Building a brand in a world of noughts and ones.

The industry in which I work is a strange one.

Opta and our competitors are essentially selling something completely intangible. Noughts and ones flying down a pipe and ending up on a screen – sometimes a TV, sometimes a laptop or a tablet, maybe even a newspaper.

We collect the data from sport across the world and send it out around the world. Location is largely irrelevant, as long as the final product is accurate and timely. The end users know very little of the process involved between the action occurring and their consumption of it.

This creates an interesting marketing challenge. How do you differentiate yourself in a world where the product can’t be touched, and the differences should, in theory, be negligible between suppliers?

There are ways you can do it with your product, of course – at Opta we believe we collect more interesting and detailed data. We believe that we can deliver it more quickly and in a format that is easy for our clients to use. But I’m sure we’re not the only ones who say that kind of stuff.

We’re a premium supplier. But getting that message across in a way that people understand can be tricky.

This is why, as the guy tasked with addressing this challenge, I try to concentrate on a couple of key things.

Firstly, I massively believe in building trust in your brand through focusing on attention to detail in all areas of your work – the ones that people will see, and the ones people won’t see. The excellent Bryony Thomas calls it “sweating the small stuff“.

You can tell a lot about the final output of a company, or an individual, by the energy, effort and focus they put into other things. This is especially important when you can’t pick up a product and see and feel instantly how well made it is. Attention to detail is reassurance.

The other thing I believe is tremendously important is the power of design. We have two graphic designers within the marketing department at Opta, and I couldn’t imagine running a B2b marketing department without this resource.

Everything we do that is client facing (and a lot of stuff that isn’t) goes through the funnel of our graphic design team. Armed with robust brand guidelines and a fearsome attention to detail, they ensure consistency of output and help us to elevate even the most simple piece of communication into something that helps to reinforce our status as a premium supplier.

Whereas a premium FMCG product can invest in packaging, point of sale or above the line advertising to reinforce their position, we can’t do that. The only thing that really differentiates suppliers of intangible goods (at least at the stage prior to “sampling” the product) is brand.

And I think you can go a long way to addressing this issue by focusing on how you address the other stuff.

It does matter. All of it matters.

Building a brand a series of a million little decisions: take care with each and every one of them.

The Changing Face of Football Data

I did a piece on how the world of football data has evolved for the newly launched Opta blog.

You can have a look at it over here at the Opta site.

What the Police Elections and the Wii U have in common

Every week in Marketing magazine they ask the Brand Manager of the Week to define marketing.

The answers are generally something they’ve thought up to try and make themselves sound more intelligent than they actually are. “The art of communicating profitably with customers”, “forming life long connections between brands and people” are such gems. Bollocks, frankly.

Now I’m no stranger to marketing bollocks. I’ve built this “career” off spouting stuff like that at regular intervals. It can serve you well. And I’d no idea what I’d answer if asked to be Marketing’s Brand Manager of the Week (contact details on this blog….).

But for me marketing is nothing more than making stuff simple to understand. What does that do? Who are that company? How will this particular thing help me?

Things and stuff have different levels of complexity. The simplification of some messages may be just showing people how one brand differentiates from another whereas some marketing teams have to get across a very complex message about the product or service first, before brand even comes into it.

Some people call this the elevator pitch. Americans usually. Although “lift pitch” doesn’t quite cut it. Also, I’ve never heard anyone actually speak in a lift, so this analogy needs a bit of work.

Anyway, all of this pre-amble brings me to a couple of examples of what I would describe as a complete failure of simplification. And therefore, in my opinion, terrible marketing.

Firstly there was the Police Commissioner Elections. This is a complicated new position doing a complicated thing at the top of complicated organisations. With varied and complicated responsibilities, depending on location. Complicated.

So the very first job of the people responsible for marketing this election should have been to simplify this. To simplify it enough for people like me to go outside in the dark and cold and go and put a cross in a box.

But every bit of communication I saw about these elections muddied the muddy water even further. The labour chap in our district put a leaflet through the door that started with the promise that he would reverse government cuts. So, he’s a politician? Part of the government? Has Danny Alexander’s mobile phone number?

Who knows? My initial reaction was “no, you won’t” and I dismissed it out of hand.

The local TV news had a feature on the election stating that the new Commissioner would “have the power to hire and fire the Police Constable”. Right, fine. But what does the Police Constable do? And why would you need to fire them? And what are you doing the rest of the time?

Do they just hire and fire a new one every day to keep themselves busy? Like Jesus Gil in a M&S suit.

Every single thing about the communication of these elections was pitiful. Personally I’m surprised they got as high a turn out as they did.

The second example of a complicated proposition that hasn’t been distilled at all by the communications is at the other end of the spectrum, the new console from Nintendo – the Wii U.

This, for the uninitiated is the big daddy to the hugely successful Nintendo Wii. That’s the game console that you control by waving the controller about. And that, in a sentence, explains a great deal of the Wii’s success. You can explain it to anyone within a few words. Or you can show them and they instantly get it.

Anyone of any age can pick up a Wii controller and they know instantly what to do.

Now with the Wii U, Nintendo have added stuff. And they’ve decided to try and compete with the big bad Xbox and Playstation brands. The graphics are better, the processor more powerful.

And then you have a new controller thing. Which looks a bit like an iPad and allows you to interact with games in a variety of different ways. Or play a game on it instead of the TV.

As stated on this advert, the possibilities are endless:

Watch that ad, then imagine explaining what the Wii U does to your Grandma. You’ll get to “and then you can also play on the controller” before you give up.

I wonder if the marketing folk at Nintendo ever considered that “the possibilities are endless” is actually something you avoid saying at this stage of introducing a brand new concept.

I don’t think people want endless possibilities. They want simplified concepts. Especially when trying to play to a wide market. The type of people who walked into Asda and picked up a Wii because they understood what it could do and how don’t want to try and work out which of these possibilities suits them.

I love video games, and new console launches always appeal to me. I may be wrong, and I hope I am, but I see the Wii U as almost dead on arrival. I just can’t see it being a success, certainly not to the levels of the Wii or the DS.

And that is about as simple as I can make it.

The Digital Olympics – A Game Changer

The Olympics have been finished less than a week and already we’ve had a multitude of blogs, tweets and comments about how the big bad world of football can learn from it.

We’ve had it from journalists and we’ve had it from footballers currently serving massive bans for punching other players.

I’m not going to add to that debate. Other than to say this – maybe, just maybe, you can’t compare the two things. And maybe, just maybe, some of the more unsavoury aspects of football are what make it so compelling week after week. And maybe, just maybe, that if some of our Olympics heroes were given an agent at age 13 and were earning £40k per week at age 16 and had everybody out for a piece of them every single day they would turn out to be just as big arseholes as a lot of the footballers.

But, enough of that.

I do think football can learn from the Olympics, however. But I’m not talking about off the pitch. I think the real lasting legacy that will impact on the Premier League and beyond has come from the off-pitch stuff. I’m talking about the coverage.

In short, LOCOGs digital team and the BBC have done such a good job that I think they moved the goalposts. I think they may have opened the eyes of a lot of the general viewing public.

They have changed “what is possible” into “what is expected”. And I think this could be a difficult thing for top flight football to swallow. During the Olympics I would seamlessly move from big screen to small screen, through all sizes of screen inbetween. There would be no change in the quality of programming that I was watching.

I could choose exactly what I wanted to watch, and when. I was completely in charge. And there was no arbitrary distinction between broadcast platforms. Online was TV and TV was online. All the time, across all of the different sports.

It was a masterclass in how to put the viewer in charge of their own event. The BBC delivered superbly on all counts, and the size of that undertaking should not be underestimated. Every session of every event, in HD, in whatever format you choose to view it, supported by radio and online text commentaries. Really, truly superb.

So the jarring thing for me this weekend was not seeing Chelsea and Man City players kicking lumps out of each other. I quite liked that. And it wasn’t hearing the crowd shouting “wanker, wanker, wanker” at the referee. I kind of agreed with them. And I’m a grown up, so that doesn’t bother me.

What jarred for me was seeing the new season ad for Sky Sports advertising Wigan v Chelsea.

Here you go, take it or leave it.

But I don’t want to be told which game to watch. I want to pick and choose. And I don’t want highlights available at this time, on this platform, through this provider. I want it the way I want it. I’m prepared to pay. In fact, I already do, so give me what I want.

Now there are very good reasons why it is like it is. The Premier League makes a whole heap of cash by carving out the rights across platforms and by dividing up match packs. A free-for-all wouldn’t make a whole lot of commercial sense.

So it is what it is. And Sky’s coverage is uniformly excellent (and with Sky Go they at least let me take my coverage with me on different devices).

But I do wonder how long “consumer expectations” and “making commercial sense” can be at odds with each other. A tech savvy and passionate audience has a way of moulding these things to their own preference.

It happened in music, it happened in TV and now, as we have seen over the last couple of weeks, it can happen in sport.

However long it takes for the impact to be felt, I think the Olympics has been a game changer for football. Just not on the pitch.

How can Twitter own the second screen?

I first started banging on about second screen viewing in around 2007.

That was when my dwindling attention span and Johnny-5 like desire for more and more digital input started to affect my everyday life. My PC was now a laptop and I wanted to, for want of a better phrase, fart around on said laptop while watching TV.

It lead to the start of the often heard “Oi, I was watching that/no you weren’t you were on the computer” argument in my household. And who said men can’t multi-task, eh?

I wasn’t alone. As computers became laptop and laptops became netbooks and netbooks became tablets, more and more people with diminishing attention spans started flitting between one, two and three screening while watching TV. And this has lead to a proliferation in apps, websites and experiences designed to cater for this can-you-not-leave-your-sodding-phone-alone-for-five-bloody-minutes audience.

I’ve tried them all. From Zeebox to StatsZone. From Squawka to The Million Pound Drop app. There are some really excellent second screen options out there, each offering something different and adding to the experience.

On a personal level though, I’ve still not managed to find anything to match the original second screen experience – that of Twitter itself. When using one of the dedicated second screen apps I tend to find myself flicking back to Twitter itself, eventually often sticking with it.

For filtering the world through the eyes of my interest group, it can’t be beaten. The second screen experiences that cater for a specific market or topic often pull in a social feed, or create one themselves. And that is great, it certainly adds something. But for me, when I’m watching football I also want to know what my non-football followees (just invented that word, you can have it) are up to, and what they have to add.

And from what I gather, providers of other experiences can’t pull in a full Twitter timeline due to the rules and regs. So I’ll have to keep swiping across my ipad from one thing to another, back and forth out of Twitter itself. Or buy another iPad. What?

So, that for me leaves an opportunity for Twitter itself. If you look at the Twitter website, or the app, there is a lot of wasted or underutilised real estate.

So why can’t Twitter go the other way? Why can’t it read what is in my timeline and use that space to serve me some interesting stuff. On my timeline there are always loads of people droning on about football. So, why not send me some contextualised content – stats, info or betting ads, for example.

I won’t mind. Twitter gives me so much value that I actively want it to start advertising to me, if that advertising is contextual and relevant. Why can’t it find out what is trending on my timeline and use that to help to create the ultimate second screen all-in-one destination?

I see a future where there is a Twitter app store of sorts, where brands and companies offer different solutions to improve my Twitter experience. Loads of people on your timeline banging on about The Dark Knight? Come on IMDB, give me some info. Come on Odeon, tell me where I can get tickets.

Maybe it would be too much, and maybe it would ruin the experience. But done well, I think it could create the complete solution.

And maybe I wouldn’t need my lounge to look like a scene from Minority Report after all.

An opportunity for LinkedIn

One of the main bits of news from the world of social media this week was the change in the Twitter API signalling the end of its two year relationship with LinkedIn.

I’m not sure how much of a say LinkedIn had in this. Reading some of the commentary around this I’d say not very much. They may be whingeing and whining and mourning the lack of a partnership with the world’s premier micro-blogging service.

If so, they need to sit back and have a think. They need to reflect on a bullet dodged.

Because this is now a big opportunity for LinkedIn. A chance to differentiate itself from other social networks and cement its place as the biggest and best business networking site around.

Partnering with Twitter was, in my opinion, a massive mistake by LinkedIn. They approached it with gusto – pushing the option to “connect accounts” at every opportunity. And a massive proportion of people took them up on it. So their tweets went straight into LinkedIn, and consequently sprung up in my LinkedIn news feed.

I never wanted this. And I never wanted to have to go through each and every profile turning off their updates. There are several people who I think are useful enough to connect with, but not interesting enough to follow on Twitter. LinkedIn shouldn’t have been making that distinction for me.

They are different networks, with different purposes, and should have different content within them. I wouldn’t expect someone to tweet about becoming connected to John Smith, MD John Smith Inc, but that is of interest to be in a professional network. Horses for courses and all that stuff.

But now all that is gone, for whatever reason.

LinkedIn has a gap to fill. There is still a news-feed. There is still a need to make LinkedIn a day-to-day, rather than an occasional relevance. I think the answer lies somewhere in the company profiles and the ability to push information out (and consume it) on a corporate, rather than an individual level.

LinkedIn should introduce new functionality that allows companies to promote themselves as thought leaders, or content producers, or simply great places to work. Maybe a corporate and less flowery version of Pinterest. They should then pull out all of the stops to get companies to update, update, update.

And maybe then they would have a professional networking site that was relevant for its audience, every day.

Is the season ticket still an appropriate pricing model for football?

“I’m a season ticket holder”

It used to be the five words that defined you as a fan. The phrase that elevated you to a station above that of other fans and instantly told the person you were talking about that you cared and that you knew what you were talking about.

There were season ticket holders, and then there were other fans.
And then, last of all, there were fans who just watched on the TV.

So the investment in securing your seat for the season was as much a status symbol as it was the chance to guarantee yourself a seat. And guaranteeing your seat used to be important for a lot of clubs. No season ticket meant a scramble to get tickets for big games and queuing for hours to get tickets for the showpiece Wembley games.

So, a season ticket was a draw for fans. It provided a status and it provided a seat. And it was a draw for clubs who could charge top dollar to fans who were essentially paying full price, up front for a year’s subscription to a product. So, seemingly a win/win situation for those who wanted to take part.

But, I’m asking – is the season ticket model still a viable pricing model for football clubs?

Do you need a season ticket to guarantee a seat at any football club in the country these days? I would say the answer to this is “hardly”. In some cases, maybe Manchester United or Arsenal then yes. But even then only for the bigger games. A lot of games have been going to general sale for even the biggest clubs over the last couple of seasons.

And for the majority of clubs in the Premier League you could walk up to the ticket office on a matchday and buy a seat for yourself, your bag and your dog with very little trouble at all. At some of them you could pretty easily have a bit of a lie down if the match was bit boring.

Does having a season ticket give you a status symbol amongst fans? This is a tricky one. I’d argue in the past that a season ticket holder could comfortably claim to have watched more games, in more detail, than a “normal” fan. This is maybe not the case so much anymore. On Sky you can watch live games or long-form edited highlights of every club in league and cup competitions. You’ll have gaps, but you’ll still have watched a lot more football than the armchair fan of yesteryear (whose TV football was consigned to Everton v Arsenal four times a season on THE BIG MATCH).

Once you’ve had your fill of the live or long form stuff you can watch short form highlights on Match of the Day or on the internet. You can study the stats and read the reports online. You can feast on in-depth analysis til chalkboards are popping out of your ears and you’re dreaming of False 9s and Inverted Wingers.

So having a season ticket doesn’t mean that much anymore from that point of view. At least not as much as it did.

But what if my team gets to Wembley? What then? Surely the season ticket holders will get priority. Well, yes, this is a point. But one that is becoming less and less valid for a few reasons. Firstly, there are more opportunities to get to Wembley. Despite what some people might say it simply isn’t seen as that special anymore.

So, apart from special cases like Liverpool’s first visit to the new stadium or a brand new team getting to a cup final, the clamour isn’t usually what it was. And as the number of season ticket holders for most teams is diminishing, there are fewer people in front of you in the queue anyway.

Possibly worth taking a risk.

So, with that in mind, why do clubs still persist with the season ticket as a pricing model.

From a clubs point of view the guaranteed revenue is often extremely useful from a budgeting point of view. And often clubs will have mortgaged future season ticket money to give pay for some Argentinian kid’s Ferrari.

But it prevents clubs having a flexible and more malleable approach to pricing. If a club discounts heavily or offers innovative group pricing on a week-by-week level they risk pissing off their “most loyal” fans – the season ticket holders. They have paid a set price per game and don’t want to feel ripped off.

When clubs like West Ham have done this, there is an understandable backlash from fans who feel they are being taken for a ride by the club. And when the club is relying on them to renew, often at increased cost, this is a big risk.

So you end up with a stand off. You have latent demand to attend matches, but only at a lower price point. You have empty seats. And you have fans who’ve paid in advance expecting to treated fairly by a club who can’t afford to alienate them.

Every other industry uses pricing as a marketing tool but football struggles to, for all of these reasons.

But as a new generation of fans grows up without the culture of buying a season ticket, it follows that a new pricing model will have to follow to.