October 01, 2007
Brandweek Q&A With NHL VP John Collins
For the first time in a long time, I came away from reading a piece of copy about the NHL's branding and advertising strategy where I actually felt good about what I might see next.
I'm talking about a Q&A that Brandweek conducted with John Collins, the NHL's Senior Vice President for Business and Media. Here's what he had to say about the league's new advertising campaign:
The players are at the core of everything we’re doing, and this crop of up-and-coming stars led by Crosby and Ovechkin will be the focus. There is a heavy, graphic emphasis on the NHL shield. The key is about being authentic. Slowing the game down and celebrating the smaller moments is a real key to some of the things we are trying to do. As a comparison, I started in the NFL at NFL Films, and they have done a phenomenal job of slowing the game down so you see what happens at the line of scrimmage, you can look into the eyes of someone like [former all-pro linebacker] Mike Singletary. It’s getting fans a different view of the sport. The NHL’s greatest strength is speed, and sometimes that is used as its greatest weakness and the game is often accused of being too fast for television. So we took this opportunity to slow the game down. Like the face-off. We’re looking at it in a way that’s never been seen before. We don’t have a huge media budget, so we’re working with our national rights holders in the U.S. and Canada to give us inventory as part of the deal, plus we’ll be on all the regional networks.
How many times have we heard hockey fans complain that the only place that they see NHL advertising is while they're watching hockey games? Only just about every time the NHL rolls out a new campaign, right? Well, now you have your answer as to why the league does that -- they simply don't have the money, and instead rely on getting ad time on league broadcasts to air the spots.
Of course, the other side of that equation is the "why" behind the fact that the NHL has no advertising budget. It's a "why" we covered in this morning's edition of The Ice Sheet -- because the vast majority of NHL revenues are generated at the local level, there simply isn't any way to support the sort of national ad buy everyone would like to see in order to win the league some new fans.
Which leads me to another conclusion: Instead of trying to replicate the best in class functions that we see in other sports, why not seek to work with those best practice functions that lead their respective industries?
What am I talking about? Why shouldn't the NHL outsource a piece of their marketing/advertising function to organizations like NFL Films and MLB Advanced Media? We can already see from the above quote as well as the debut of NHL TV that the league is doing its level best to replicate the success of other major sports. So why not just import that best in breed talent in order to get the job done?
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Eric, thanks for covering this topic. It is very complex yet maddening as to how the NHL can't market one of the best games in the world. The cookie-cutter approach does not work in the real world, so why should it work in the NHL? I've always thought that the NHL has 30 different markets, not a monolithic one.
Here in Columbus, we have a top-notch B-school (Fisher College) and you would think that our local NHL franchise would offer some internships in order to pick the brains of the brightest marketeers out there and learn about the demographic that they need to reach.
Please keep covering off-ice topics like this.
Posted by:
at October 2, 2007 08:20 PM
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