The market for promoting new media advertising about football has recently undergone a drastic change. The prestige quo, unchanged for two years, has been shaken by the appearance of a new virtual auction space called Aura Sports.
In just over a month since its launch, the BSkyB operation, the representation of six Premier League clubs, that is, almost a third of the market, has concluded.
Until now, advertising sales in the virtual homes of the Premier League’s top clubs were reserved for a handful of major broadcasters. Grenada, NTL and Sky were the main players, controlling the virtual operations of 16 of the 20 clubs after the creation. joint ventures and the acquisition of virtual rights, the dot-com fever of 1999 and 2000.
Grenada has joint online operations with Arsenal and Liverpool; Sky still runs Tottenham Hotspur’s virtual sales operations, but has partnered with Aura Sports for sales of West Ham, Southampton, Chelsea, Leeds United, Manchester City and Sunderland football clubs.
Ntl, through its sports content and rights subsidiary Premium TV (PTV), manages the official information of 78 football clubs, including Blackburn Rovers, Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Bolton, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and West Bromwich Albion in the Premier League.
This is an unexpected time for a startup, especially given the depressed situation in the online advertising market. But Paul Wright, executive leader and co-founder of Aura Sports, believes the time has come for a specialist to enter the market.
“Prices for clubs have skyrocketed, especially in the case of players. The income wants to be higher and clubs can turn to a specialist,” Wright says.
Adrian Ford, advertising facilities director at Granada Sport and Interactive, believes BSkyB is not expected to turn to Aura Sports to help. According to him, it is just about maximizing income.
Ford states: “Selling natural advertising on football club websites is not the simplest solution for several reasons. One of the main problems is that the portals attract a large number of advertisers due to their size. Based on this , Sky is the most productive The setup to maximize the price of online advertising sales was to use a third party. Small and agile can be a smart thing to do. ”
Manchester United is arguably the biggest virtual attraction in the world of football. In August last year, it bought its virtual rights from TWI Interactive, a subsidiary of Mark McCormack’s IMG sports watchdog group.
He did this to generate more online earnings and tap into a global fan base of over 55 million. Manchester United is now employing the virtual sales operations of the Lycos portal as part of a global deal to expand the club’s overseas online presence.
Ben Hatton, Manchester United’s director of business development, is convinced that there is a market in which Aura Sports and former rights holders can intervene. “There’s a hole in the market, the sports audience is very expressive in terms of demographics, there’s been a shift in advertisers’ views on online opportunities with clubs. “
The void that Aura Sports is looking to fill arose in part following the restructuring of several leading sports, adding Sportal and Sports. com, which has caused advertisers to rethink where it is most productive to spend their budget online. This made club sites more attractive.
“Ad spend on websites tends to focus, for example, on Sports. com or Sky, rather than on an eclectic organization of websites,” says Richard Holman, managing director of the AdLINK advertising sales network.
Holman believes that the arrival of Aura Sports has created a fundamental shift in the way advertisers manage online sales on Premier League club websites.
Your challenge will be to grow to take a greater share of the market.
“To be a powerful success, sales representation needs to be across a group of sites. Aura Sports hasn’t changed that, advertisers still need to go to four major players to get coverage,” he says. “The ability to place an advertisement across all Premier League websites would be killer and I assume Aura Sports is trying to build a central sales point to control the market.”
But is Aura Sports more likely to strike similar deals with companies like Granada and NTL to gain that critical mass? In a word, yes.
PTV, the NTL subsidiary that manages the 78 football sites for which it holds the virtual rights, has entrusted the virtual sales operation to IDS (formerly Flextech Sales) since the beginning of the year.
IDS is now moving away from online sales to focus on TV sales. PTV and the seven Premier League club websites it now has are for an outside sales company. It selected Aura Sports, Real Media and AdLINK.
Given the number of football websites that Aura Sports currently represents, it is in a strong position to win the deal and secure promotion rights for almost three-quarters of the Premier League’s available clubs. This would make it a difficult player in attracting advertisers who need a streamlined way to succeed among a giant number of engaged football fans.
“The strength of football lies in the excessive loyalty shown through clubs,” says Wright. “Research has shown that only 11% of people replace their loyalty to their club. From an advertiser’s point of view, if they can penetrate this on a large number of sites in one attempt, it is much more difficult than a old virtual property. “
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