All marketers planning to jump on football (soccer)’s mobile bandwagon over the next six months must look at how football clubs and seasoned mobile marketers engage mobile fans. With tips from the experts.
As the football-loving world (that’s soccer if you’re from the US) winds itself up to a fever pitch in the run-up to the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in June, it’s essential to take a look at the role that mobile plays in football. All marketers planning to jump on football’s mobile bandwagon over the next six months please take note.
If anyone knows what football fans want on their mobiles, it’s the football club they support (for most fans, the club is first love, then the national team). So before you spend a small fortune developing one of, no doubt, hundreds of gimmicky World Cup mobile application, you’d do well to study:
How top football (soccer) clubs use mobile to engage fans.
Reading the fascinating accounts from the mobile managers at Real Madrid (La Liga, Spain) and Everton (English Premier League) brings home how much all companies – whether or not their interested in wooing football fans – have to learn from the way that top football clubs use mobile.
Point one: while clubs are relatively lean companies, they employ mobile experts – while many much bigger companies that will be dabbling in mobile marketing this World Cup will have little or no in-house mobile expertise.
Point two: when you look at the way football clubs use a heady cocktail of mobile Web, paid-for SMS alerts, mobile social networking, global content licensing, applications, permission-based marketing lists and Bluetooth, one theme is abundantly clear – everything they do is useful to their fans.
It isn’t just football clubs that get this. Years of experience in catering to the mobile sports fan has taught both seasoned mobile marketers (e.g. sports brands and mobile operators and manufacturers) and the leading mobile publishers (e.g. TV networks, news organizations) to all make utility central to their mobile strategies.
So what do football fans want?
1) Content: fans will need some downloads to personalize their phones, entertain themselves and amuse their friends – World Cup ringtones, screensavers, games and videos. These will all be in abundant supply and the winners will be the most imaginative, high quality, highly visible and easily available. But marketers should beware of cheapening their brand image with a gimmick that nobody wants on their phone – would you offer your customers a World Cup ironing-board cover?
2) Mobile competitions and promotions: everyone loves a competition – if it’s well-run, fun, cheap/free and the prize is right many may also sign up to future communications. Tickets to World Cup matches are the ultimate prize, signed memorabilia are also sort after, but many fans will also value a team shirt etc.
3) Mobile services: the critical thing for football fans is to stay in the know. The appetite for the latest news, scores, statistics, gossip, video of the latest goals, etc, is insatiable and best served on the medium that’s with them 24 hours a day. Particularly relevant for fans who are in South Africa is knowing what’s on, where to go and how to get there. All brands can participate in the provision of such mobile services by sponsorship or advertising.
For lots of examples of football/sports related campaigns and tips, please see:
The Starting 11 – the essential mobile-marketing guide for the 2010 FIFA World Cup
Here are some useful tips and observations from the speakers at M-Football (January 21 2010, London, UK).
Paul Berney, managing director for EMEA, Mobile Marketing Association
The sports industry recognizes the power of mobile to connect with target consumers in a one-to-one, tailored engagement. Big name sports brands, such as Adidas, Reebok and Nike have had huge success from incorporating mobile into their communications strategies. A great example, showing the breadth and depth of mobile technology that is available to brands today, is Nike’s work with Mobilera on the Euro 2008 UEFA European Football Championship.
Nike wanted to connect with young Turkish football supporters. The campaign incorporated a range of tactics including a dedicated mobile site: mynikefootball.mobi, mobile banner ads, push WAP and MMS messages and content distribution via widgets and over Bluetooth at both football grounds and Nike shops. The campaign allowed for a really rich user experience and therefore generated a high degree of consumer participation – with over 150,000 content downloads. Strategic partnerships with the likes of Apple iTunes and the digital TV channel D-Smart to distribute Nike Euro 2008 content also demonstrated mobile’s ability to tie in with other media channels and bring them to life, adding interactive and rich media elements, while the content chimed well with the football-mad Turks and their strong sense of national identity when it comes to the national football team. See the case study
Other great football/sports campaigns include:
Nike iD; Nike Zoom’s Mobile Legend, the mobile video campaign Your Reebok and You got Rondo’d (also by Reebok) see the video case study.
Andy Goodman, managing director, Fjord
I’m more of a ‘services’ than ‘campaign’ kind a guy. The most interesting football-related mobile service recently was the Sony PSP trial with Arsenal at the Emirates. It showed live replays and statistics during the match. It should be released commercially launched next season. This is a good insight into the future of mobile sports interaction.
David Cushman, managing director, 90:10 Group
A couple of applications I like:
FanChants from IAppMaker.com solves a genuine problem (it teaches the irregular fan the chants of his team so he can join in on the rare occasion he shows his face…). BUT it doesn’t take a great deal of advantage of the fact it is mobile (other than killing a bit downtime while taking public transport to the match to listen and learn).
Nike Football+ application (See the video) aims to improve your football skills with the stars. But it could also do more with mobile.
A lot of apps just fill a ‘bit of downtime’ with entertainment. Few make use of the genuine abilities of mobile – location based services (where are fans meeting before the game, using maps to show the location, for example) or m-commerce (what about purchasing tickets or merchandise). And far too few apps focus on the social aspects of the game.
Some of the club based/official apps do a great job of providing/broadcasting information, but football is a supremely communal activity and your club is a sensational social object (a thing around which people gather and communicate).
We need more services that connect fans and that make use of the user-generated content.
Anna Gudmundson, global product manager, Ad.IQ
In the 2006-7 season Barclays – the sponsor of the English Premier League – ran the following competition. It received 11,536 responses, of which 69 percent of respondents opted in for future communication from Barclays. The campaign said:
“Over Christmas it is likely that the 15,000th Premier League Goal will be scored. Text Barclays with the name of the player that you think will score the 15,000th goal to 61066 and if your chosen player scores:
• You and 5 mates could win VIP tickets to see the Barclays Premiership team of your choice
• PLUS you will also get to present the award to the goal scorer!
That’s not all. Barclays will donate £15,000 to the nominated charity of the scorer’s club.”
Patrick Kuwana, co-founder of Livemobile
Note: LMfootball.mobi was a 2009 MMA award winner.
Fans at the World Cup will be constantly on the move and will definitely have a mobile phone. The mobile device will be the most important and most used information source and communications device for fans during the event. The mobile will be key to finding the latest info on the tournament (scores, results, news, etc) or where to go out to party and to share the information with others.
This is the focus of Livemobile to create a mobile ‘Fan-Experience’ offering that both gives fans access to all the football related information they require in near real time, but to also provide them with a social platform where they can interact, learn about each others countries and pick up some of the language.
For marketers, mobile isn’t just the best opportunity to reach football fans, it may well be the only one, as most traditional advertising medium space in South Africa is sold out or selling at astronomical prices. But to produce a positive ROI, mobile marketing needs to be within a value-added service.
Claire Boonstra, co-founder, Layar
First the do’s and don’ts:
• Place yourself in the context of the visitor/ fan. Don’t push what you want to tell them, but understand what they are looking for, interested in at that moment.
• Try to engage with them, bring them a nice experience and service them in a useful way
Second to what Augmented Reality (AR) can do (Layer is a mobile AR browser):
AR will bring unprecedented possibilities for brands to interact with people. With AR you hold up your smartphone and as look around, superimposed over the things you see through the camera lens are virtual images or messages.
How can AR be used to help visitors to the World Cup:
• Telling visitors where they can find good restaurants, which match is on next (and where), where the toilets are?
• Playing a nice game of AR football: hold up your phone to see where the nearest goal is, walk up to the ball, slide your finger over the screen to kick the ball and see it roll towards the goal?
• Enable tours around the towns where the championships are held, exploring what the city would have looked like 100 years ago and how it might look in the future?
• Set up a treasure hunt: catch the logos of the sponsors or team mascots in the streets, prizes to the ones who gathered the most points!
• Find discount coupons of participating stores (of course only when you’ve expressed interest in receiving them).
David Gibbs, general manager, Sky Mobile
I can’t share specific plans but suffice to say that mobile will be a key platform for our customers seeking World Cup news, scores video etc. Sky has seen increasing numbers of users accessing Sky Sports content through their mobile devices via the Sky mobile site or downloadable applications. Monthly unique users of these services are now in their millions and the mobile site attracts users from all over the world. The Football Score Centre application has been the number one free sports application in the iTunes app store since launch and we expect to see significant use during the World Cup as customers access scores while on the move (though Sky has no rights to live footage).
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