Sponsorship Works - Submit Your Case Study.
August 5, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
SportBusiness is looking for the best in sports marketing case studies for our annual Sponsorship Works report. So, if you are a sponsor, sports property or agency with a great story to tell we would love to hear from you.
For some in sponsorship the past 12 months have been tough so there is no more important time to reinforce the message that “Sponsorship Works”. With sponsorship spend ever more subject to scrutiny, our focus this year is on value which is why submitting a case study for the report is absolutely FREE. Click here to submit your case study abstract today.
Sponsorship Works for you – published as a report style book Sponsorship Works is read by some of the most influential decision makers in sports marketing but this year we are going a step further. The top 11 case studies will be serialised in our magazine SportBusiness International getting your story out around the world.
What are we looking for from you?
As submitting a case study for Sponsorship Works is absolutely FREE, we need you to help make our delivery process as easy as possible. At this point we are asking you to submit an abstract of up to 200 words telling your story by Wednesday 19th August 2009. We will then contact you with the editorial guidelines for the complete piece and the report will be ready for serialisation and publication later in the year.
Submit your abstract or download more details here, we look forward to hearing from you.
Sports Marketing & Social Media Networking Event In London.
June 18, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Sports Marketing is a growing business. Social Media is a huge buzzword at the moment relating to sports marketing, but most of the discussion, at least that we are exposed to is happening in the USA.
We’ve decided to run an event. The premise is pretty simple - we’ve booked a room at a cool members club in London. All you have to do is register and show up. We want to get together people who are interested, people who are thinking about it and people who are doing it to share stories, work out what’s working and what’s not.
It doesn’t matter if you are an ad-agency, a PR agency, a sponsor, a team, rights holder or blogger. This is an opportunity to get together with like minded people, have a couple of drinks and get the low-down.
Check out the details at http://www.pilotemedia.com/thought-leadership/sm2-sports-marketing-free-social-media-networking-event/
New White Papers - Getting Onto the Plane.
April 16, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
Pilote Media are proud to announce a new series of White Papers that use sailing and Yacht Racing to explore themes of Sports Marketing, Sponsorship, Social Media, Brand benefits and Return on Investment.
With the current economic climate in mind, David Fuller, CEO of Pilote Media and Contributing Editor of Yachtsponsorship.com, looks at the relative merits of sailing versus more traditional or well known sports.
The title; ‘Getting Onto the Plane‘ refers to the process of a boat lifting out of the water to skim across the surface of the water rather than pushing through it. The series aims to give potential sponsors, Marketing Directors, Event Organisers and competitors insights into the business of yacht racing and get them racing more quickly.
The First Paper ‘Getting Onto the Plane - Assessing the Benefits of Yacht Racing‘ is an overview of the topics and themes that will be covered by future papers. It touches on how sailing provides positive brand associations and how technology can provide new audiences. There are also messages for politicians and media who have sought to characterise sponsorship as a wasteful perk : Sponsorship of sport is a legitimate part of the marketing mix and can deliver real return on investment.
Get your copy of the White Paper here.
A Tale of Two PR Companies. Sports Marketing PR 2.0
March 5, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
IT technology was supposed to make things easier. ‘Work smarter not harder’ is the slogan for the information age. But just as you think you have understood it - how to make the most of email, how to measure click-throughs and page impressions, the geeks invent a new thing. Or they rename an old thing and make everyone else seem foolish. How many of these terms do you understand: Web 2.0, RSS, twitter, UGC, personal media…
The latest buzzword is ‘Social Media’. Ask 10 people what social media is and you will probably get 10 different answers. The term ’social media’ is misunderstood by many. From nowhere, social media consultants have appeared selling their opinions on reputation management and sentiment engineering. Whatever you call it, the technologies that allow huge numbers of people to create, publish, share and comment upon content (images, text, video, audio, gps co-ordinates), are important for sports marketing and PR.
One of the services receiving a lot of interest at the moment is Twitter. While on the surface the functionality seems simple, almost banal, the power of millions of people saying what they are doing, feeling, thinking at any one point in time should not be underestimated.
Let’s compare two examples. Imagine a sports entity; a pro-sailor, a team, an event organiser with a large company as a sponsor. This entity also has a traditional PR company working to maximise the ‘coverage’ of news and activities and in turn help the sponsor achieve their goals of exposure or association or some other objective.
Example One - the Traditionalists.
In example one, the traditional PR company is measured on more old-fashioned metrics like column inches, television screen time, radio brand mentions. Even in 2009, there are PR companies that believe that national newspaper coverage alone is enough to determine the success or failure of a campaign. There might be historic reasons for this. News used to be determined by powerful editors and specialist journalists. Developing relationships with these people determined whether your story was featured or not.
More recently this PR company has been forced to learn new methods of distributing the news - via email - usually in the form of a PDF, so that it can not be easily changed or manipulated. For these promoters, the only website mentions that are worth talking about are BBC.CO.UK or TheTimesOnline. Bloggers aren’t real media.
To this company, Social media is the devil. If taken to its end, social media makes a PR company redundant. If the talent can communicate directly with their fan base, what role is there for PR, or journalists, or editors for that matter.
While this is a hypothetical example of a PR company, it is a thinly disguised collection of behaviours that we see daily in the sports marketing industry. Not all are anti new technology; some just find it overwhelming and alien.
Example Two - The New World of PR.
In our second example, we imagine a PR company that understands how media is changing. While the traditional press and television is important, they understand that niche sports like sailing are more frequently being covered on other platforms. More importantly they understand the value of the network effect. Instead of all news going through a handful of gatekeepers, the content is free to appear wherever it lands. Some of the concepts in the new world are the same as the old world - things like reach, reputation and influence. But in the new world, these relationships are not as straightforward.
Much has been written about Stephen Fry’s 120,000 twitter followers. Obviously if Mr Fry twitters about something he raises its awareness and delivers thousands of ‘eyeballs’ to the story. You might then be tempted as a PR company in the new world to target Stephen Fry, but that would be to ignore the fact that Stephen Fry also follows other people. So imagine a person who has only 5 or 6 followers, but those 5 or 6 are followed by thousands.
PR company number two has spent time developing relationships, not just with traditional media, but with influential bloggers in their space. They understand that a small blog read by 100 people can be very powerful if those 100 people are an exact match to your target audience or they influence thousands of others.
PR company number two also understands that the new world is not a one-way broadcast. This is not a Sunday broadsheet that states - this is the news and there is no more. This is more like talkback radio. If the people disagree, they can say so. In public. With an audience.
PR company number two is asking questions like:
- When was the content published? Where? Who saw it?
- What was the sentiment of the authors? Were they in favour or against?
- How many times was the story reposted? Where? By whom?
- How long did the buzz last?
- What was the highest number of mentions on twitter per minute?
- Where do the people live who were twittering about the story?
- How many comments were attached? What was the sentiment of the comments?
- Was the story shared amongst friends via Facebook? ….
Obviously PR companies don’t work in a vacuum. They are representing brands and personalities that may not yet themselves understand the value of these new media. If a client tells you that their objective is to have a photo on the front page of the paper, do you sell them the benefits of bloggers? If you don’t someone else might.
All of this assumes that you want to communicate externally. Social media principals are just as important, perhaps more so, when communicating internally, but that’s a subject for another blog.
Pilote Media are offering Social Media Health Check for companies who want to learn more. The free 30 minute sessions can be held, in London, via phone or skype conference. The aim is to provide honest, down to earth advice without the jargon. For more information see http://www.pilotemedia.com/social-media/
SB:MKTG - Website Relaunch
January 24, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
The new SB:MKTG Site
Pilote Media was asked by Somerville Baddeley Marketing to create a website that was clean, easy to update and tapped into some of the emerging social media technologies available.
The new SB:MKTG site allows the company to quickly change copy through a simple Content Management System and also incorporates a blog that is already becoming an authoritative source of news from the powersport sponsorship marketplace.
Other social media type functionality includes:
- ShareThis integration - allowing visitors to republish information to sites like Facebook and Digg.
- Twitter Account Integration - automatic posting to twitter when the blog is updated.
- Blog to Email Integration - allows readers to sign up to the blog and get it in their inbox daily.
Denis Baddeley, Principal of SB:MKTG said:
Having worked with the team from Pilote Media in the past on big projects for the likes of NASCAR and MotoGP, we know that they understand emerging media better than anyone else. We wanted to be ahead of the curve without having to spend ages testing every web 2.0 plugin and widget ourselves. Pilote Media gave us the functionality that is relevant now with typical down to earth style…
The new SB:MKTG site can be found at http://www.sbmktg.net
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Dark Blue Book
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Getting Onto The Plane
