The cultural and business differences in how digital sports is offered in Europe and North America is in many ways as wide a divide as well, the ocean that separates the two continents. The early growth of mobile and digital platforms by the sports consumer outside of the United States, as well as the passion and tradition of club followings, gave elite brands like those in the Premier League a decided advantage in fan engagement at an early stage.
Club followers could gain access to all sorts of content, but only for a fee. Followers of Manchester United and Arsenal would buy in for extended content and access, much of which was delivered via a mobile platform to hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Conversely in the United States, most clubs and properties, faced with a more fickle fan base and a consumer not yet fully in tune to the mobile pace, chose to go the free route to provide content access. Volume of coverage and the ability to engage those fans was the way brands would activate digitally in sport in North America, with digital being less of a hard dollar stream than it is abroad. It was complimentary and a needed addition, but not the hard source of sponsor or fan dollars as it is in the UK and other places.
One club that has looked to buck that trend, one of many ways they are trying to change the view of sports marketing in Europe, is Manchester City. The world’s wealthiest soccer club rolled out a number of new digital initiatives to help drive support and increase fan engagement earlier this year. It was the latest step by the club, purchased by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan in 2008, to increase its casual following globally as well as find new ways to engage its traditional followers. The club became one of the first to launch a YouTube channel and cross promote the content posted through all their traditional and non-traditional media, and followed that up with free tweets and chats involving many of the club’s players and staff. While it may seem normal for American sport to do such programs, having an EPL team take that step is a departure from the norm of putting all such top content and access behind a pay wall
The latest step of giving fans a bit more engagement took place this past week, when the club announced it would start implementing tweets and Facebook posts by fans in stadium during the course of matches. The posts would be monitored as to not be offensive, and will come directly from the Manchester City sites, giving fans the ability to engage with the team and those in attendance, an immediate real-time global reaction to performance, support and buzz around one of the world’s premier sport brands. While some may say the giving away of premier content, or providing such a large forum as a stadium message board is counter to the revenue stream that existed, it may actually be the opposite that is true. The EPL teams have done a great job of monetizing content, and are well aware that there are legions of fans around the world who either can’t or won’t pay a price for the added value. Giving away snippets, creating new content platforms and reaching out to those fans to get them more engaged may actually increase the dollars coming in down the road. The casual become more engaged, and their interest grows with the potential for up-sell and engagement. The perceived “loss” is really sweat equity not hard dollars or investment, as all the tools needed for the social media “freebies” already exists, and much of the content is going to be user generated.
The move by Manchester City is also the latest by clubs to find ways to use social media even more in their real time fan engagement platforms. Hashtags have started showing up in college football stadia. Now of course most of this has to do with experimentation, building critical mass and presenting a new avenue engagement that can in turn be packaged and monetized. Broadcasters have used live feeds of fan comments to try and enhance and not distract television audiences for years to mixed reviews. Whether bringing the comments to the huge screens in stadia as an addition will be welcomed remains to be seen. Regardless it is an interesting move by one of the world’s richest clubs, who realizes that the next step of engagement needs to be to a wider audience, and hopes that the dollars that flow from that free step will far offset the gamble they will take.
A great example of best practices from both sides of the Atlantic coming together.
