I’ve been writing a lot lately about my desire to combinine inventory from nfl.com and the other 31 club sites to form a national, online ad network. I’ll keep beating that drum until somebody listens, but while I’m pounding, let’s not forget about local opportunities.
For the Colts, local means the state of Indiana on the macro side, and the Indianapolis DMA on the micro side. Indianapolis TV market holds about 1 million homes, and 2.6 million people, So we’re not talking about a huge market (25th largest DMA). The entire state population is just over 6 million, which ranks 14th nationally. On the business side, Indiana holds over 400,000 individual companies.
Map of Indiana Metro areas
Right now our marketing and sales resources only allow us to do business with a small fraction of these people and companies. To put it in perspective, we have only 57,000 seats in or stadium to offer to our 2.6 million Indy MSA residents. Consequently, only 280,000 unique individuals (Scarborough data) actually attend a game at the RCA Dome in any given season. Just one in 10 citizens actually buy tickets from the Colts in a given year.
On the business front, the numbers are even more stark. We do business with approximately 200 sponsors and 100 suite holders, most of which are businesses. We also have premium seat buyers who should be considered B2B clients. Add up all the companies we do business with and we might get to 5,000 unique companies. That’s just over 1% of the firms in the state.
While our Website sees only about 25% of its traffic from Indside Indiana, I’m fairly certain we’ll find that the citizens who don’t or can’t come to our games, and the owners and employees of companies who aren’t Colts customers will be represented there. We have connections to “the rest” of the market, and our Website is the primary channel.
To compliment our main site, our new social networking site is being designed to encourage localized groups to form across the world, and we’ll work especially hard to promote groups inside our state boundries. We’ll do this by partnering with local newspapers and radio stations who can effectively sponsor local chapters of our fan network.
Fans will learn about the fan network via Colts.com or through their local media, and when they visit the site and join the network, we can build up a database of fans in each town across the state. This database can be encouraged to buy Colts stuff, to be sure, but it can also be activated in the local community. We hope these fans will get together with eachother offline to watch games, and we hope they’ll work together to server their communities. We also expect that the local “groups” that form on our Website will allow local “sponsors” to engage with them. When this occurs, thousands of businesses who aren’t good prospects for a stadium sponsorship may be able to leverage a Colts affinity group to grow their businesses.
Localized fan groups and microsponsorships may seem like small potatoes. Any one of them may amount to just a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. But a few hundred dollars from a thousand micro sponsors could add up to significant revenue. This is money that we could not have reached before the Web came along, and if our plan works, most of it will come to us thanks to “self service” systems build inside My Colts Net.
Bottom line, our local strategy will seek to engage and monetize the “long tail” of our fan base, both consumers and companies. We will follow the Internet strategy of trying to “make a little from a lot,” which runs counter to our traditional strategy which is entirely focused on larger companies who can afford to buy significant sponsorships. If it works, we should produce revenue growth as we’ll continue serving the big companies while layering these micro sponsorships on top.
It won’t surprise me if larger sponsors take notice of our locally targeted databases once we have them built. It’s difficult to reach small town America online with any sort of personalized messages. My Colts Network will allow us to learn a lot about its members, and this knowledge will help us customize sponsor programs to Colts fans, wherever they live.
