edp sports marketing - blog

Are the Olympics sexy?

Our favourite Olympic story this week has been the launch of an advertising campaign by Chinese condom-maker Elasun with ads depicting a stick-man athlete using condoms as various pieces of apparatus from different Olympic events.

 

The Daily Telegraph reported – without a hint of irony – that the campaign had become “a viral sensation in

China

”.

 

However, further investigation proves the point that there is no greater international love-in than the Olympic Games. Apparently the 16,000 competitors staying in the Beijing Olympic Village are able to purchase a wide variety of soft pornography, whilst at the 2004 Athens Olympics 130,000 free condoms were made available to athletes and officials.  In

Sydney

 in 2000, every athlete was given 51 condoms on arrival (Why 51? Why not 50 or 52?) at the Olympic Village, but another 20,000 had to be shipped in when supplies began to run low. Well, that’s the Australians for you!

 

Meanwhile, attention here has been turning to how

London

will top the spectacular

Beijing

opening ceremony in 2012. Those with a sense of humour should visit the Facebook group “2012 London Opening Ceremony Ideas”. Ideas proffered so far include a policemen bobbing around to reggae in the drizzle while hoodies perform a synchronized stabbing; Myleene Klass being savaged by giant pitbulls each with the face of Cliff Richard, and a chav chucking a Superking cigarette butt into a disposable Tesco BBQ and driving off on a stolen moped with his pregnant teenage girlfriend as the flames ignite a Polish man standing on a ladder painting the unfinished stadium to lit the Olympic flame.

 

Aah, national pride! Suggestions on a postcard please.

 

 

 

One Great Golfing Game

We love nothing better than filling our spare time with a bit of viral game play, so if you've got a spare minute, go onto www.ladieseuropeantour.com/ and click on the Golf Challenge on the right hand side of the home page. Be warned, it's compulsive but very good fun.

Everybody Needs Heroes

 

 

There was a point during the recent Wimbledon Championships when the whole essence of sport seemed to be summed up in a single moment.

 

It came at the end of the third set tie break in the match between Andy Murray and Richard Gasquet. Murray, two sets down and having stared defeat in the face minutes earlier, reached and returned what seemed an unreachable backhand to secure the third set on a tie-break. The relief was as great for the

Centre Court

crowd as it was for

Murray

. But it was his reaction rather than the achievement that struck us most. As the BBC put it - “

Murray

howled at the gods and the stands erupted”.

 

This was the moment

Murray

and the

Wimbledon

crowd engaged with each other as they had never previously done. It laid the ghost of Henman to rest and enabled the crowd to buy into a personality who, hitherto, had appeared aloof, even surly. From there on, the next two sets were a shared endeavour.

 

This illustrates two points: the importance for rights holders or event sponsors to recognise that sport at its most effective is a shared endeavour and, second, the importance of personality. If you go to a sporting event, you need to be and feel involved. If you want to be in an audience, watching politely, go to the theatre. The sporting public needs heroes - individuals to pin their colours to, to get excited by, an underdog to cheer, a master to be in awe of; watching a sport without any of the above gives us nothing to invest in emotionally.

 

That’s easy for the major sports. Football, with Beckham, Rooney and Ronaldo is positively teeming with them; basketball has

Kobe

Bryant and LeBron James; cricket blessed with Pietersen and Flintoff; rugby with Cipriani and Wilkinson.

 

But every sport has them. They may not have yet uncovered them or maximised their potential, but in every sport they are there. It may be their back story – their struggle to achieve what they’ve achieved against the odds; it may be the quirky human interest angle or their age (who really was interested in diving before Tom Daley – but we’ll all be watching him in

Beijing

). It may, dare I say it, also be that they are just damned good looking.

 

What rights holders and governing bodies should recognise is that these guys – their potential superstars – are their route to engaging both the consumer and potential partners, a route to creating interest in their sport that will help them crossover into mainstream media and demonstrate to a sponsor one vehicle for their brand that could make a partnership worthwhile. And every sport has them. If they’ve found them already, they must maximise their use of them. If they don’t have them – start uncovering them. They’re there somewhere.

 

 

Football's Coming Home

Nothing exercises the views of the footballing public as much as the fortunes of the England football team...and nothing, it would seem, causes so many people to have an opinion on one subject as much as who should pick up the poisoned chalice, sorry mantle, from Steve McLaren and lead England down the yellow brick road towards the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

The implications go far beyond taboid speculation; the financial implications of non-qualification for Euro 2008 are serious both for the Football Association and the wider economy. Failure to qualify again for 2010 would be catastrophic. The failure of the national team can also have a major impact on the way the country feels about itself that can go far beyond the relatively limited confines of an international football tournament. In 1970, for example, England's failure to defend their World Cup in Mexico was blamed for creating a negative atmosphere that contributed to Prime Minister Harold Wilson's defeat in that year's General Election. Gordon Brown must be patting himself on the back for not going to the country after all. It's a serious business.

But how to snatch positives from an overwhelmingly negative situation? Unfortunately for The FA, irrespective of what other good work it may do, perceptions and attitudes of the organisation are intrinsically bound up with the success (or otherwise) of the national team. McLaren's failure is The FA's failure, and not just because they were the ones who appointed the coach in the first place.

This current situation, though, also offers The FA an opportunity to turn the situation to its longer term advantage by re-engaging with its core constituency - football supporters like you and me. It can only do this if, and only if, it chooses to manage this recruitment process professionally and with more than half an eye on the potential pr implications. Get the process as well as the next appointment wrong and it's difficult to see a bright future ahead.

And when we talk about pr implications, this isn't about who would make the best England coach (though, for the record, we have a couple of quid on Frank Rijkaard at 33-1), it's about managing expectations and taking control of a situation involving a potentially negative target audience and converting their opinion into a positive.

It is never going to be possible to stop or even dampen media speculation about who will succeed Steve McLaren, but allowing a vacuum to emerge filled only by speculation would be potentially damaging. It risks making The FA appear indecisive, not in control and buffered by said speculation; responding to events not controlling them.

For this to happen, the first recognition may not be a particularly palatable one in Soho Square. The FA should recognise that the fans, and I suspect the media, no longer trust 'the suits' with such an important appointment. Instead of fighting that, embrace it. Go public with the fact that you are gathering experienced football figures, including people who have done the job before, to draft the job description, long list the candidates and allow one of them to lead - and, crucially, be seen to lead the search process. They will have a far clearer insight into who has the temperament, the talent, the experience and the determination to adapt to the rigours of the job. A footballing decision made by footballing people – probably the best way for the sport’s civil servants to regain the respect of the fans.

The other way of taking the initiative is for the FA not to be bounced into an unnecessarily quick decision. England will likely not face another competitive fixture until September or October 2008. This lifts the pressure of having to have a permanent Head Coach in within a matter of weeks and allows the organization to approach the appointment in a calm, considered and structured manner. By moving to dampen the frenzy now, by categorically ruling out an early appointment (which still gives the FA the space to make one if they so wish) and defining clearly the attributes that everyone is looking for, would give the process and the sport a welcome sense of direction.

Every Sports Brand Needs Jumpers for Goalposts

A week doesn’t seem to go by without another media spotlight on the ticking time-bomb that is child obesity. 

Between a quarter and a third of British children are said to be overweight which, we are told, is storing up a whole warehouse full of problems for the future.

Indeed, you know it’s a hot topic when, in the space of just a couple of weeks, the Prime Minister takes to the television studios to demand more sport in school and that more of it should be competitive, and his predecessor launches The Tony Blair Sports Foundation to nurture young sporting talent in areas suffering social exclusion.

But there needs to be a commercial imperative at work here too. The good intentions will be little more unless young people are engaged and come to embrace sport as a natural part of their own leisure choices. And that may mean by-passing the school and going direct to the child.

The focus on schools – or solely on schools – means that brands could be missing a trick. Although there remains a focus on increasing levels of school sport, there is also a disconnect between what may be desirable and what is achievable. Most schools will tell you that they are already struggling to deliver two hours of sport per week as required by the National Curriculum, let alone the aspired figure of four hours; many say four hours is just not going to be possible.

So brands that want to tap into this market and smarten up their socially responsible credentials may need to find more creative ways to promote sport and fitness to youth.

And this means bringing sport and youth-oriented brands back into the playground, the parks and the gardens. It means engaging young people in ways to which they are receptive, not necessarily through the establishment that schools represent, and developing formats and concepts for sport that are as easily replicated in a home environment as they are in school. The days when kids played cricket with a tennis ball and used their leg as bat may be gone….but the opportunity on offer to brands that achieve the same effect could be significant.

Only by getting under the skin of the next generation and making sport genuinely relevant and cool will brands succeed in making a difference that lasts. We need competitive sport to be a natural rather than a contrived part of childhood again. Which brands are up to the task? Because the ones that are will be the ones that lock themselves into the consciousness of future generations.