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.

By Malph Minns on July 1st, 2008

Tags: Branded content, Digital marketing, Euro 2008, Football, Rugby, Sponsorship

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The hardcore fans are still out there and their allegiance is strong to both club and country.  Much has been said about the sales of Spain and Portugal shirts rising this summer.  In Liverpool and the surrounding area Spain shirts have sold well thanks to Spanish striker Torres establishing himself as a Kop favourite.  Whilst Man Utd fans (wherever they live, Surrey as I understand it…) are snapping up Portugal shirts in homage to Cristiano Ronaldo.

Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Spain’s Fernando Torres in the English Premiership.

The multicultural Barclays Premier League will be well represented in Euro 2008 even if the English team isn’t there itself.  Austria and Switzerland will play host to many faces familiar to the English audience including players from Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Newcastle, Wigan, Man City, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Middlesbrough, Tottenham and Portsmouth.  The Coca-Cola Football League and Clydesdale Bank Scottish Premier League will be represented too plus the transfer gossip will link many players with a move to the Premiership after their performance this summer.

So there is still plenty of home interest but what qualifies as ‘home’ interest?

European communities are well established within Britain and they will be watching their ‘home’ teams with all the passion and support you would expect.  Tesco has not missed this opportunity and would appear to have adopted Poland bringing in extra supplies of polish snacks and beers in 150 stores in areas with large Polish communities as reported in The Times.  There are also strong areas of support for Portugal, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands to name a few.

As a football fan I’m still excited about Euro 2008 and without the inevitability of England getting knocked out it’s almost more enjoyable.   If the fans’ interest is strong then the brands will follow suit.  As Tim said in his previous blog, Euro 2008 is a time that brands can see how their long term football agendas measure up and will give them the chance to make sure things are on track in time for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

So whether you can lay claim to a great-great-grandmother from Portugal, or will be following a player from your club or you just like the shirt… which team will you be adopting?

By Alex Coulson on June 11th, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Euro 2008, Football

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Euro 2008 kicks off this weekend without England or Scotland, but clichéd commentaries about lower fan interest and less brand activity miss the point that for brand marketers who use football, there are still valuable lessons to be learned from the tournament – many of which couldn’t be learned if the home teams had qualified.By the same token, ambush activity will also be thrown into higher relief, whether big, bold and obviously strategic such as the Mars ‘Get Britain Playing’ campaign or Burger King’s ‘Football Your Way’, to the tactical, such as Heineken’s new, and very funny, press work – although we suspect that UEFA and tournament sponsor Carlsberg will be less than amused given Heineken’s status as a UEFA Champions League sponsor.
 

Finally, let’s not forget that Euro 2008 will do quite nicely without the home teams. Every one of the 1.05 million match tickets has been sold – albeit only 33 per cent direct to the fans – and in football terms it will be as good as it gets: the 2006 World Cup Final was between France and Italy.

From fan consumption across a variety of channels for example, we’ll discover how many fans here love football no matter who’s playing, as distinct from those who, as Martin Samuel put it recently in The Times, are in love not with football but with:

‘a St George’s Cross [on] the car aerial, buying the new red England shirt and joining the gang for a month.’

Tournament sponsors, many of them brands with long term football agendas, will also gain a much clearer perspective on how powerfully their campaigns cut through to the hardcore fan audience, undiluted either by the casual St George’s Cross fan or the blizzard of ambush campaigns that would normally accompany a big tournament featuring the home teams.

 

 

By Tim Crow on June 6th, 2008

Tags: Ambush campaign, Brand marketing, Euro 2008, Football

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