Nearly 90 percent of all U.S. companies polled in a new study will use part of their marketing budgets to advertise in new media like video games or virtual communities.
I picked that headline off a Reuters story. The stat comes from a survey done recently by the American Advertsing Federation.
It’s no secret that advertisers are looking to digital for new ways to reach target audiences (and spend their budgets). It’s also evident that every traditional media company (TV, radio, newspaper, magazine), and every digital media company (Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, etc is busy polishing their digital divisions to attract those dollars.
I wonder what all this is going to mean for the NFL?
I read a recent report from Paid Content from the NBA Technology Summit, which took place in Vegas over Allstar Weekend. While Rafit Ali was not allowed to divulge details of what he witnessed, he did offer highlights from the guest list which makde if fairly easy to figure out what they were discussing in Sin City:
Among those who participated: Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt; Mary Meeker; Turner’s Mark Lazarus, David Levy and Phil Kent; MTVN’s Denmark West; ESPN’s George Bodenheimer, Sean Bratches and John Skipper; Mark Cuban and more. Among those in attendance: Blake Krikorian, whose Sling Media continues to be a matter of great interest for sports and programming execs; Yahoo’s Scott Moore; Qualcomm’s Gina Lombardi and Dan Novak (Las Vegas is a test bed for MediaFlo so they could show off the service); a number of active NBA and WNBA players, and many more.
I think it’s fair to say the topics under discussion in the room and the hallways are just what you would expect from such a gathering. But I can also say the conversation has advanced considerably since the first summit I attended in 2003. One major change: a lot that was merely theoretical back then in terms of the ways technology would affect sports is actually happening.
While new programming possibibilities were apparently on center stage, ad dollars are clearly waiting in the wings. I am particularly interested in what these big guys are up to because we need to figure out ways to sell a higher percentage of our total inventory.
At the Colts we have more than doubled our digital ad revenues in the past 12 months, but we’ve done so almost entirely on the strength of local sponsors. We’ve successfully monetized our local, in-season page views, which amounts to just 20% of our total site traffic. It remains to be seen how we’ll get national advertisers intersested in buying our “national” inventory. Seems to me the best way would be to network together with other teams and the league itself, and work some programming and advertising magic of our own.
