• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, August 2, 2007

Capturing the attention of this captive audience is no walk in the park

Sports fans, especially those who indulge their jones online, are an alternately accepting and ornery lot. They happily consume everything from news blurbs to video highlights, from columns to characters. But while they recognize that advertising pays the bills, they still become surly whenever a 30-second marketing message interrupts an event's key moments or comparable content consumption.

I'm one of them. I "own" fantasy baseball, football and basketball teams and track them in real time, which means 19 hours of computer fun every Sunday between September and January. I plunk down bucks for "insider" subscriptions and spend more time perusing Pete Abraham's blog than I do with friends and family. I am, for lack of a more elegant sobriquet, an online sports nerd.

And I'm not alone. As my peers and I have been told more times than you can imagine, marketers find my demographic more desirable than pancakes and butterscotch combined. We're young and well-educated, spend hours online every day and eagerly embrace the latest technology. We earn gobs of cash - me not included - and are happy to spend it on trifles, tchotchkes or anything else that catches our eye. Remember us, sweet marketers? You've seen pictures.

At the same time, online marketers face a tough task in capturing our attention for more than a few fleeting seconds. But every little bit that registers generates crucial credibility among this audience. Here are a few tips to consider:

> Let the fans yell: The beauty of sports, both offline and on, is the banter that surrounds it. Some fans may wholeheartedly believe that the Red Sox blowing a two-run lead with two outs in the ninth inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series was a far bigger choke than the Yankees blowing a three-game lead in the 2004 American League Championship series; other fans, who are all out of their minds, might disagree.

Wherever you stand on that issue, online social networks centered on sports have barely tapped their own potential. "Social networks have been around for years, in the form of guys watching and discussing games at bars. They just haven't been online," says Yun-Oh Whang, assistant professor of marketing at Kansas State University's College of Business.

A few months ago, the Portland Trail Blazers became the first professional sports franchise to launch its own social network (the National Hockey League debuted a league-wide one). "We wanted to give fans the ability to profile themselves and tell why they're a Trail Blazers fan," says Dan Harbison, the team's Internet marketing manager. At iamatrailblazersfan.com, fans can discuss a game or explore volunteering opportunities with Hands On Greater Portland. A "Blazers Maniac" season-ticket package exclusive to members sold out quickly, prompting the team to create a second one.

Marketers haven't yet invaded the space - as of late June, the Blazers were negotiating with a handful of potential title sponsors - but Harbison believes a brand presence within social networks could soon provide much more bang for the buck than the usual banner ads.

But the advice to let fans yell comes with the following caveat ...

> Be prepared to encounter some hostility: SportsWar, a network of college-sports communities, specializes in the "spirited" back-and-forth that makes advertisers' knees tremble. CEO and president Trey Copeland says fans are now willing to tolerate marketers' presence in heretofore off-limits communities - so long as they don't overstep their bounds.

SportsWar's advertisers, which include Lowe's, refrain from what Copeland calls "blasting everybody with messages," and have no problem stomaching the content. "Marketers should probably get used to this," he says, stressing that sports communities aren't a fit for everybody. Adelphia was an advertiser with SportsWar for a stretch, but backed away because "they were used to advertising at people and not hearing anything about it."

> Give them extra access, preferably for free: A savvy lot, we sports fans are quite aware of what can be found on the leading sports sites and blogs. What we can't access without assistance, however, is access to league-owned audio and video.

Which is why a recent Nike program pegged to the launch of the Air Force 25 shoe captured the attention of the disciples like few others. Wieden + Kennedy, Nike's longstanding ad partner, put outtakes from the broadcast commercial online and let users create their own videos, complete with music it supplied.

"We gave people the ability to play God," jokes Raina Kumra, W+K's director of digital strategies.

She believes the program caught on with fans and non-fans alike because it gave them the ability to flex their creative muscles. Also, the program was the main event, as opposed to the marketing content often seen flittering on the top or sides of the screen. "If the banner or other advertising that's going on is in direct competition with the content, it's going to be ignored," Kumra says flatly.

>Engage fans' creativity: Give us something to do while we're marooned at work. The Nike campaign certainly qualifies, as does a recent Wendy's/ESPN program coordinated by online interaction specialists Oddcast. The "Voice of the Fan" campaign allowed fans to produce something akin to a sports news segment of their own. They could create talking avatars, put all sorts of rants and raves in their mouths and send them to friends via e-mail.

Oddcast CEO Adi Sideman considers this just the tip of the iceberg. "The future is putting fans into more dramatic situations online - 'I'm for one team, you're for another, let's argue and have the whole world listen,' " he says. Sideman envisions a campaign that allows users to, say, do their own highlight voiceovers or battle in trivia rooms. "Look at that Verizon 'Action Hero' campaign, where your photo transforms into a 3-D character that can play in a video game. You're telling me sports fans wouldn't flip for a program like that?"

>Don't ask too much: Multiple co-double-reverse-registration with e-mail confirmation gives this audience migraines. We're the short-attention-span generation, remember? The more hoops you make us jump through, the fewer of us will play along.

And steer clear of our inboxes, which are so littered with team, league and non-sports-related marketing detritus that we rarely bother to open such missives anymore. That, in fact, was a primary reason the Trail Blazers decided to go the social-network route: the team had witnessed a steady decline in its open rates. "E-mail isn't dying, but it's becoming a lot more complicated to cut through all the junk," Harbison says.