Case study: Matchday programmes enter the electronic age - May 2007  

Pregramme’s media director David Walmsley introduces a new electronic programme that marries content and technology to enhance the event experience for the fan in the stadium and create new revenue opportunities for their hosts.

When Liverpool Football Club (pictured right courtesy of Getty Images Sport/Gary M Prior) was crowned champion of England in 1988, the queue for admission to the match in which the team won the title stretched over halfway round Anfield more than three hours before kick-off and the famous Kop terrace was full to capacity with two hours still to go.
When Liverpool beat Chelsea in the 2006-07 Champions League semi-final at the same venue, players and commentators alike marvelled at the fact that the home crowd was present and in full voice 45 minutes before the game got under way.
The comparison shows how much our match-going habits have changed over the last two decades.
Growing interest in sport has made advance ticketing the norm for major events, the advent of all-seater stadia has eliminated the need to turn up hours in advance to secure a decent view, and the rising prices that have accompanied better facilities and soaring demand have altered the demographic make-up of the average crowd.

Communicating with fans

But what hasn’t really changed is the way we communicate with the fans in the stadium.
The fan in the armchair now has more means of consuming sport than he can shake a remote control at. But the fan in the stadium is still essentially limited to a printed match programme that has changed little since 1988, a big screen and the generalised WAP services they can access (expensively and often only intermittently) by mobile phone.
This is where the pregramme comes in – as an electronic programme available to spectators online in advance of the event and as a download to mobile phones for use on the day itself, offering them everything they need to get the most out of the event experience and creating new marketing and revenue opportunities for venues and properties.
The pregramme achieves this through a mix of content and technology unavailable from any other single source.
On the content side, it pulls together everything from team and event news to travel information, latest betting odds and expert opinion, alongside a range of interactive elements such as sweepstakes, voting systems and feedback forms.
In terms of technology, the content is delivered as a distinctive micro-website with a Java download version that runs on virtually all mobile phones.
The download costs pence and takes seconds to install, and enables the user to browse the content offline, thus eliminating the issues of network charges and connectivity associated with WAP. Updates are provided at specified intervals before, during and after the event, with handsets using the Symbian platform offering automatic alerts when new content is available.

Monetisation

So to complete the equation, content + technology = revenue. But how?
The pregramme creates marketing and revenue-generating opportunities through a number of routes. But what makes each of them work is the way in which its content and technology combine to create both the opportunity for the property to put its brand, its merchandising, its sponsors, commercial partners and licensees in its spectators’ pockets and the incentive for those spectators to interact with them.
That incentive comes from the content – practical, relevant, timely and credible.  By adding value to the event experience, pregramme content builds the user’s trust, making them more receptive to the commercial messages accompanying it.
The opportunity is created by the pregramme’s use of web and mobile technology, enabling a wide range of e-commerce and marketing applications – from mobile downloads, merchandise orders and information requests to advertising and sponsorship of the pregramme itself – and allowing these messages to be highly targeted as well.
Stadium audiences are more segmented than ever in terms of the prices they pay, the facilities they enjoy and in what they want from the event experience. Pregrammes can be created in multiple versions with content tailored to specific groups, linked in the longer term to mobile ticketing.
For example, hospitality guests and season ticket holders – i.e., occasional versus regular spectators – will not get the same benefit from the same content, while the property’s commercial objectives will also vary between these groups.

Hospitality and data mining

Pregrammes have particularly strong value for hospitality operations through their data-mining functions.  Rather than immediate revenue generation, the focus of a hospitality pregramme is far more on acquiring valuable information about who is attending and obtaining feedback on facilities and service from the broadest possible range of guests.
Admittedly, it’s still easier to ask a star player to autograph a match programme than a mobile phone, but the breadth of benefits available in a pregramme gives it an advantage over all other event communications: more portable and up to date than a printed programme, cheaper and more accessible than WAP, better targeted and more interactive than a big screen.

Pregramme Media is offering a free trial of the pregramme service to readers of Sport and Technology.  If you represent a club, league, governing body, sponsor or hospitality provider and would like to find out how pregrammes can work for your events, please email david@pregramme.co.uk or visit www.pregramme.co.uk

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