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Matching Mobile with Football

02 February 2010

There’s a lot of buzz around the potential for mobile marketing and content at this summer’s World Cup in South Africa. Earlier this month AIME was fortunate to attend, as a media partner, a unique mobile content event hosted by Camerjam at the Emirates Stadium in London unsurprisingly called M-Football.

High level speakers from Real Madrid, Everton, Sponge, Turkcell and Flirtomatic, among others, focused on how the mobile medium can not only transform the football experience for fans, but also how content and service providers can exploit the opportunities available from these large-scale sporting events.

According the event chairman, Jonathan MacDonald, founder of JME.net and mobile consultant, there is a disconnect between what football fans actually do at a match and what they could be doing in order to have an even more enjoyable experience. Mobile can fill this space and there are massive potential revenues to be made by doing it right.

General consensus seemed to be that there are two main opportunities for mobile when it comes to football, however, this can be logically extended to virtually any big sporting event: inside and outside the stadium. Deciding how to tackle these two environments and working out what kind of services to offer is the main challenge. With the former, service providers have access to tens of thousands of people ( spread over different locations in the case of World Cup in South Africa ). In the latter case, there are the potential billions of viewers spread around the world experiencing the tournament via television and the web.

By using the natural social environment of fans within a football ground to leverage social interaction – and gathering vital data there is much that can be brought to the game. A lot can be done around the location of the game and this is an area where mobile can assist. Within the stadium itself, there have already been rafts of well documented mobile success stories that hint at what may be in store for the World Cup.

“In Slovenia, the Lenovo Team stadium shows a video at the entrances that show a virtual mobile soccer game that can be downloaded,” says Tomi Ahonen, author and consultant at the Oxford Forum. “The service is sponsored and the fans pay to download it then use key pad to play. It gives them something to do while they are waiting for kick off.”

“In Pittsburg, the ice hockey team the Penguins have a special ‘Penguin Cam’ service to mobile which offers users access to special cameras out on the ice, on players’ helmets and in the dressing rooms,” says Ahonen. “This all adds to the personalisation and movement of the people at sporting events.”

Ahonen also points to how US news channel CNN is using fans with mobiles to generate fan reporting and photo and video footage from the fans point of view and linking it to chat and other interaction with fans to help, as Ahonen says, “expand the moment”.

All these things can be used in-stadium to generate interest at the World Cup. However, many are thinking more laterally than this and looking at how to use smartphones, text voting, wifi connectivity and cutting edge service such as augmented reality to redefine the sporting experience. Elaborate plans exist to try and use real time voting to get a view from fans as to whether the referee’s decision is right or not, for example.

Football is unique in that the customer and brand loyalty is taken as a given, so all you have to do is work out new and innovative ways to exploit it. When it comes to the World Cup, the opportunity to exploit team loyalty amongst supporters outside the stadium is immense. It is estimated that there will be some three billion people worldwide tuning into the World Cup in June. That’s three billion people who will probably all be willing to pay something towards extra information or entertainment and social interaction around their team’s games.

But it throws up an interesting proposition: while there is some money to be made in developing smartphone apps and mobile web sites for brands, the real cash cow lies in delivering really simple, text based services that could go global.

“If it was down to me I would just build a simple text only alert service that sends the score, draws, team information, that sort of thing,” says David Gibbs, general manager, Sky Mobile. “I would also build in different tariffs depending on how quickly you want to get that information.”

Real Madrid, the richest and one of the best known clubs in the world is at the forefront of creating a mobile presence for its team. The club works with UK content and apps developer AFC Mobile and has a strategy to concentrate on unique content generation, content distribution and mobile community creation. It is also looking at phase two for using mobile for ticketing, other promotions and perhaps even gambling –thanks to the teams shirt sponsors B-Win.

“Currently mobile is just 1% of Real’s business,” says Pedro Duarte Gonzalez, head of mobile at the club, “but it is growing. Football is ideal for mobile services as the fans are already loyal to the club, and because we play every week we are constantly generating new content for them. Mobile then offers a way of getting new content to fans and involving them in communities that centre around the club. This is what we are planning to grow over the years.”

Currently, Real has 100,000 subscribers paying €11 per month to access its premium content and community services. Unfortunately, mobile operators take more than 50 percent of this in revenue share. Still, it’s not bad service loyalty and, as Gonzalez points out, there is hardly any churn because the fans are incredibly loyal to the club’s brand.

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 to know 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 more in-depth analysis of the mobile opportunities provided by the World Cup in South Africa this summer, head over to www.telemedia-news.com.