To sports publishers: What (sponsors) don’t know can help you

Sometimes Web marketing is as much about research as it is about direct selling.

A recent post on Paid Content. org http://www.paidcontent.org/35-advertisers-paying-$100,000-$200,000-quarterly-for-ABC-broadband describes a program in which 35 national advertisers are paying $100,000 to $200,000 (per quarter) to be a part of a new ABC broadband video program.

One prominent national advertiser is quoted as saying she bought into an ABC Broadband video project as a means to learn what consumers will watch.

NFL teams are Web publishers. We attract audiences. These audiences are passionate about the content we publish. Advertisers / sponsors want to reach these audiences in order to sell products, so sponsors will give us money to place ads on our sites.

But our audiences are also valuable (to advertisers) on the research front. NFL fans are very active. (We can use Web analytics tools to show sponsors which content is most popular with our fans); And fans are highly interactive whenever the teams ask questions. (Last season we ran a register to win ticket promo and folded 4 research questions into the entry form. We collected 15,000 surveys overnight, with registrants from all 50 states). Not only did we grow our team database, we gained significant marketing insights. Sponsors will pay for this information.

As long as the on-line sponsor model is evolving, large advertisers should make investments in NFL sites - if for no other reason than to learn more about NFL fans – their brand preferences, and on-line behavior. But we’ve gotta teach them to use us this way.