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Archive for the ‘Sports Marketing’ Category

Over the past year sports has been hands down one of our biggest markets. Its easy to understand. Clients have great traffic and sports teams and organizations have some of the most fanatical fans. These two factors drive some of the best campaigns.

We have run successful campaigns for the Oakland Raiders, Ihoops.com, Eteamz.com, and Sports Illustrated Kids. The Raiders best fan photo contest was a great success with 1.2 million votes and 1600 submissions in 8 weeks.

As we look at the new year and how the sports market can benefit from our services,  I believe one of the biggest overlooked opportunity is for pro athletes to leverage contests to communicate with their fans.

This morning I was watching Chad Johnson now Ocho Cinco live stream talking to his fans and I thought it was awesome. Reggie Bush I also think has a great site and I know has a social media consultant helping him communicate with his fans more effectively. Social Media is allowing athletes to communicate with their fans on their own time so they don’t feel overwhelmed when they are focused on playing.

I think the next step that some of the more proactive athletes could take would be running interactive contests with their fans. Athletes are like brands and they have loving fans. Why not embrace this?

Here are some ideas we have and we are open to any other ideas from agents or sports consultants:

  • Fan Poster or Apparel Design Contest : Fans would love to design a cool shirt or poster for an athlete and the athlete benefits by getting some rocking fan inspired art.
  • Fan Voted Photo Contest for a new sports card: A player could upload a bunch of action photos and let fans decide which picture will be on their next sports card. The athlete or card company could run this.
  • Fan Logo Design Contest: Reggie Bush has a cool logo with his initials. How cool would it be to have tons of fans designing logos for Reggie and have one win. I love Roger Federer’s logo. It would be awesome if a fan had designed it.
  • Fan Art Contest: We have been running contests with SIKids.com for the last year and some of the art from these kids is amazing. It would be awesome to pick an athlete each month and let fans submit their best drawing. Kids would love it and it is such great PR for an athlete.

The cool thing is prizes don’t have to be big cash prizes like brands use. Prizes could be a personal note and some personalized signed gear. Those are the things fans live for and will mount on their wall and pass to their kids.

Here are some examples of amazing art we have received in the last year work with Sports Illustrated Kids. Athletes with great fan relationships are the ones that are remembered forever.

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Our business develops white label contest applications for sports teams and online sports communities, so we talk to a lot to people who are frustrated by their results with running online contests for fans.  There are a few common reasons why online contests don’t work.

Here’s a brief education on the types of online contest management methods and their pitfalls.

The email method: When an organization asks fans to “submit all photos to someone@something.com by Some Date, 2010”, here’s what fans think is going to happen:

  1. Nobody is going to look at my photo.
  2. They might not receive my photo.
  3. If they get my photo they might lose it.
  4. It’s probably not going to be fair.  They are just going to choose a photo submitted by a friend.

The ranking method: When most organizations develop a ranked contest, where fans rank submission on a scale (ie: 1 to 10), here’s what goes wrong:

  1. Numbers are relative to the voter.  When looking at a person, place or thing and asked to rank it on a 10 point scale, a 6 to you is often not a 6 to the person next to you.  As such, on a large scale, number ranked contests eventually always center around a mean, where the majority of all submissions end up close to the average.  We learned this after talking to threadless.com when developing our contest application for collarfree.com, our crowdsourced t-shirt line.

The “votes for” method: When the host develops a contest that asks fans to “vote for” a submission (ie: yes or no, thumbs up/down), here’s what goes wrong:

  1. When the winner is determined by the # of votes for a submission, the campaign has built-in bias towards early submissions.  Submissions entered early have an unfair advantage because the duration of their time in the contest is longer than later submissions.
  2. There is bias in promoting.  Not always a bad thing, as people should be rewarded for their effort, but when winners are determined strictly by the number of positive votes, people with resources (time, lots of followers, etc.) have an unfair advantage in skewing the voting pool when the contest’s submissions can be linked to directly and a non-relative vote can be cast for said submission.  Here’s a link to my image, simply take a second to click on the thumbs up and leave.

The message is not targeted. Organizations need to consider what interests their fans and customers.  Here are a list of questions to ask yourself:

  1. What are your fan’s key interests?  Pets, babies, winning moments, hobbies, girls (Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, let’s be honest)…
  2. If you are running a fan submitted photo contest, what type of photos do your fans have quick and easy access to?
  3. If you’ve run contests before, what type of submissions did you receive?  Did you learn anything from your audience?  We run contests for a consumer food products brand called Tapatio Hot Sauce.  We noticed that for the first 2 months we kept getting submissions from military folks in places like Kosovo and Kuwait – Tapatio sitting on a tank, or on the table in a barracks.  How would we know that Tapatio was such a hit in the military, maybe military food needs a little extra kick?  Anyway, we switched things up in December and are running a “Best Military Family Photo contest” – a great goodwill piece for a loyal fan base.

The prize is not valuable or relevant. Make sure to consider these questions when choosing a prize for your campaign.

  1. Create prize packages that your customers want.  Think of something they want, and may never buy for themselves.
  2. Justify the effort involved with a equivalent prize package.  If it’s a photo contest, submitting is easy, offer something small.  If it’s a video/audio/design contest, fans have to spend time on creating it, editing it, uploading it.  Make the prize justify the time it takes to participate.
  3. Target prizes that have a high value to cost ratio.  If you are a football team, give away a used game football and call it a “Commemorative Game Used Football”.  No cost to you, huge value to the fans.

Now, here’s what we have found.

What makes Artistic Hub’s contest software work for the fans:

  1. It’s interactive.  This is not a sweepstakes.  We can capture email too, but we can also keep your fans there, and keep them coming back.
  2. It’s addictive and simple.  Here’s happy face and sad face, which do you like?  Here’s panda and chimpanzee, which do you like?  How fast can you click?  How long is your break between meetings?  We’ve helped take Active.com’s eteamz property site time to over 8 minutes with interactive photo contests.  A substantial increase for them.  The reason: we make decisions simple with an “A vs. B” method, and super fast loading between votes.  No time wasted in scrolling down the page, or clicking from page to page, then clicking that little “…more” button, only to lose the page you were on before.
  3. It’s Fair!  Submissions are displayed at random, from a database of all submissions that fans submit, and the client approves.
  4. It’s transparent.  Fans vote and can see the rankings change.  We include auto e-mails and a search bar so participants can be easily notified when their submission goes into voting, and can go search for it when they return.
  5. It’s easy to promote/share.  Our Direct links and the ShareThis feature allow fans to promote the contests their friends and family, and get voting support for the contest.

Our Results. Here are the first week’s results of our newest client, The Oakland Raiders

# of fan photo submissions: 649

# of individual fan votes: 420,621

Check out the campaign at http://raiders.artistichub.com/

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