You don’t have to live in Indy to be a Colts fan anymore

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who reads the research.

Our fan base (Americans 12+ who say the Colts are their favorite NFL team) has grown from 2 million to 6 million over the past few years. The areas of fastest growth are outside the state of Indiana. And on the Web, 75% of our traffic (about 1 million uniques per month) comes from outside our home state. Is anyone else getting excited about these numbers!?

If we’re thinking like a football team, we may not care too much about these statistics. So what if we have 6 million fans? We only have 55,000 seats in our stadium, and that’s how we make our money – monetizing STADIUM traffic with local fans and local sponsors. In fact, only 250,000 uniques will attend a Colts game at the RCA Dome in a given season. That’s our world and we like it fine.

But the Web changes things dramatically. It gives us a low cost way to reach ALL of our fans, regardless of where they live. And it gives our sponsors the same opportunity.

So, if we think like a MEDIA CHANNEL, then we recognize that our stadium audience (and even our radio audience) pales in comparison with our Web following. In fact, when it comes to reaching AVID Colts fans, not even ESPN can touch us! We beat them for reach and frequency to this highly targeted audience.

If you’re “America’s team,” then you get to say you’ve got more fans than anyone else. I say “so what” if you can’t measure your “revenue per fan”.

This is not a jab at the Cowboys. It’s a call to action for every team and every sponsor. Let’s see, 6 million fans…if we could figure out a way to get $10 from each, that would add up to…a revenue stream that would rival anything we’re generating locally; and if we keep winning, and our fan base continues to grow, and we maintain our reveue per fan, then our revenues would come to…a lot more money!

Best of all, when we connect with our entire fan base via the Web, we break out of the ”regional niche” and become a platform that makes sense for national sponsors. Our fans have purchasing power!

…the amazing thing is that we’ve never had this thought before because historically there was no way to reach these people let alone do business with them directly. Our team Website, Colts.com, changed all of that. But Colts.com has its limits. The 1 million monthly visitors to our site remain anonymous. To make hay out of this group, we need to gather more data. We need QUALITY traffic, not just QUANTITY.

Imagine you’re a big sponsor – like Chevy for example. With the Colts Fan Network, you can leverage your Colts sponsorship across the world through via our site. You know that 90% of the visitors are Colts fans, so your message is reaching its mark. Now take that same message, but swap the horseshoe for a blue star, and place that adjusted message in the Cowboys network pages. Repeat for the other 30 NFL teams. You’ve just connected your brand – not just to the NFL – but to each of the teams – and the teams are what fans care about most! And you’ve done it fairly efficiently.

Realizing this vision won’t be easy. Sponsors are guilty – just as teams are – of ”horse and buggy” thinking. When I talk to national sponsors about Colts.com they say things like “it’s too small” or “it’s a regional play.” Those statements make sense if they’re only seeing the local / stadium as the sum total of the Colts reach and influence over consumers.

If the Colts fan base were a city with 6 million residents, it would be one of the largest cities in the U.S. Only this “city” is 75% male, 65% 18-44, and 90% avid Colts fans. If that’s your target, which city do you want to buy? And do you really care if that city is spread out across the world? I’m a Colts fan. My neighbor in Indy is a Packers fan. But if you’re buying both team networks, then I’ll see your message in a Colts context and my neighbor will see it in Packers green. We may both buy Chevy’s for the same reason – because that’s what Colts fans (er Packers fans) do!

As we build the Colts Fan Network, we’re creating a platform to engage with our geographicaly dispersed base of fans. My hope is that other NFL teams will follow suit. In fact, we’re building the platform to make it easy for other teams to create their own networks and plug them into ours. Ultimately, this interconnected web of AVID NFL fans will grow much larger than our combined stadium audiences. And on top of that, we will know the names and addresses, preferences and clickstreams of these fans as never before. This data will give us a better chance to keep our stadiums full (through retention and acquisition marketing), and it will allow us to offer sponsors unprecedented direct marketing opportunities on-line.

Our fan base goes well beyond the stadium – and best of all for sponsors – television is no longer the only way to reach this far flung audience. In fact, the Web is more efficient…and happily it compliments TV very well (last year over 50% of avid NFL fans watched a game on TV while simultaneously surfing the Web). So sponsors can break out of their own “horse and buggy” mindset and approach sports marketing in a more enlightened way.

Is this making sense to anyone??