My advice to sports publicists as the World Cup draws near.
Gaining earned positive media for promotional programs has always been difficult. I’m referring to programs by sports marketing publicists whose clients are “official sponsors” of mega sports events. That’s because sports writers are interested in what’s happening on the playing fields and not what the field generals who craft promotional campaigns devise.
Soon, the pressure of sports marketing publicists to deliver will reach crescendo proportions as the FIFA World Cup begins, The schedule of the FIFA World Cup, which will be held between June 11 and 19, offers numerous opportunities for creative national and international publicity campaigns, as the games will be played in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
I have been in such situations numerous times during my long career as a sports marketing guru, and I succeeded in earning the media coverage that sponsors want by using a strategy that seems out of bounds for sports marketing campaigns – ignoring sports writers.
One of the problems with many sports marketing publicists, as the sports marketing guru at two major PR agencies before establishing my consultancy, was their tunnel vision. All they targeted were sports journalists. What I believe is necessary for success when hawking promotional stories is for sports publicists to shed their blinders and stop targeting sports writers, because, with rare exception, those stories end up in trade publications or waste baskets.
Graphic courtesy Global Brands Magazine
Perhaps because I was a reporter and editor at New York City dailies and two wire services before jumping the fence to the public relations side of the communications business as newspapers failed, I knew that sports writers were tasked with writing stories about hits, runs, and errors, etc. There was little space on sports pages for clients’ sports marketing stories.
In addition, many sports editors thought that marketing stories were too commercial for their pages and were of little interest to sports fans. Editors considered promotional stories as “inside baseball” information, interesting only to those in the public relations, marketing, and advertising business. And they were correct 99.9% of the time. (Today, because of the 24/7 news cycles, sports writers are busier than ever providing content for print publications and their websites, making it more difficult than ever for sports marketing publicists to plead their cases.)
Unless publicists have a true hard news story to pitch, which is hardly ever, I advise playing the entire journalistic field instead of targeting sports writers. That’s my strategy for “official sponsors” stories and for clients wanting a sports tie-in without spending the big bucks it takes to become an “official sponsor.”
Here are just a few examples that resulted in major print and TV publicity for clients I represented.
• For a health client, I arranged for a major league baseball trainer to appear at a seminar attended by newspaper and magazine health writers. He demonstrated the proper way to prepare before undertaking a strenuous exercise routine and explained how this preparation can reduce the risk of injury.
• For a manufacturer of building materials, I arranged TV and print interviews for a retired Olympic champion to discuss how equipment has changed over the years, targeting lifestyle, technology, business, and non-support’s beat reporters with data specific to each segment of the media.
• For a manufacturer of handballs, I had a handball player publicly challenge a team consisting of any two professional athletes, because he said the conditioning needed to be a professional handball player would make him unbeatable. The challenge was accepted by two National Football League players who read about it, and the match ended in a win for the handball player and was covered by major print outlets and the Today Show.
• I used retired athletes for many clients, nostalgia being a big part of sports, to be interviewed by sports feature writers, ignoring the day-to-day beat writers. But they had to be former athletes who had been out of the spotlight for many years and be a natural fit for the program, giving it credibility. For a baseball program, I would use only former baseball players; for an Olympic program, I would use only former Olympic champions. Those are just two of multiple examples.
Importantly, I went against the public-relations grain and never used the “athletes of the day” for publicity for a good reason: they are available to the media every day, and when interviewed, they’re asked about current happenings.
The media craze is sure to occur in the U.S. because World Cup competitions will take place in multiple U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle. So, what would I do if I were strategizing a sponsoring brand’s publicity outreach? I would craft a four-pronged strategy.
1) I would engage a well-known soccer player and arrange interviews explaining the ABC’s of the game and target non-sports media.
2) I would arrange soccer clinics for youngsters featuring a well-known soccer player who would provide the instructions.
3) As youth soccer grows, so do lateral ankle sprains, ACL tears, hamstring strains, groin pulls, and concussion injuries associated with the sport. Thus, I would consult a sports physician and arrange interviews to discuss how best to avoid these injuries, which some can lessen with proper physical conditioning, and what to do if someone is injured.
4) I would arrange interviews with business journalists for high-level brand executives during which he/she would explain why sports sponsorships are an important part of the marketing strategy.
Graphic courtesy Marriott
Additionally, I would provide all spokespersons with a leave-behind sheet of quotes from brand executives, along with their contact information, explaining why they are sponsoring the World Cup and any publicity programs associated with it.
To add an out-of-the-box touch, instead of using one former athlete as a publicity spokesperson, I would use three—one each from the countries hosting World Cup games, that is, from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. I would introduce them at a press conference prior to the beginning of competition and then make them available for press interviews with media in their respective countries throughout the tournament,
My advice to sports publicists is not to limit thinking to the beat sports reporters whose bylines appear in newspapers daily or to the TV sportscasters on daily news programs. There’s more non-support media to target than there are sports media, and there isn’t a sports marketing program that can’t be tailored to fit various sections of a print or TV outlet.
