The market for the promotion of advertising in new media about football has recently undergone a radical change. The prestige quo, immovable for two years, has been altered by the appearance of a new virtual sales 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 major Premier League clubs have been reserved for a handful of primary broadcasters. Grenada, NTL and Sky were the major players, controlling the virtual operations of 16 of the 20 clubs following the creation of joint ventures and the acquisition of virtual rights during the dot-com rush 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 within of the Premier League.
This is an unexpected time for a startup, especially given the depressed situation in the online advertising market. But Paul Wright, CEO and co-founder of Aura Sports, believes the time is right 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, director of advertising installations at Granada Sport and Interactive, believes BSkyB isn’t expected to turn to Aura Sports to help. According to him, it’s just about maximizing revenue.
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 possibly 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 holding group.
He did this to generate more revenue online and tap into a global fan base of over 55 million. Manchester United are now employing the Lycos portal’s virtual sales operations 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 is a hole in the market, the sports audience is very expressive in terms of demographics, there has been a change in the opinion of advertisers about online opportunities with clubs. “
The void Aura Sports is looking to fill arose in part following the restructuring of a number of leading sports, adding Sportal and Sports. com, which has caused advertisers to rethink where it’s most productive to spend their budget online. This made club sites more attractive.
“Advertising spend on websites tends to focus on, say, Sports. com or Sky, rather than an eclectic organization of websites,” says Richard Holman, CEO of advertising sales network AdLINK.
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.
Their challenge will be to grow to take a larger share of the market.
“To be very successful, sales representation will have to expand to a location organization. Aura Sports has not repositioned that, advertisers still have to turn to four main players to get coverage,” he says. “The ability to position an ad on all Premier League websites would be fatal and I suppose Aura Sports is looking to build a central outlet for the market. “
But does Aura Sports have any intelligent possibility of closing similar agreements with companies such as Granada and NTL to ensure such an important critical mass?In a word, yes.
PTV, the ntl subsidiary that manages the 78 football sites for which it owns the virtual rights, has entrusted the virtual sales operation to IDS (formerly Flextech Sales) since the beginning of the year.
IDS is now abandoning online sales to focus on the sale of televisions. PTV and the seven Premier League club websites it now has are for an external sales company. Selected Aura Sports, Real Media and AdLINK.
Given the number of football sites on the internet that Aura Sports represents lately, it is in a strong position to win the market and secure the rights to sell almost three-quarters of the available Premier League clubs. That would make it a difficult player to attract advertisers who need a streamlined way to succeed with a large number of engaged football fans.
“The strength of football is based on the excessive loyalty shown by the clubs,” says Wright. “Research has shown that only 11 percent of people replace their loyalty to the club. From an advertiser’s point of view, if they can penetrate a gigantic number of sites in a single attempt, it’s much more difficult than a proconsistent virtual classic. “
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