Profiting from the team Website – Part 1 of 5

I recently wrote a piece for the “Team Marketing Report” newsletter. I’ve broken it into 5 parts. Here’s the first

1. Is there a better way to price advertising on a team’s Web site?

For the Colts the answer is “yes.” But let’s be clear on terminology. There’s a difference between “advertising” and “sponsorship”. Sponsors are partners with the team. They support team programs and look to differentiate themselves in the marketplace through a clear and relevant association with the team. Advertisers are different. Advertisers buy media as a means of distributing a message efficiently to a target audience. In the past we have not sold advertising. We have only sold sponsorships. On the Web, however, we are now beginning to experiment with both because we simply have more inventory than sponsors can possibly buy.

We divide our Website inventory into for basic levels: banner ads, sponsored content (standard), sponsored content (custom) and naming rights. Since you asked about advertising, I won’t talk too much about the sponsored content, even though that’s where the big money is in my opinion. Still, banner ads are the low hanging fruit in terms of quick revenue increases because they’re easy to package for sale.

So let’s talk about banner ads. Below you see banner from one of our sponsors.

The first strategic change we made was to adopt standard banner sizes on our Website. There’s an organization called the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB.net) which publishes the sizes of these units. The AT&T banner above is called a “Leaderboard” in IAB parlance. It measures 728 x 90 (pixels) and is just one of several IAB banner sizes. The IAB standard has been widely embraced across the Web. We adopted this standard for banner positions on our site to make it easier for sponsors and advertisers to do business with us.

We follow a fairly straightforward Cost Per Thousand (CPM) impressions method in pricing our Web inventory. We build pricing based the number of page views (i.e. impressions) a particular banner gets. For our sponsor sales staff, we package our banner positions in week long flights – so that our home page banner positions can be sold almost like 1-game sponsorships. This makes it much easier for the sales guys and the sponsors who are not accustomed to buying the Web and who are used to buying season long programs.

Finally, we reduced the number of banner positions. We did this or a couple of reasons. First, we wanted to clean up the look of or home page so that users would find it more appealing and have an easier time navigating to the content they want to consume. This will drive more traffic, which is good for sponsors and advertisers alike. In addition, fewer ad positions mean that each position is worth more. Sponsors would rather stand out on the page and it’s difficult to stand out if there are dozens of logos an offers competing for attention. With fewer ad positions, more site traffic and higher demand from sponsors, we can raise our rates.

Just for fun, here is an example of what we consider “standard sponsored content”. In this case, the sponsor is RCA and the content is our multimedia player.

This content is considered “standard” because we did not create it just for the sponsor. We would have a multimedia section regardless of sponsorship. You will see this content box on our home page. It shows the most recently updated videos and audio clips available on our site. When you click through to watch a video, it launches our media player, which is prominently sponsored by RCA.

In addition to “standard” content sponsorship, we also build “custom” content prorgrams as well. Here’s a good example of “custom content sponsorship”.

The “wireless” section is essentially a Cingular micro-site that gives Cingular the benefits of “co-branding” and actually leads people to purchase Colts ringtones and wallpaper directly from Cingular, and participate in other wireless promotions.

We call this a “custom” content section because we had to build it just for Cingular. Our internal staff did all the graphics and back end code. We also work with Cingular (and all the wireless carriers) to make sure our text messaging and video clips work properly with their systems. For another example of custom content, see our Meijer Tailgate section. In the future we will develop more and more custom content sections.

As for “naming rights”, that is a big idea. Someday (I predict) there will a sponsor who looks at a team website much like Lucas Oil looks at our stadium and says “I want people to think of my brand EVERY TIME they visit colts.com,” and plunks their name on it simply for the brand exposure. With stadium naming rights worth over $6 million per year, then naming rights for the Web site could be worth at least $2 million. Some people think I’m crazy, but hey, I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I??