Sportsonomics is a sports business resource for students and industry professionals. The site provides an in-depth look at the multi-billion dollar sports industry and the challenges and triumphs of sports marketing.
Marketing metrics are huge for sports business as much as any other. If' you're interested in creating great competitor analysis, positioning maps, and any other strategies related to managing market performance then you might want to check out Roger Best's Marketing Metrics Handbook. (Get a free trial here.)
The table on the left is an example of a Relative Market Share and Market Concentration table I created for Nike, adidas, New Balance, and Under Armour. (I used 2008 revenue numbers for each company, and used 2008 figures from retail sporting equipment, sports apparel, and retail athletic footwear.)
It's a cinch to calculate the ROI, ROS, margins, etc. for these tables, and they really beef up presentations and quantify marketing expenses.
Note: I am not affiliated with Roger Best, and receive no incentives (financial or otherwise) for promoting his handbook.
I recently had a conversation with a senior executive at an NBA franchise that opened my eyes to how much corporate leaders distrust Twitter. There is a commonly-held view that Twitter is populated by ego-driven geeks who drone on about what they had for breakfast. While there is certainly some of this, brand managers should also be aware that Twitter is filled with millions of users who are talking right now about their needs, their likes & dislikes, and about your brand.
Hundreds of companies are using Twitter to successfully promote their brands and engage with customers. Here are six best practices for Twitter:
1. Provide customer care and feedback. This is the most talked about brand management tool available on Twitter. Ford, JetBlue, and ComCast all put tremendous effort into responding to customer complaints, praise, and questions. By using the search function on Twitter or more advanced listening tools, brands can immediately redirect frustrated customers toward the help they need, often turning a bad experience into a positive one.
2. Engage your audience. Customers want to feel like they have a voice. Starbucks asks its followers to come up with new ideas, EA asks its gamers what they’re playing now, and 10 Downing Street (Tweets from the Prime Minister’s office) asks followers to throw questions out via YouTube.
3. Start a conversation. Whether it’s Al Gore reflecting on the market for electric cars in China or John McCain lambasting the Wall Street bailout, Twitter is a public forum for conversation. Brand spokespeople can make use of this great feature, too, by authentically raising a concern or praising an achievement. It’s best if the achievement isn’t their own.
4. Learn about customer needs. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, encourages companies to use Twitter to answer key questions about their customers. What other things (besides my product) are customers interested in? What are the most important subjects being talked about by people who use my product? Who are the key influencers?
By learning and listening, companies have the opportunity to meet their customers at a point of need. Most people won’t open an email coming from a lawn-care company, but are happy to listen to a pitch right after they complain about their brown grass. 5. Advertise an event or promotion. AdidasRunning promotes running events around the world, Powell’s Books lets readers know when an author is coming to Portland, and Samsung pushes cell phone deals and giveaways. All these companies are taking advantage of their large voice that comes with thousands of followers, brand loyalists, and industry influencers.
6. Be creative. Ashton Kutcher is quickly becoming best known for his Twitter personality, thanks in part to the gauntlet he dropped at the feet of Larry King and CNN to see who could be the first with 1,000,000 followers. EA has taken advantage of the media hoopla to offer Ashton’s 1,000,000th follower 10 EA games, and a role in the Sims 3. EA’s individual titles also creatively use Twitter to engage customers. Battlefield Heroes, for example, holds Twitter trivia contests and gives away swag to the winners. Great publicity, and a model for Twitter best practices.
In late November adidas Originals launched a marketing campaign called “House Party,” designed to garner attention for the 60th anniversary of the brand. While the campaign includes live events, real house parties, commercials, and other media buys, House Party has enjoyed its largest successes in the digital sphere, where the campaign attracts viewers on YouTube, Facebook, and on the adidas corporate Web site.
In the House Party video—the focal point of the campaign—celebrities (Young Jeezy, David Beckham, Kevin Garnett, The Ting Tings, and others), as well as hundreds of good-looking young people, congregate at an urban house party where they skateboard inside, paint on the walls, and dive fully-clothed into a backyard pool—all-the-while conspicuously sporting the three stripes and adidas Originals logo.
Response to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive. The YouTube video has 830,000 views to date, the adidas Originals Web site continues to hawk online spin-offs of the campaign (like The Ting Tings paint party), and the adidas Originals Facebook page (with more than 1.5 million fans) threw a house party for a lucky fan.
The important question to consider, though, is whether adidas loyalists have found the campaign authentic enough. While Adrants.com called House Party “an ego-fueled, self-indulgent, hipsteresque, celebu-fest,” most blogs have been on fire with praise for the campaign, and one TV station even created a knockoff of the ad to promote The Simpsons. It’s clear from a look at the online chatter over the campaign, that the vast majority of online creators, critics, and collectors agree with themusingsofondolady.blogspot.com that House Party’s use of skateboarders, hip hop, motorbikes, and graffiti all contribute to the authenticity of the campaign.
While the most successful attribute of the campaign is authenticity to the brand and to brand loyalists, the campaign didn’t take full advantage of the Web’s most fascinating feature: user-generated content. House Party is hugely successful in a Web 1.0 world, where adidas has pushed excellent content on the consumer. On the adidas Originals Web site, viewers can even get more in-depth in the house party by choosing a room they’d like to see more of—the living room, for example—and can witness more footage of people drinking, dancing, playing poker, and painting on the living room walls.
However, nothing put forward by the campaign allows users to interact on a more personal level, or create their own content. Wouldn’t it be a more successful campaign if users were uploading their own house party videos, using social network to create a virtual house party, or pulling content onto their own sites?
Moving forward, adidas might consider revising their campaign to make full use of the following online tools:
1. Twitter. Adidas Originals has 108 followers of their Twitter profile. So few because there are zero Tweets coming from adidas Originals. Adidas could quickly start a conversation (and, more importantly, be a part of a conversation) by updating their fans and asking questions of the roughly 8 million people who use Twitter. It’s a small number, relative to Facebook, but Twitter caters to early adopters, young people, and those who like to be on the cutting edge: just the demographics adidas Originals would like to target.
2. Content sharing on the corporate Web site. Adidas should encourage their fans to use House Party to create something original of their own. To do this, adidas could allow fans to download:
Art assets including concept art & hi-res logos
Site design elements including borders, backgrounds, fonts, and stylesheets
Exclusive content: Forum avatars / Messenger images
3. Ning. Why not create an online House Party? Ning allows users to create their own social networking site, which would be the perfect tool for adidas to create an invite-only virtual gathering, where invitees could invite friends, who could invite friends, who could invite friends… just like a real house party.
Last winter I posted a list of the fantastic guest speakers and visitors who came to the Warsaw Sports Business program. Here’s a list of sports industry leaders who have recently shared their insights with MBA students in my program.
Adam Antoniewicz, NBA China
Stephen Baines, Sports Business International
David Baker, AFL
Eric Barmack, ESPN
Lee Berke, LHB Sports
Declan Bolger, Stoneybatter, Inc.
Gert Boyle, Columbia Sportswear
Justin Byczek, NBC Sports
Carter Carnegie, NTRA
Tim Chen, NBA China
Emilio Collins, NBA
Jason Day, IMG
Len DeLuca, ESPN
Andy Dolich, San Francisco 49ers
Dave Doroghy, Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Games
Consumers of sports programming are seeking out online video for a number of reasons. Whether they’re looking for Web gems, using videos to find a community, or sharing tastes, these consumers are more likely to visit YouTube than any other online video-sharing site, as shown by the graph below. (YouTube accounts for more than 96% of all videos shown by Google.)
Among sports properties, there is no clear winner in the battle for online video supremacy. Last month, I wrote about Nike and adidas in the online video world, but these aren’t the major sports properties on YouTube. On the contrary, while the Nike Soccer channel boasts 286,000 views and adidas “It Takes 5ive” channel can claim 413,000 views, the NBA channel on YouTube leads the pack with 2.7 million views.
I’ve created a chart with a sampling of sports properties and their respective rankings on YouTube. Some sports properties have no official presence on YouTube, such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, while some (like the NFL) have made a disappointing effort.
A YouTube channel is a centralized location where other users can see a user’s videos, favorites, bulletins, comments, subscribers and video log. In the case of these sports properties, a YouTube channel is similar to a Web site or a social networking profile page. The sports properties use these landing pages to direct viewers back to their official homepages (“Visit NBA.com for over 15,000 videos”) and to help promote a campaign (“Help decide which NFL player story should be made into a Super Bowl commercial”).
And while the skeptic might point out that none of the 2008 Super Bowl ads pointed to their social media presences on YouTube, the number of Americans viewing online video is encouraging (research indicates that 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com in January). In a market where grabbing a consumer’s attention seems ever more difficult, these numbers are worth a second look.
Today’s edition of Portland Business Journal featured an announcement that snowboarding apparel company, Holden Outerwear, has just established its headquarters in Portland, OR. Recently a number of sports apparel companies have relocated to the city, thanks in part to the proximity of Nike, adidas North America, and Columbia Sportswear. Besides these three giants, the greater Portland area is home to the following:
End Outdoor Inc., sustainable footwear Icebreaker, outdoor sports apparel Keen Inc., footwear Le Coq Sportif, sporting goods and apparel Li Ning Sports USAInc., footwear and apparel Lucy Activewear, women’s sports apparel and accessories Montrail, footwear Nau, inc., outdoor apparel Nautilus, Inc., exercise equipment Rapha Racing Ltd., cycling apparel Solstice Outdoor Inc., outdoor gear
A 30-second spot in last year’s Superbowl cost advertisers $2.6M (it was $2.7M this year) plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in production costs. But for Five Point Productions, the winner of the 2007 Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, the production cost for their ad, “Live the Flavor” cost only $12.79. Though the story is inspirational (USA Today ranked the ad 4th out of the 62 ads that were aired), the implications of this sports marketing triumph went beyond the Frito-Lay accomplishment. The larger picture is that the Doritos ad campaign from the 2007 Superbowl affected the norms of sports marketing video content: how it’s assembled, where it’s distributed, and how much it costs.
In the last year, sport marketers seem to have boosted their online presences with fancier Web sites, integrated Flash applications, Social Networking profiles, and more. But of all the improvements these companies have made online, perhaps the most effective (after a Web site) has been the use of innovative video techniques.
One of the best videos, shot with an amateur camera, features the Brazilian soccer star, Ronaldinho, as he meticulously straps on a pair of Nike soccer shoes, juggles the ball for a minute, then fires four consecutive shots off the top of the goal post without letting the ball touch the ground. The video, posted by Nikesoccer.com, has been viewed more than 21 million times as of this posting. To put that in perspective, this is roughly a quarter of the global viewership of an average Superbowl. Not bad when you consider that the clip is 2 minutes and 44 seconds, and that viewers were likely paying more attention to the video they had chosen to see than they would to a Superbowl commercial.
With the majority of online video viewers saying that they find new videos through friends’ recommendations, it’s helpful to note that the Ronaldinho video was selected as a favorite (“favorited”) by 48,740 different viewers. Youtube, like other social participation sites, allows users to tag, comment, rate, and embed the videos as well as add them to a favorites list. In the near future participants should also expect to be able to personalize, edit, an add in-video comments.
“It Takes 5ive” is the adidas basketball campaign based on the idea of believing in the team. The campaign has put together a presence on YouTube with clips of Dwight Howard, Jerry Stackhouse, Adam Morrison, TJ Ford, and other celebrity ball players. Their most viewed clip, “adidas 5ive on 5ive,” has just over a million views, and is part of a campaign that includes at least 14 other short videos. Though not as successful as the Nike soccer video campaign, adidas finishes the video with a call to action, urging viewers to see all the action by visiting their video site. Adidas’ video is a jumping off place for the basketball enthusiast to see more related videos and the accompanying marketing messages.
Digital marketing can help maximize the impact of production budgets (the Ronaldinho video would have cost more than $10M to air on the Superbowl because of its length), it can act as a gateway to a longer piece that allows for a deeper and more interactive experience, and it can work without the formal constraints of time (both in the sense of 30 second spots and the sense of ads appearing only after the 5 o’clock news). Digital marketing doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is irrelevant, but it has become enough of a force that media campaigns should have an Internet component. Moreover, traditional media should take a lesson from the 2007 Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest and learn how to integrate this new format with their own.
About a year ago, Pat Coyle wrote an interesting article pushing for Lucas Oil Stadium (the soon-to-be home of the Indianapolis Colts) to go live on the Internet-based virtual world of Second Life. Recently, his article got me wondering what sports properties exist on Second Life, and how they function to support their brands. Below is a list of four major sports properties with significant presences in Second Life.
adidas AG
For $50 Linden Dollars (L$50—roughly $0.20) you can outfit your avatar with a3 Microride shoes from the adidas store, which allow the wearer to bounce around like a kid on a pogo stick. The shoes may not have permeated the Second Life market like adidas once hoped, but the move to open a retail outlet got some positive press back in 2006 and may have also made Second Lifers feel like an important demographic.
Reebok
Direct your avatar over to the Reebok island on Second Life and you’re in for a marketing treat. Unlike at the adidas Sim, at the Reebok store you can buy shoes AND customize them. Shell out L$50 for the initial white pair and before you know it you’ll be upgrading to a custom-color pair for only L$5 more. You can come back as often as you want to switch the color, and the cost is L$5 each time.
Major League Baseball
In July of 2006 Major League Baseball simulcasted its popular Home Run Derby on Second Life. Fans and their avatars paid L$1000 (about $3) to congregate at the virtual stadium on “Baseball Island” and watch the event on virtual screens. The event was criticized for adding very little interactivity to the experience, though the MLB marketing executives did set up chat rooms for fans to trash talk, and sold virtual MLB merchandise at the event and at in-world stores.
NBA
If the Major League Baseball foray into Second Life is a rim shot, then the NBA’s presence is a slam dunk. At the NBA headquarters that opened there in June 2007, sports-minded avatars can watch 3-D diagrams of games in real time while chatting with others, play HORSE and Crash The Boards at the NBA Jam Session area where basketballs are freely available, and buy NBA merchandise. Like the Reebok store, this virtual world is likely to attract repeat visitors.
One of the detractors to sports properties focusing their attention on Second Life is that some of the recent media has highlighted the adult nature of the virtual world. For a family-friendly brand like Major League Baseball, association with Second Life has its drawbacks. Just consider the recent articles decrying inappropriate behavior, FBI investigations, sexual harassment, and pornography. So while some sports properties are excited to be among the first in the industry to brand themselves in these virtual worlds, others are understandably worried.
Sports marketers use the popular networking site, Facebook, to promote events, market leagues, advertise media outlets, and generate excitement about sports properties. And while not all sports entities have created a presence on Facebook, those that have can claim real results for a minimal investment.
CBSSports.com has recently created the Official Tournament Brackets application. Roughly 500,000 users have uploaded this app, and most days nearly 5,000 of those users open the application to play around with it. This particular application lets users create a NCAA basketball tournament bracket, register themselves as fans of particular teams, and compare brackets against friends and other users for a chance to win $10,000.
Sports Illustrated has created a more modest application with roughly 10% as many users as the CBS sports app, which allows the user to choose favorite teams from the “Big Four” leagues plus NCAA basketball and football. It then spits out customized SI headlines for those teams.
A third, less-known company, Citizen Sports Network, has created dozens (possibly hundreds) of Facebook applications targeted uniquely to fans. Each page is a forum for fans of a team to congregate, discuss, and cheer with fellow supporters. Citizen Sports Network has highly-downloaded and viewed applications, with names like “Red Sox Nation” and “England Football.”
Many sports properties, such as Nike, haven’t necessarily created their own Facebook applications, yet still maintain a Facebook presence. A search for Nike applications, for example, yields a “Nike+ Running Monitor” app that lets users share Nike+ running progress with friends, and a few other applications designed independently from the company. Searches for “adidas” and “nfl” yield similar results.
Other sports properties have reserved the use of their name in the same way that someone might buy a domain name for future use. The difference with Facebook is that application names are free and must be at least 7 characters (thus “nike” would be unacceptable, but “niketennis” would work). Callaway Golf has reserved their name without actually creating an application, as have EA Sports and adidas. However, some companies have clearly failed to reserve the use of their names, as “IMGWorld” and “Daktronics” are still available for anyone to snatch up.
I reserved the use of some excellent application names that might someday have value just as domain names in the early 21st century came to be valuable. Perhaps years from now “icehockey,” “softball,” and “wrestling” will all be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if these names aren’t worth anything, it seems prudent for any corporation to grab up their own name. I just registered “NorthFace” and it didn’t cost me a penny.
Today I was accepted to the University of Oregon Warsaw Sports Marketing Center’s MBA program, class of 2010. The Sports Marketing program at the U of O places graduates in sports leagues, sports franchises, sports media, and sports products companies. Nike hires more UO MBA graduates than any other company, and more UO MBAs intern at Nike than at any other company. Other top firms to hire UO Sports Marketing MBA graduates include adidas North America, the NBA, the WNBA, the NFL, Visa, Octagon, Wieden + Kennedy, Columbia Sportswear, and many more.
you might want to check out Roger Best's Marketing Metrics Handbook. (Get a free trial here.)
.
