The biggest news in the world of football this week has obviously been the acquisition of perennial underachievers Manchester City by Abu Dhabi based investment group ADUG. As if it wasn’t enough that they out-Chelsea’d Chelsea by topping their bid for Brazilian Robinho, the new owners are now talking about paying £135 million for Cristiano Ronaldo, with equally audacious bids apparently planned for Kaka, Fernando Torres, Thierry Henry David Villa and the Brazilian Ronaldo.

Whether or not any sportsman is worth £135 million is a question that probably deserves a post all of its own. However what is interesting, when one considers that a lot of a player’s value in the modern game comes from the opportunity to exploit them commercially (think shirt sales etc…) is whether the prices being bandied about match up with consumer interest in the players, as demonstrated by searches for a player’s name.

Well the short answer would appear to be no.

The graph above, taken from Google Trends shows that, contrary to the value placed on them by the clubs, most people in the UK over the last 30 days have been more interested in Joey Barton than Kaka. Maybe the Brazilian should consider a bit of anti-social behaviour if he wants to bump up his, already impressive, £70 million price tag.

The green line suggests that Manchester United got a bargain when they, finally, snapped up Dimitar Berbatov for just over £30 million, when you consider that there have been more searches for his name than for Robinho’s, who cost nearly £2 million more. Whilst there’s no way of proving this, I personally have a sneaking suspicion that much of this might have come from the fact that people can’t get over the fact that a professional sportsman of his stature also smokes (I certainly never tire of this photo). This of course suggests that Robinho should probably work on developing a 20 a day habit at the same time as he works on his English.

And Ronaldo? Well, if Google Trends is to be believed, in the last 30 days he’s gone from being the most valuable of the 5 players surveyed to one who would barely demand more than Barton. Maybe Ronaldo & Kaka could scrap it out for that all important 4th position.

On a serious note, checking the search results for these players we once again see the lack of foresight that also existed during the Olympics. Of the 5 players, searches for Kaka & Cristiano Ronaldo return no paid search results suggesting that those associated with these brands (for that is surely what these players have become) are missing a trick. After all, if The Sun think it’s worth buying Google AdWords on Joey Barton to promote an article on him, and Kitbag reckon people searching for Robinho might be interested in buying a shirt with his name on it, you have to ask why the same assumptions wouldn’t apply to Ronaldo & Kaka.

Ciarán is the SEO & Social Media Director at Synergy’s digital partners Altogether.

Table football image by jonboy mitchell on flickr

By Ciaran on September 5th, 2008

Tags: Digital marketing, Football Sponsorship

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The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games are up and running, media coverage is everywhere and consumer interest is predictably high. Olympic sponsors – and as always, quite a few non-sponsors too – are competing to associate their brands with the Olympic Gamess in the minds of consumers. But given that this will be the most digitally-connected Games in history, are brands making effective digital connections?

With all of this coverage and all of the money riding on the Olympics it seems pretty safe to assume that a lot of people will be looking for information on the games. And certainly, looking at Google Trends which tracks the number of searches for particular key words, there has been a sudden spike in interest in the Olympic Games and associated terms.

With this in mind, and considering that search engines (and particularly Google) are now often the first port of call for consumers looking to find information, one would assume that marketers are utilising the opportunities that search offers. But for some reason that doesn’t seem to be the case.

A search for Olympic Games reveals that only one company appears to be bidding on the phrase to appear in Google’s sponsored listings (AdWords). That company is The Guardian, a brand that have been quick to adopt the web and attempt to make the most of it.

With the recent relaxation of Google’s rules on brand bidding (buying adverts on trade marked search terms) it seems strange that more companies are not making the most of this opportunity. After all, if you’ve spent millions of dollars sponsoring the event, wouldn’t it make sense to promote that association to all those who are actively seeking information on the games?

If companies aren’t willing to add to their existing marketing spend then common sense would suggest that they might simply want to work to make information about their sponsorship as visible as possible. One way to do this would be to invest in search engine optimisation, whereby web pages are designed, written & coded so that the search engines ‘think’ that they are particularly relevant to a search term. Taking Visa as an entirely arbitrary example (I’m sure that this exists on many of the sponsors’ sites), this again seems to be a trick that has been missed by those looking to maximise the sponsorship potential of the Olympic Games.

Looking at Visa’s section dedicated to its sponsorship, it soon becomes apparent why Google doesn’t think this page is particularly relevant to searches related to the Olympics. For a start neither of the words Olympics or games appear in the title tag (the blue bar which appears at the top of a browse window) or the URL, both of which a search engine considers when determining the relevance of a page to a search term. It also sits on a different domain to the main Visaeurope.com site, meaning that it won’t be benefiting from the thousands of links pointed at that site, as Google uses links to judge the importance of a site.

Whilst it is likely to be hard to rank for such a competitive term as Olympics or Olympic games, that doesn’t mean that brands shouldn’t even try. After all, if there’s one lesson that we can all take from the Olympics, it’s that it’s not always the winning that’s important, but that they should at least try to compete.

Ciarán is the SEO & Social Media Director at our partner agency Altogether Digital.

By Ciaran on August 12th, 2008

Tags: Digital marketing, Football, London 2012, Olympic sponsorship, Olympics, Public relations

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