In my last post, Be digital or die , I talked about the scale of the change that’s taking place across society. How the next generation of consumers is totally ignoring traditional media power structures and building their own way to approach the world.
Today, I’m going to talk about my experiments in this new world. While I come from a traditional marketing background, I have access to a fantastic resource in my two sons, who have a totally different perspective to me. With their help, I’m able to try out different things – and share the results with you.
Both of my boys are tennis players, and they’re pretty good – Felix (12) was an AEGON Future Star player in 2013, 2014 and 2015, while Lucian (10) is consistently one of the highest ranked junior tennis players in Great Britain.
The traditional way that they’d build that talent into a career would be to apply for grants and seek sponsorship. Because competing at an international level is expensive. Not only do professionals need to fund their own travel and living costs, they also need to find the cash to pay for an entire team. To establish an equal playing field, a young tennis talent needs to find more than US$160,000 per year – which is why only 1.8 percent of all professional male tennis players turned a profit in 2013.
The grants that are available are limited and, as you probably expect, incredibly competitive. Then there’s sponsorship, but sponsorship contracts are concentrated more and more at the top of the sport – in 2014, the top one percent of male players received 62 percent of the available price money pool.
So I want to try something different – I don’t want my boys to have to go begging and scraping for cash from sponsors. Instead, we’re planning to see whether it’s possible for them to become the first self-funded junior tennis players in the world.
Over the last 18 months, under the startup brand tennis Brothers they’ve already built up a substantial online following. We now have more than 48,000 followers across various social media platforms, including 37,000 on Instagram.
On a daily basis we get more than 1,000 engagements in the form of views, likes and comments. That following has been built up with zero spending on any kind of advertising or sponsored content – just original, authentic and entertaining stories.
We’re hoping to use that following to fund the boys’ sporting activities in 2016 and beyond, and we’re going to do it in a variety of ways.
First, we’re launching a crowdfunding exercise on PledgeSports – a platform that lets athletes, teams, clubs and sports brands raise money. In return for contributions, fans and brands get different rewards based on their contributions – from a shout-out on Twitter to a full media campaign executed through our Tennis Brothers fanbase.
A crowdfunding campaign for an athlete, however, is just one element within a holistic self-funding strategy that everyone gets something out of. The fans get authentic stories, the feeling of part of a journey, and the ability to actively engage and react daily with new developments in an athlete’s life. Brands get the opportunity to tap into an existing community, joining the dialogue alongside the athletes and becoming part of the “family”, while increasing sales, revenue streams and their own social engagements. They’re seen as helping, not intruding. The athletes get to further their careers.
There are some fascinating insights we can take from this. Young audiences are fed up of being “talked at” or “sold to”, and have begun to ignore traditional marketing approaches. Instead, online influencers are increasingly holding the power to influence purchasing decisions – and more and more corporations are waking up to the fact that they need to fundamentally change the way they engage with that demographic. My boys, for example, are influential to their audience of 48,000 followers.
To be clear here – this isn’t about taking corporate cash for athletes to parrot marketing messages. It’s about helping brands to meaningfully engage with an audience. The trust that an athlete’s fans have is valuable and can be easily lost if bad decisions are made. Getting the balance right is hard- but the payoff is enormous.
So that’s how we’re approaching this new world. I’ll keep you updated on our unique experiment and its results. With any luck, we’ll be able to come up with a strategy that fits seamlessly into what the world is becoming, and share with you the details of every step along the way.
