It’s an interesting rumour that could pass as a viral hoax: “Internet will close tonight for cleaning.” “Please wire me your bank details so I can send you $10m.” “Government will regulate web content to help TV.” (Spot the real one.)
In fairness, Mr Burnham is all about promoting “innovation, risk taking, and new talent” and, although scant on details, there’s no doubt that the internet is by far the most innovative platform ever invented. But I think we now know Mr Burnham’s views on grubby commercialism like product placement, so we have to assume that plans to “tighten up” the online content will be a less-is-more approach.
If the plan is to restrict content, either through ISP certification or centrally-managed censorship, it feels we’ve heard this somewhere before: clearly recent Olympic trips to Beijing had more of an impact on the DCMS than anyone expected…
When I first skim-read the article I thought ITV was proposing an on-screen advertising overlay a la YouTube, which would have been truly horrible. But no, this is a smart techno way of getting brands involved in the editorial at a time when no one wants to see them interrupt the story.
It’s a silly supposition that ITV will allow advertising brands to unsophisticatedly plaster the walls of The Rovers Return with their posters, or for Microsoft to spray its logo in the sky while Morse solves another provincial conundrum. The creative force that gets these shows on air is just too strong to let the channel screw it up so badly.
No, what strikes me is this is just product placement ‘in post’. Whether a brand pays for a neon sign to be digitally superimposed on the Woolpack door, or whether it was there during shooting - if the brand paid for it, then it’s product placement. Pure and simple. And forgive me if I missed a meeting, but doesn’t Andy Burnham have a dim view of such nefarious practices?
Sponsorship has been adopted by a myriad of product categories in the modern era, but ‘Chemistry’ is a new one on me. Let me hasten to add, I think Dow has done a very clever deal with the PGA, creating a perfect showcase for its agroscience and technology products. And I’m sure that the guys at Dow and the PGA thought long and hard before landing on ‘Chemistry’. But it does lead your imagination in some interesting directions…
Talking of which, the scientists involved in the Large Hadron Collider project have taken a break from attempting to discover the ‘God Particle’ to star in their own hit viral video. The ‘Large Hadron Rap’ has become a favorite on YouTube.
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.
The top 20 most searched for Olympic athletes in the UK, ranked by share of traffic in the category, can be seen in the table below:
No surprises that the two new truly global stars created by Beijing, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, top the list.
But you could, I suspect, have got very good odds on the top 20 featuring only ten Brits, only four of Team GB’s 19 gold medallists, four gymnasts (three of them American), three tennis players and two Brazilian footballers!
As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all. This is a classic example of taking time to understand your online audience and getting digital marketing right - as the 1.5 million people that have so far viewed the clip can testify.
You’ve only to look at the comments on YouTube to see what a positive effect this video has on even the toughest audience - as YellowOnline says “LOL, I don’t like EA these days (”Quantity not quality”), but this is a brilliant ad.”
I’m sure every brand would like such positive comments from both current and past customers.
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.
Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be a sponsorship in existence without a digital presence. From the early days of a fleeting mention, or if you were lucky a whole subsection (though often buried), on the main corporate website, we’re now into the era of the dedicated ‘sponsorship microsite’. But has that much really changed?
While investment in sponsorship microsites shows positive progress and a commitment by brands to invest in the important digital marketing space, it’s also created a beast. What we’re now seeing are a raft of generic websites with the same tired format and content.
What do I mean by this? Well let’s take the Heineken’s Rugby website as an example – just one of many I could have picked. As aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate as it is, with the brand ambassador’s blog, gallery, competition, downloads, newsletter, polls, stats section etc you could strip out the Heineken name and replace it with Castrol to make their Euro 2008 site.
Users want ownable and original content with a talkability factor. They’re more than happy getting news, images, polls etc from sites that do it very well and that they have a strong relationship with, like BBC Sport. The online audience are creatures of habit and for them to start consuming generic and available anywhere content on sponsor’s sites will take a long time, no matter how much is spent on SEO. As Ciaran Norris at Altogether Digital tells me “The old adage ‘you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make it drink’ rings true here. Chances are the horse is happy drinking where it is thanks.”
Creating a sponsorship microsite should not be seen as a solution in itself to the question of ‘what do we do online?’ To be honest this should never be a question in the first place, any activities should be done to solve brand problems and not fill media space. Anyhow, if we look at this offline for a moment, a brand wouldn’t start a new TV channel to reach a specific audience at a particular time. They would advertise or devise a branded content solution on an existing channel.
Sponsors and their agencies should be using this knowledge to their advantage. Heineken, for example, may be better served by using their sponsorship assets creatively to engage with the plethora of established rugby websites (e.g. Planet Rugby and Rugby World to name a few of the 115,000,000 websites returned when you type ‘rugby’ into Google) producing something akin to the highly engaging and successful Landrover rugby advert with Josh Lewsey.
This original content has great talkability and as a result is all over the web on video sharing sites, rugby blogs etc and I would hazard a guess has been seen by more people than the average sponsor’s website – as well as elicited more positive feelings towards the brand (though maybe not by football fans).
Even the most popular websites crave creative and original content that will help differentiate them from competition and the syndication of content I’m talking about is nothing new. The BBC has being doing it for years, and very successfully. As Ciaran says in his blog ‘The magic penny of giving content away’, the “…assumption of “build it & they will come” simply doesn’t hold water any more.”
So am I saying that all sponsorship microsites are a waste of time and money? No I’m not. There are many opportunities for brands online, especially those sponsoring less mainstream sports like snooker, where the online community infrastructure is in its infancy and crying out for investment. What I am saying though, is that more time needs to be spent understanding what online consumers want and how they behave as well as considering what’s already out there. It’s important to appreciate that building a relationship with your target market will take time and won’t happen as soon as the first ball of a tournament is kicked. The audience are fans of the sport first and foremost and need persuading that they should be brand fans too. Telling them the score is not going to achieve this.
A landmark day begins, entirely appropriately, with the launch of our blog. Come in, it’s really rather exciting…
Although we feel incredibly privileged to advise brands on sponsorship for a living, and every day in our business is fascinating, there are some days that you know will be extra special. Today is absolutely one of those, as it’s the start of a new era for us in so many ways.
We’ve just moved into our superb new HQ in 60 Great Portland Street (or “60 GPS” as it’s rapidly becoming known) and there’s a palpable sense of energy and excitement as the eleven companies and 600 people in the Engine Group unite under one roof.
On top of which today also marks our first day as Synergy after twenty-four years as Karen Earl Sponsorship, so there’s an extra-special buzz as we finally unveil our new brand identity and offer after a year of planning.
Having, naturally, revealed Synergy to our two most important audiences first – our people and our clients – we already know that the response is overwhelmingly positive, and that it feels absolutely natural for the brand to evolve, because our business has evolved so much, particularly in recent years.
Two other things about the new brand identity tend to come up. The first is “I can’t believe Synergy was available”. Neither could we! But happily it was, because it brilliantly encapsulates both what we do and how we do it. The second is “How does Karen feel about it?”. Very simple answer: she’s 100% behind it and has been up for a change for years.
The new services are partnerships with the Engine companies who specialise in the disciplines involved (respectively Huge, Altogether, Dave and Woo) and have in fact been operating informally since we joined the Engine Group in late 2006. So we’re simply formalising an operating reality – and creating something really groundbreaking that no-one else is close to offering. All good.
So a new chapter begins, and it’s all change - and yet no change. We’ll be staying true to the key principle on which Karen Earl founded the company - never selling sponsorships, meaning that we can guarantee clients impartial, as well as expert, specialist advice – still a very rare commodity in sponsorship. And above all, as I look around, I see what I’ve always seen: great people who love what they do and are very good at it.
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