Social Media undermines Sports Sponsorship
By brendan at 16 March, 2010, 1:02 pm
Its not news that Social Media is big business at the moment, and rightly so, because its a game changer. Consider this: If I am interested in raising awareness of my product with the type of person I who barracks for Melbourne Football Club I could take the traditional route and become a club sponsor. Big bucks and a low level transparency on the impact.
Alternatively for say 1% of the price I could run a campaign on Facebook, targeting people who’s profile includes being a fan of the Melbourne Football Club. And with Facebook I know exactly how many times my advertisement has been viewed and clicked though.
A quick look on Facebook shows the following fan bases for Australian Rules Football Clubs. These are people I can touch without having to pay a premium to the AFL or the club.
| Team | Facebook Fans * |
| Melbourne Demons | 3,960 |
| Western Bulldogs | 4,254 |
| Port Adelaide Football Club | 7,408 |
| North Melbourne Football Club | 9,502 |
| Brisbane Lions | 10,207 |
| Richmond Tigers | 11,284 |
| Carlton FC | 12,010 |
| Fremantle Dockers | 12,617 |
| Hawthorn Football Club | 13,915 |
| Geelong FC | 15,532 |
| Sydney Swans | 17,677 |
| StKilda FC | 20,750 |
| Collingwood Football Club | 25,601 |
| West Coast Eagles | 32,845 |
| Essendon FC | 38,338 |
| Adelaide FC | 39,136 |
| AFL | 86,463 |
* Note the number of fans changes everyday, plus in some cases there is more than one fan group. In that case I have taken the higher number.
The same type of thing is also happening in other sports such as motor racing, Cricket, rugby and soccer.
Social Media platforms such as Facebook also allow you to be dynamic, trialling dozen of messages per day to optimise click through rates. And the price is cheap. I recently ran a campaign that was viewed by 5,400 graduates of a particular university one day. The cost? $130.
By the way, if I ran a business that made its dollars raising sponsorship funds, or was highly dependent on sponsorship for revenue, I would be very concerned about now.
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Comments
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Not really. Take your first example Melbourne demons on facebook you have 3960 potential pairs of eyeballs. At their last pre-season match there were 11500 pairs of eyeballs. For just one match sponsorship provides a much bigger audience to get your brand “out-there”, add in more matches and television coverage and the difference in your numbers gets even bigger.
Too much emphasis is being placed on instant metrics in online advertising, people seem to be forgetting that one of the main points in any advertising is brand name recognition.
Sponsor a club or ‘for say 1% of the price I could run a campaign on Facebook” Great Article Brendan!
Sorry Brendan but here at SponsorPACK we don’t agree with you. If companies don’t sponsor, then the clubs will close, then there won’t be any fans and you won’t have anyone to tweet or talk to.
Why would the fan want to engage with a company that doesn’t provide the club with anything tangible? The fans show loyalty to sponsors because sponsors are providing for their club, end of.
Thanks’ for your concern but we’re not.
I couldnt disagree more with the article Brendan! Online advertising and reaching ‘eyeballs’ is unproven, getting more expensive and lost in the clutter with everyone else jumping on board for ‘cheap sales’.
The arrival of social media in sponsorship, as in everything else in sport and business, means they are having to adapt to survive. Many deals with clubs and leagues are utilising social media within their sponsorship strategy including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flikr, WordPress.
Through Facebook alone you can run promotions, add content and create real dialogue with fans that no Ad campaign ever can. 85k fans is still small when you look at Michael Phelps, Fernando Torres, Lance Armstrong, Shaq O’Neill as athletes and NFL, NHL, etc as leagues.
There you are talking millions of people interacting with the club or athlete and the sponsors can become part of that. Getting away from the Facebook and Google Ads and running some great interactivity via these sites is how it is going. Even brands can do it themselves, finding ways to talk to their customers, solve promblems and launch products – it is a two way dialogue, not just pouring out the usual PR and website feeds.
We are still learning how to measure and monetise this new technology but understanding is getting better of how to harness it. Carry on with your Facebook Ads or create a real, loyal fan base who will buy your products – it is your choice.