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traditional and complex business like football? Time went by ... sponsorship and licensing deals with more focus ... tha
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THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE FOR THE FOOTBALL INDUSTRY

DIGITAL MEDIA

HOW TO RESOLVE FOOTBALL'S DIGITAL ‘PROBLEM’ Arsène Wenger has been noted as saying social media is a growing problem for football. WORDS Oscar Ugaz IMAGES Action Images

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t´s not Mr. Wenger's fault that he thinks that way. After all, fans and some sports media pundits have wildly attacked him via those same platforms.

But is it really the fault of some vocal fans and a group of journalists hungry for an audience? Or is it maybe that football is falling short in its digital media approach and Wenger's perception is shared by other, nondigital savvy, football decision makers? Some years ago, when digital media was proposed as a new way to reach football fans, senior management provided a patronising green light and not many additional resources. Then their interests for the issue languished and almost disappeared. Who will care about a few thousand fans on some obscure internet platform when you need to manage a very traditional and complex business like football? Time went by and those few thousand fans grew to millions and today's digital media is highly visible. Marketing managers, sponsors, consultants and sports journalists refer to the content that clubs, players, managers and fans publish and obsessively measure and boast about the likes, comments, tweets, views and app downloads they gather. Resources are put in place and complex technical projects are announced and deployed in a race to reach more fans via new platforms. All the while traditional football businesses have grown too. We just need to take a look at the economic evolution of broadcasting TV rights, ticket sales or sponsorship deals APRIL 2016 | fcbusiness.co.uk

based in traditional activation to get the idea. Sponsors, broadcasters and other partners love football and pay so much to be part of it because of the awareness and attention it delivers - two resources that in today’s marketing landscape that are difficult to find. It seems that huge sporting events will not be violently disrupted by digital innovation as has happened in other business sectors, but is already undergoing a slower, but unstoppable process. We are seeing companies like Google or Facebook making initial efforts in the broadcasting bidding sphere, regional sponsorship and licensing deals with more focus in digital activation and amateur producers that are creating relevant content and potential media businesses beyond traditional football rights. These efforts can be considered irrelevant if they are compared with the returns of traditional business models. But as innovation has demonstrated before, big disruptions start as small irrelevant efforts. Perceiving those efforts as a problem doesn’t help. Tradition is not only strong on the business side. As the self-proclaimed ‘guardians’ of the club's image, the media and press areas ‘freak out’ with angry fans on Facebook, vocal players using Periscope or the ‘attack’ of an amateur journalist on Twitter. They like digital media’s immediacy (an element that was not common before the internet) but at the same time are paralysed by the fear of backlash. So they play safe and try to avoid the ‘digital problems’. When there is no apparent urgency to lure fans with out-of-the-box propositions and

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THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE FOR THE FOOTBALL INDUSTRY

“It seems that huge sporting events will not be violently disrupted by digital innovation as has happened in other business sectors, but is already undergoing a slower, but unstoppable process.” there is fear about what they think or say, what prevails are predictable and lame approaches to content through the use of less interactive platforms such as old broadcasting models. This situation creates a media vacuum that is occupied by enhanced gossip, sensationalism, aggressive confrontation and tweaked uses of the new platforms as ways to circumvent a traditional offer of the sporting experience that is in conflict with the new patrons of consumption. Just think in the paradox of rights holders, policing spectators that broadcast live games using their mobile phones and the free Wi-Fi connection that the same club gently provided. Indeed, that may seem more like a problem than an opportunity. The solution is not an easy one. How do big football clubs take advantage of unproven opportunities when all their activities and competencies are focused on very profitable endeavours that they’ve already mastered? How can medium or smaller clubs divert attention from the daily surviving basics into the pursuit of a long-term promise? There are some strategic decisions that deserve a deeper discussion. As any business endeavour, digital innovation is based on competencies. These days sponsorship, licensing, broadcasting deals and the transfer market are driven by business to business relations, negotiation and deal-making skills. Meanwhile digital is focused on the final user experience, growth hack marketing and iterative, analytics driven product development. It is necessary for football clubs to put more focus on these new competencies and acknowledge that they are not going to find them within the sports sector or via traditional recruitment processes. Entertainment, technology development and new media production are some of the pools where they need to look in order to identify individuals with public and verifiable experience. Education plays its part here. Most of the business school programmes with a

sports management specialisation consider digital as a separate discipline and teach it accordingly. This is a mistake and a lost opportunity. Schools need to identify how digital is touching the different business models and approach it as an integral reality. New digital savvy teams can be easily nullified by poor organisational decision making. A new digital unit cannot be put at the same level of the more traditional ones and expect them to work together. Culture, skills, budgets and expected financial returns are not the same. The business status quo will be prone to generate a ‘turf battle’ in which the incumbent digital unit will be treated with business condescend. To prevent this, new digital units must depend and report directly to the Chairman or to the board instead of a CEO that is focused on the business through its usual operations; they may even come from one of those operational units. The scope of work of the new digital team is also important; its approach to sponsorship, licensing, rights, et al needs to be a service and consultancy one in order to identify strategic opportunities and organisational requirements. This is a top to bottom effort. To expect grassroots innovation from a traditional organisation is not realistic. Chairmen and boards must have a long term vision and accept with intellectual honesty that these new opportunities are in many cases beyond their understanding and that they must find the right people, put them in the top positions and nurture and defend them from the inertia and resistance of the traditionalists. Some clubs have already gone down this path and include digital profiles inside the board in order to champion these new opportunities. The process has being difficult and in some cases fruitless; but efforts must persist. Examples from outside the football sphere like MLB BAM's successful digital spinoff required an open mind and strategic resilience beyond short-term demands. What we cannot do is fall into the daily practice of a playing safe, ‘don’t rock the boat’ culture or the self condescending tribal culture of ‘digital sport geeks’ that boast about superficial metrics and projects that are more PR material than real change. That only isolates us and makes our approach more limited, predictable and timid. Digital can generate the perception that it is a potentially growing problem for football. But it’s a perception that we have created by ourselves. We are the ones that need to work on the solution. ■

About the author: Oscar Ugaz is a marketer and consultant with expertise in digital media and online businesses. In the past 15 years he has been working for major brands in America and Europe. In 2007 he was appointed as Digital Business Manager at Real Madrid C.F. From that position he led the implementation of the ecommerce business, the commercial strategy of the official web portals and their online video and social media strategies. fcbusiness.co.uk | APRIL 2016