Clubs, events and other sports rights holders will enjoy greater revenues from these sponsorship rights in the five years.

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What 5G Means for Sports

fromthecheapseats — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 22:17:17 +0000

First published on www.sportindustry.biz

Sport rights holders are approached by numerous companies looking to sell Wi-Fi and other in stadia connectivity solutions. The reasons for this are three fold:

Smart phone penetration in the UK will reach 80% by the end of 2015, fans now have devices that will benefit from connectivity
Fans, particularly the millennials generation expect to be connected. A Cisco study shows that 44% of fans site connectivity as very important to their experience with over half now preferring to watch at home
Connectivity allows rights holders and sponsors to talk to fans when they are at their most engaged

Most solutions are expensive and it is often difficult to justify the cost of a Wi-Fi install. The advent of 5G, due to be released in South Korea in 2018 will dramatically change connectivity and as a result in stadia fan engagement.

The Power of 5G

Scientists from Surrey University believe it is now possible to run a wireless data connection at an astounding 800Gbps – which would allow users to download 33 HD films in a single second. The speeds and huge data capacities will revolutionise many markets and sport is just one of these.

The UK and South Korea are leading the way; Surrey University and partners will be deploying 5G trials in Brighton and a number of other testbeds around the UK, whilst there are plans to launch a temporary trial for 2018’s Winter Olympic Games. It is likely that this will be more widely available in the UK by 2020.

How will 5G affect current systems?

1. High Density Wi-Fi

Although high density Wi-Fi has been installed in a limited number of venues in the UK, providers such as Cisco and Huawei and have found it hard to gain acceptance from clubs. With costs ranging from £500K to £2m per venue this is hardly a surprise. In addition, calibrating all the access points in a concrete bowl is an incredibly complicated task and reliability can be a problem. 5G could make the need for high density Wi-Fi completely redundant.

2. Peer to Peer Networking

Using Wi-Fi direct (the technology that automatically connects your mobile phone to your Wi-Fi at home), peer to peer networking enables phones with the same mobile app to share information in a local network rather than needing to connect directly to Wi-Fi or 3G/4G. If one person has a connection in the stadium then they share the live scores with all those sitting in the same stand.

The more people on this network, the better it performs and for this reason it could become more important when 5G hits the UK market and clubs are looking to share larger amounts of data with their fans.

3. Multicasting

Multicasting is a networking technology that greatly reduces the cost of distributing over any wireless network. If a thousand people want to see the same content, rather than sending the same content one thousand times, multicast will allow all thousand devices to register and receive a single sending of the data. Essentially it allows a one-to-many distribution of content (e.g. video) rather than having to replicate data requests from multiple users. This technology can be used by clubs to send out video highlights to fans at half time. Multicast will likely be available in the next generation of 5G systems, as well as its availability in Wi-Fi, and will thus provide a legitimate alternative to a pure Wi-Fi solution.

What will this mean for fans?

In stadia fan experience is about atmosphere, being with friends and cheering your team. What does 5G have to do with this? Connectivity does not necessarily change the fan experience but it can dramatically enhance it.

Here are a few areas where providing fans with mobile functionality can enhance their experience:

1. Content: delivering live match analysis, half time replays and ref decisions to fans. TV does this brilliantly and currently fans are less well informed in the stadium

2. Participation: enabling fans to take part in voting for the man of the match, betting, predicting the score at half time and even challenging away fans to quiz head to heads

3. Logistics: ordering drinks, tickets to the next match, knowing how long it will take to the leave the stadium, upgrading your seat

Much of this functionality is possible at the moment but 5G will make this activities like this more seamless for fans and less expensive for rights holders. Combine this with good old fashioned team support and there will be no comparison when it comes to experience.

The post What 5G Means for Sports appeared first on Archie Woodhead, From the Cheap Seats.

A few simple charity fundraising tricks for sports clubs

fromthecheapseats — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 18:36:09 +0000

67 million tickets are sold for spectator sports in the UK each year. This represents a huge opportunity for charities to involve the crowd in fundraising, much like charities at the London Marathon do. Crowd initiatives will create positive sentiments towards the sports club and improve the fan’s experience. It would also be a lot simpler than running 26.2 miles around London!

Aussie cricket fans get involved at the Jane McGrath fundraiser

High volume, small payments are integral to fundraising plans

Micropayments are more accessible than ever: traditional direct debit donations (e.g. £3 a month), SMS payments and rounding up at the till are all examples of charities benefiting from micropayments. Using a range of these, Unicef raised £3.7 million at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony
Significant benefits: the majority of charities who receive most of their funding from members of the public (rather than government funding), get in excess of 60% of their income from donations of £10 or less.

Increased ticket sales to certain personality types

Behavioural psychologists such as Carl Jung, Myers and Briggs have developed the idea that different personalities react well to different messaging.

A personality type with values linked to authenticity, community, ethics and morality has been proven to react better to more charitable messages. For sports clubs, this personality type could form up to 30% of their customer base so promoting charitable causes would increase ticket sales amongst this group.

Ethical Goods, a company that matches charities with businesses, produced a 400% uplift in sales for Harrogate Spa at the same time as raising over £1.6m+ for Pump Aid through a simple partnership promotion.

Benefits of marketing through charities

Charities are masters of managing databases to build support. Their relationships need to last a lifetime. For example, a supporter acquired through an event or direct debit relationship may go on to leave a legacy and learning those trends over many years is vital to a charities success.

Consequently charities have an engaged audience who will react well to sensibly targeted marketing coming from the charity. If a charity can promote tickets for the club and in turn raise more money then this seems like a fair exchange.

Some Ideas for Starters

The key to all these ideas is that the team, players or fans need to be involved in the fundraising process.

Sponsor me to wear Pink

Players are sponsored by fans and their team mates (perhaps a week’s wages) to wear a pink shirt during the match in support for Breast Cancer Care or Cancer Research.
Fans, in the same way as being sponsored for a marathon, are sponsored by their friends and family to attend the match dressed head to toe in pink.
Both players and fans would set up fundraising pages and it would certainly create a buzz around the home team’s city as well as some fantastic photo opps.

Ticket donation matched by the club… IF the team wins

On purchasing the ticket a fan can donate £5 to a charity.
This amount will be matched by the club if the team wins.

£1 per goal

Season ticket holders donate £1 for every goal scored that season.
This is matched by the club for each ticket holder.

Charity Seating

Most sold out participant events reserve entries for charities, after a certain point it is only possible to enter if you commit to raising money for charity.
In the same way, for the final 1,000 tickets, a club could add a £10 donation to each ticket.

Continuing the hard work of clubs and player

Scepticism often surrounds the good work that clubs and players do for charitable causes, mainly due to the size of player wages. Sometimes this is justified but often not. There are multiple cases of clubs working in the community – there were 39,658 football player visits to charitable schemes in the 2013-14 season alone.

Involving the crowd goes a step further and would provide many commercial and PR benefits to both the clubs and associated charities.

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Mass Participation Sports Should use the Nectar Card Model to Increase Event Entries

fromthecheapseats — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 18:33:46 +0000

A whopping 95% of consumers in the UK own at least one loyalty card. With so much focus on doing 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week I believe people should be rewarded for taking part in running, cycling and swimming events using the successful Nectar card model.

This would have two effects:

Increased participation: Nectar found that after a card holder was first rewarded they increased their activity in all shops associated with the card by 10%. The feeling of being rewarded and the material benefits that come with a points scheme would drive participation.
Improved customer understanding: With enough event organisers taking part in the scheme, a single view of each participant would be created rather than multiple disparate data sets currently owned and guarded by event organisers.

Using Data to Funnel Participation

Event organisers like IMG, Human Race and Limelight would be able to learn more about customer behaviour outside their own events, answering questions such as:

How do I compare when retaining customers or attracting new customers?
Is someone who took part in a Colour Run seeking new challenges?
Has a seemingly lapsed runner moved on to triathlon?

The data would show which participant has a greater propensity to enter a particular type of event. This in turn would lead to more targeted and effective marketing for the event organiser and ultimately a clear funnel of participation from first event through to regular exerciser.

Learning from the Theatre Industry

Purple Seven is a company that works with multiple theatres in the UK to create a holistic view of the habits of all theatre goers.

By collecting data from each ticket transaction (37m of them), Purple Seven can analyse anonymised data that allows theatres to improve their service for ticket buyers. 110 theatres provide this data to Purple Seven and benefit with higher ticket sales using the actionable insights created.

Rewarding All Activity

Wearable tech has grown rapidly in the last 3 years. Kantar Media predicts that there will be 13.1 million users of apps or wearable technology in the UK by 2015.

Apps and devices that measure exercise could become part of the scheme, increasing the frequency of reward and inspiring more participation and enjoyment in training. The more a participant’s exercise is tracked the better the rewards and experience will be.

Positive Message with Benefits for Sponsors

Rewarding people for being active and healthy is a more positive message than for their “loyalty” to a coffee chain. It presents numerous opportunities for brands to become part of that reward, creating healthier opportunities for event sponsors to engage with participants.

What better way for a brand to connect with someone than offering a free coffee to congratulate them for completing their recent cycling challenge.

Tackling the Competitive Events (this is the most interesting Nectar stat in my opinion!)

One perceived problem of this rewards scheme is that event organisers may feel they are handing over participants to their competitors. Sainsbury’s looked long and hard at this with their Nectar relationship, especially as other brands that formed part of Nectar sold items like wine and petrol. What they found was that weekly spending at Sainsbury’s was 40% greater amongst people collecting from Sainsbury’s and two other Nectar affiliates than if they just collected at Sainsbury’s. This then increased to 100% if the collector was using Nectar at 5 or 6 affiliates.

The message here is that the more events on the scheme, the greater the benefits for those events individually and overall.

Worth the Investment?

This would require significant investment in technology to work across all event and exercise systems but I believe there is a compelling argument for rewarding participants for exercise.

The post Mass Participation Sports Should use the Nectar Card Model to Increase Event Entries appeared first on Archie Woodhead, From the Cheap Seats.

Millennials can be Persuaded to Watch More Sport

fromthecheapseats — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 07:58:20 +0000

Gamers aren’t usually linked with the sporting community but nearly as many people go to eSports events (over 12 million) as attend Premier League football matches (just under 14 million). I think there is an opportunity for sport to integrate live gaming competitions that will embrace the Millennial Generation.

The fast growing eSports industry

When I hear the word gaming it conjures up images of teenage boys hunched over a console in a darkened room. That was before I discovered eSports, live gaming events where attendance is growing exponentially. With 67% of gamers wanting to go to more events more often, this growth is set to continue.

This is a brave new world for sport’s administrators but gamers are looking for the same experiences that sports fans have enjoyed for centuries. They want to be part of a community, meet their heroes, enjoy an atmosphere and watch their favourite teams and players. Sound familiar?

Generation Y

Sport’s rights holders need a strategy to engage the millennial (18-34 year old) generation. 69% of this group (more than any other age group) can be persuaded to attend more sports events according to Mintel. In fact as this graph below shows, the older someone gets the less likely they are to change their sport viewing habits.

75% of gamers are in this age group and 54% of these also watch traditional sports. If sports clubs in particular want to position themselves at the centre of a community then they can’t ignore gamers.

London vs. Manchester

Take two of the largest communities in the UK. I would like to see football teams in each of these cities working together to create a new rivalry.

For example, Arsenal could create its own London based gaming team under the Gunners brand and play against a similarly constructed team from Manchester. The gamers could then play on the eve of an Arsenal vs. Manchester United match, juxtaposing the competitions to increase the reach of both events. Gamers would take an interest in how their team does on the football pitch and traditional United and Gunners fans would take interest in their gaming counterparts.

Benefits for the Teams

eSports is still relatively underdeveloped and the industry would benefit from having big sports brands like Arsenal involved.

For major sports teams, this is an opportunity to expand fanbases, create additional rights and generate new commercial opportunities. Ticketing is the most obvious income stream but there would also be new sponsorships, licensing deals and a whole host of digital rights. As the table below shows, when gamers attend an event, they like to buy more merchandise than the traditional sports fan:

Major Event Integration

And why stop there? Perhaps the International Olympic Committee could include gaming as one of its sports? That may well irritate squash’s governing body which has spent over 20 years unsuccessfully campaigning to become part of the world’s biggest sports event. All the same, embracing the gaming community would certainly see an increase in Olympics followers. It would also put eSports on the map in a big way.

Simple Gaming at Existing Events

If so many gamers are interested in live sports then at the very least sports events should build interactive products to engage this audience. Generation Y want to be connected and entertained during a match. It is no longer enough to rely on the atmosphere of a football crowd – without developing additional engagement the in stadia experience will fall further behind TV.

This is a group that rights holders can’t ignore, they behave differently to traditional sports fans but are becoming increasingly important. Sport should take this opportunity to broaden its appeal.

If you want to be truly amazed by the world of eSports then watch the first 30 seconds of this video:

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How to Increase Fan Engagement in Cricket

fromthecheapseats — Wed, 27 May 2015 16:01:28 +0000

Cricket’s administrators should follow the women’s Ashes structure to increase fan engagement and TV revenue.

In 2013, the women’s Ashes was restructured to give one winner, taking into account performances across the Test, ODI and T20 formats. It was a huge success with greater national media interest than ever before. I think parts of the men’s game should learn from Clare Connor’s brilliant initiative.

Cricket has a problem – with three different formats it is hard to keep track. I have read a paper on David Kendrix’s ICC ranking system and studied how the County Championship points work. That probably defines me as a cricket nerd but I still have no idea which is the best county or even the best international team!

By combining the three formats into one competition, it would enable fans to understand what is going on throughout the tour.

International Example

Firstly, let’s take a typical England tour to India with 4 Tests, 4 ODIs and 4 T20s. I would then allocate:

4 points for a Test win
2 points for an ODI win
2 points for a T20 win
Half points for a draw or tie

Enhancing Narrative

Work is then needed to make every match matter.

I think tennis does this fantastically well. Each game reaches regular climaxes with big implications for the overall match. The pressure boils over at the end of a set where risks are required and mistakes are costly.

We could do the same with cricket. Each “set” (1 x Test, 1 x ODI, 1 x T20) would take two weeks and could be repeated across the summer, providing broadcasters with regular scheduling:

Each of these matches are important for the set and each set would be vital in the context of the overall series.

Consequences of points system

Match 1 (5 Day test): Starting the set and generating most points (4) allows test match cricket to retain its status as the most important match to win. Winning it would guarantee at least a draw in the set.
Match 2 (T20): Whatever the outcome of the test match, there would be everything to play for in the Friday evening big ticket T20. Off the back of a test victory, a team has the chance to clinch the set. A test defeat would position this a must win game.
Match 3 (Sunday ODI): Unless a team has won both the test and T20, there is still everything to play for in this deciding match, perfectly placed for a family day on the Sunday.

That would complete the set before we are back for another scintillating round starting with the test match.

Squad Dynamics

Player selection, rotation and management would become key strategies and talking points over the series. Perhaps, like in limited overs tournaments, the squad size could be restricted forcing players to excel at all formats or be tactically rotated by management. Would Cook be good enough to retain his place in a squad of 15 or would this give a chance to Alex Hales in test cricket?

An initial issue with a proposal like this is that players might find it hard to make constant format adjustments but shouldn’t that be part of the game? This is a proposal for fans not players.

Easy to Follow

The greatest advantage of this structure is how easy it is for fans to follow. With a consistent narrative built throughout the tour, we would remember key moments and know who the best team is rather than it being broken down by format. This is a big part of the 2013 women’s Ashes success.

When fans find sport easy to follow, it usually has positive implications for broadcasters. That, at least, should give encourage the game’s administrators.

The post How to Increase Fan Engagement in Cricket appeared first on Archie Woodhead, From the Cheap Seats.

Club Together

fromthecheapseats — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 08:00:36 +0000

How sports clubs can increase season ticket sales to 80% of sports fans by working together.

Like many sports fans, I get my news from the BBC or Sky Sports app. This allows me to check the weekend football scores, flick to see who won the Grand Prix and discover stories about sports I don’t even follow. In the same vein, broadcasters are paying huge rights fees so that their paying subscribers have access to multiple sports.

Looking at research conducted by Mintel (see table below) there is clearly a large group of people in the UK who take an interest in several sports. With 29% of consumers watching five or more sports (by any method) over the last year, it would indicate that there is an opportunity for a package ticket that gives consumers a discount for attending multiple events.

Number of Sports watched by any method	%
None	21
1 Sport	16
2 Sports	12
3 Sports	12
4 Sports	10
5 Sports	6
6 + Sports	23

Many clubs, particularly in the US, have started to focus on what fans wants by offering half season tickets or exploring other methods such as dynamic ticket pricing to increase attendances and revenue. I think this could be taken further and by working with other local sports clubs there would be an opportunity to increase attendances whilst providing better value for the fan.

Leeds Example

Three clubs in Leeds all need to increase the number of fans through the turnstiles (see table). By committing fans to attending two or three games in each sport, clubs would start to benefit from cross marketing to each other’s fans.

Leeds United	Football	55% Stadium Utilisation
Leeds Rhinos	Rugby League	75% Stadium Utilisation
Yorkshire CCC	Cricket	<20% Stadium Utilisation

Add in a Yorkshire Jets netball match, an evening at the darts and a day at York races and suddenly the annual program for a sports fan is looking fuller and more enticing.

Model

Perhaps this could be sold to fans as a season ticket across sports with an annual financial commitment similar to season tickets or perhaps a similar model to TasteCard could be used.

TasteCard is a membership that gives customers 50% off at selected restaurants from Monday to Thursday (off peak). It has over 4.5 million members in the UK with over 800,000 active users. With an upfront payment of up to £80 a year, it has similar elements to a season ticket but is essentially a discount voucher that works across a variety of restaurants.

Sports fans could pay £25 for a membership that offers discounts for a selected number of matches each year. Two half price tickets for each sport would fill seats that are otherwise empty without clubs needing to drop their prices. Also, don’t forget about the friends they would bring along – on average tickets are purchased in groups of three.

Loss of business?

A risk of creating a scheme like this would be that current season ticket holders would downgrade. The “share of wallet” that a club has would be reduced and split amongst rival entertainment properties. This might be the case for some fans but season ticket holders are the most fanatic, most loyal supporters in the world. They are unlikely to reduce their number of home games from 20 to 2.

By providing a low priced entry point, this is a scheme that targets fans who attend two or three sports matches a year. The aim would be to encourage them to attend 5 or 6 matches, bringing 2 or 3 friends with them each time. Ultimately this brings more people to sport and all clubs, especially in less mainstream sports, would benefit.

With 33m seats sitting empty across the four main team sports in the UK, it would be fantastic to see clubs looking at initiatives like this.

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A Ryder Cup for Rugby?

fromthecheapseats — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 17:16:54 +0000

With a hugely successful 6 Nations behind us and Rugby World Cup approaching, I look at how rugby fans are treated to relatively little international competition rugby and how a few small changes would create a compelling tournament with similar aspects to golf’s Ryder Cup.

If we have any more days like Saturday (the final day of the 6 Nations), 2015 will be a boon for rugby fans and players alike, not to mention for sponsors, broadcasters and merchandisers. I am a rugby fan but it is the first time I have watched three back to back matches.

But the excitement surrounding the 6 Nations and the World Cup is a stark reminder of how little international competition rugby we are treated to in the UK. British teams, like their Southern Hemisphere counterparts, rarely compete in more than one tournament annually. Around the big competitions, we as fans snack on friendlies such as the Autumn Internationals, an annual tour of Southern Hemisphere teams to the UK, which while compelling, lacks the building narrative of a league or knockout format.

It is this narrative that had us all enthralled at the weekend, it is this narrative that would have a Welsh fan rapt by a Scotland vs. Argentina game, if it would indirectly affect the fortunes of their national team. As it happened, the friendly I have in mind in November 2014 didn’t even hold much allure for the Scots themselves; Murrayfield was left almost half empty.

The irony of the Autumn Internationals is they consistently boast the world’s best players, greatest showdowns and higher concentration of top ranked matches than the Rugby World Cup. Nearly half of its 2014 friendlies had winning margins of less than one try, yet we struggle to recall those winning moments. They simply didn’t matter as much to the fans, the press or the big business that surrounds our sport.

Rugby’s governors would merely have to tweak the Autumn Internationals to create a more exciting – and lucrative – competition. Considering the political and logistical impediments to changing international schedules, the most difficult part of what I propose (finding time in the schedules of the world’s greatest players and buy in from the governing bodies) has already been achieved.

The annual spectre of the Autumn Internationals could be refashioned into an annual tournament pitching the best of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres against each other. Think the Ryder Cup meets Lion’s Tour, think Super Bowl or Grand Final, think All Stars vs. Barbarians. If England’s recent World Cup performances in cricket and football are anything to go by, we may need another tournament.

Excited fans also attract business. The 2015 World Cup will generate broadcasting revenues in excess of £100m and sell over 2.3 million tickets. The 6 Nations generates £300 million in revenue each year, double that of the RFU (England’s governing body) a substantial amount of whose income comes from the 6 Nations. The Autumn Internationals could be much more profitable for each nation with the added ingredient of narrative.

Here’s how it might work:

Firstly, take the top six teams from each hemisphere:

Northern Hemisphere Group	Southern Hemisphere Group
England	Australia
France	Argentina
Ireland	Fiji
Italy	New Zealand
Scotland	Samoa
Wales	South Africa

4 matches per team
Each team from the Northern Hemisphere Group would play four teams from the Southern Hemisphere Group including two of the “big three” – Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – and visa versa.

Northern vs. Southern Hemisphere battle
A similar points system would operate to the Rugby World Cup. Teams would collect points to climb the standings in their own group and also to build points for their hemisphere (or group) as a whole. Every point for every team would matter in the context of the Northern vs. Southern Hemisphere battle.

Grand Final
Following the end of the group stage, the top team from each Hemisphere would play a Grand Final worth double points for their Hemisphere. The build up to this final would be immense, there would not be a neutral supporter in the world.

Hemisphere with most points wins
A trophy and prize money would be awarded to the Hemisphere with the most points with prize money distributed to players based on how many points they won for their Hemisphere. A separate trophy would go to the winner of the Grand Final.

Cricket, football and athletics each have successful secondary tournaments that don’t come around every year. There’s little obstacle for World Rugby to follow suit. I can’t wait for the World Cup but I don’t want to wait another four years to see England play competitively against the likes of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.

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Money? Balls!

fromthecheapseats — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:40:08 +0000

Sports Teams are achieving low income in comparison to their media reach, I look at how that is changing and how teams are going about it.

We often hear about the increased commercialisation of sport – the price of football tickets, media rights fees driven up by pay TV channels and eye watering player salaries. However, a study by Decision Technology, a customer behavioural science company, shows that sports teams fail to generate revenues in line with their high social media indexes.

Sport does have unnaturally high engagement from its customers, in what other industry would customers paint their faces the colour of the brand’s logo? This is particularly evident on social media – of the 20 most tweeted TV airings in 2013, 12 were about sport (Perform and Kantar’s “Know the Fan” 2014 survey).

There are difficulties for sports teams when exporting their product. Apple can open stores anywhere in the world. Tech companies like Facebook and Google are prominent in nearly all connected territories. Manchester United, one of the most globally recognised sports brands has a well-developed licensing programme with many cafes and merchandise stores but these provide very different experiences to a home stadium, of which there can only be one.

So how will we see teams tackle this problem or opportunity?

Media Rights
Media rights continue to increase across world sport, the recent sale of Premier League rights in the UK saw a 70% jump on the previous agreement. Star now pay BCCI over $100m annually, considering the situation 30 years ago when BCCI were having to pay Dordashan (a local broadcaster) to show their matches on TV, this is not bad going. These dramatic increases more recently are a result of rights holders and broadcaster understanding the value of sport for their customers.

Sponsorship
Global franchises, led by Manchester United, have started to localise sponsorship agreements – significantly increasing revenue opportunities. The brand strength of teams that have built up their social media index so successfully enables rights to be replicated in any territory with no need to include ticketing, hospitality and branding rights true of more traditional (or outdated!) sponsorships. This is a recent development and one that recognises the value of engaged fans across the world.

Subscriptions
I believe that clubs will soon focus more on fan subscription models outside of their home territory. Annual fees in return for “behind the scenes” content, insider news, discounts on merchandise, signed memorabilia etc. Barcelona FC have over 300m fans on their various networks with 222,980 paying members. That is less than 0.1% – there is huge opportunity to grow.

Loyalty and a new class of affiliation
Loyalty platforms have had success all over the world from Nectar Card (19m UK users) to the Starbucks app. Sports teams have uniquely loyal customer bases and I think that the larger teams could secure a new type of affiliation that goes beyond sponsorship.

Working in the same way as a Nectar card, affiliated businesses would reward sports fans for their custom. These points are then redeemed with the club (tickets, merchandise, experiences) and the businesses pays the club a small percentage of the revenue received through the fan.

Schemes like these benefit all those associated with it and the value exchange between the rights holder, fan and affiliated business could allow clubs to take a share of unrelated transactions.

With investment in time and marketing there are plenty more options for clubs to create fan zones, live screenings and subscription models to monetise fans not local to the club. With the strength of a fan’s engagement with their chosen club, I believe the recent rise of sponsorship and media rights is only the beginning of club’s developing a global commercial brand.

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