According to the latest rumours in the beautiful game, Man Utd’s Christiano Ronaldo wants to be paid £150,000 per week. That means the club would have to sell 2.6 million copies of its official magazine Inside United just to pay his annual wages.
So, as the world’s financial woes deepen, how are clubs such as Man Utd making fans part with their hard earned cash to pay the wage bill? It’s taken a while, but the top clubs and now taking mobile campaigns more seriously than ever before. And it’s a trend that’s likely to increase in the years ahead.
Why? It’s a fundamental marketing principle – the company that gets closest to the consumer gets the biggest bite of the apple. And apart from his or her clothes, what’s closest to the fan? A mobile phone. Everyone’s got one, and unlike a PC, it’s rarely switched off. You don’t have to cut down a tree either to send a message to fans.
Mobile messaging specialist Mediaburst is one company that’s helping clubs to promote merchandise deals, sell half-season tickets, and increase gates at all important home games directly to fans. Increasingly, it is text services that are seen as a vehicle for clubs to better communicate and interact with fans.
We caught up with Mediaburst’s managing director, Gary Bury, at the recent Northwest Football Award 2008 event. The company’s text services were used by organisers Out There Events to let over 450 club directors, managers, sponsors and personalities attending the event use their mobiles and vote live for the player they believed should win the Goal of the Year Award, sponsored by Brown Shipley.
Gary explains: “Clearly, clubs are looking to enhance their marketing initiatives to move closer and create more personalised relationships with their fans, and mobile is the obvious choice. The same applies to corporate hospitality – it makes more sense to scrap paper invitations in favour of a mobile solution. These are the kind of solutions that clubs want to explore and that’s why Mediaburst is launching MMS products this month, so that clubs can send information in a rich format including video, images, animation, and sound to opt-in fans’ mobiles.”
Gary also believes that sending text alerts to fans will become a significant money earner for clubs going forward. “Team news, signings – these are the areas that the clubs obviously know about first. And fans are willing to pay to know these things. Take Man Utd as an example. The club charges fans 25p per alert, and it has millions of fans around the world. The impact of selling news alerts on the bottom line could be massive.”