Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

Let’s start the new year with a fresh definition of Web 2.0.

“…..Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by harnessing collective intelligence, openness, and network effects.”

I got this from Amol Dalvi who got if from O’Reilly

I don’t mean to get too deep or philosophical here, but I’ve got something on my mind as we look forward to the new year. Actually, the main thing on my mind is the imminent birth of our fifth child which will likely occur tomorrow!! Pray for us!

Also on my mind is the state of the sports marketing business as we move deeper into Web 2.0. Even as the big media sites (like ESPN) keep getting bigger, I think we will come to realize that BIG MEDIA alone does not make a market. Now that sports fans can write their own content and form their own communities, Web publishers including the largest sites are nothing more than participants in a larger ecosystem. (Notice I didn’t say “food chain”). Along with big media, other participants in sports 2.0 ecosystem include: teams, leagues, sponsors, applications providers and more.

I’m hoping we can put aside our old ways - where sponsors think that sports teams and Web publishers are nothing but commodity media channels - where CPM for banner ads is the only question on the planner’s lips - where we all realize that things have changed and that the pace of change is accelerating…and that we need to communicate consistently with eachother in order to figure out the best ways to do business in this new environment.

Wikipedia does a nice (if too scientific) job of defining the term ecosystem (read it here).

Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms are continually engaged in a set of relationships with every other element constituting the environment in which they exist. The human ecosystem concept is then grounded in the deconstruction of the human/nature dichotomy, and the emergent premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope.

Ecosystems can be bounded and discussed with tremendous variety of scope, and describe any situation where there is relationship between organisms and their environment. A system as small as a household or university, or as large as a nation state, may then be suitably discussed as a human ecosystem.

We humans need CONTEXT and MODELS in order to understand a topic - or at least communicate with one another about a particular subject. So we use words like “industry” and “business model”, “supply chain” even “space” to refer to a general area of activity where various participants (people, companies, associations, government) work in some sort of symbiotic or competitive way.

I tend to like the word “Ecosystem” because it acknowledges the importance of the smallest and the largest players in any particular space. Not sure if “ecosystem” is the best way to describe the online sports marketing realm, but I do think there are aspects of our business that look like an ecosystem.

I don’t have enough time in my life right now to dig deeply enough to articulate sports marketing ecosystem, but I do want to introduce the notion and perhaps hear from you on the subject. Certainly we have an environment (the Web) and we have organisms (fans and sponsors and publishers and application providers) and we have a whole set of areas withing the Web: ESPN, Fan Nation, Takkle, Colts.com, etc. where fans connect, create content and interact with professionally produced content.

I’m writing this post mainly to suggest that we need eachother. Web 2.0 is about openness, collective intelligence and network effects.

Big media (Web 1.0) in the industrial info age means centralized power, aggregated audiences and interuptive advertising. Big media in the digital info age means something else. Small is the new big, after all. And that’s what our new site is all about…SportsMarketing20.com