Any brand wondering about how D2C mobile content services are going to work could do well to take a look at what UK premiership football clubs have been doing over the past year, as “the beautiful game” is offering a real insight in to how the off-portal model can work.Michael Tomlins, commercial director of Infomedia, told me earlier this month at  World Telemedia in Prague that premiership football clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool (all Infomedia clients) typically send out some 1.2 million SMS to fans a year, with a spectacularly high ‘read rate’. 

Moreover, fans are, on average, looking at a staggering 14 WAP pages each time they log on to the mobile sites of these clubs. And, perhaps most interestingly, buy far more football related content from their team portal than from any mobile network operator platform. If ever there was a demonstration of how a brand, rather than the network operator, owns the mobile consumer, it is in mobile football sites.

Football clubs have two huge advantages when it comes to offering D2C mobile services: they come ready wrapped with a huge, loyal audience in the shape of their fans and they have an ongoing and almost inexhaustible supply of content that their audience will pay for.

The simple thing is that, with such a wealth of users – who are very unlikely to churn - and access to content ranging from simple SMS news updates, through ringtones, logos, wallpapers, photos and clips, right up to full blown video interviews with players and even buying a replica shirt through a mobile commerce site, football clubs own the value chain.

Smaller football clubs are also beginning to dip their toes in the mobile market. This week, interactive services provider MIG in the UK signed a deal with Portsmouth Football Club to run a text-based loyalty scheme for the club and its fans.

The scheme will reward loyal fans by giving them the opportunity to win prizes and redeem discounts on official merchandise with a unique PIN code at the club’s store when they text an official shortcode.This simple service allows the club to market direct to its fans, keep them loyal and offer them ‘deals’, which keep them coming back. And, as Paul Bell, Portsmouth FC’s , Commercial and Marketing Director points out, the club gets to keep its fans happy - regardless of its record on the pitch – while generating valuable repeat traffic and even more valuable customer data – data which is hugely valuable to the club, MIG, the network operators and third parties.

The key thing now is whether this ‘closed user group’ model that works so well around football clubs can work elsewhere in the mobile space. Other sports teams seem a highly likely target as they offer the same loyal audience and content as football. But what of other brands in other markets? While someone like Coca Cola has a huge customer base, are they loyal enough to facilitate a similar buy in to a mobile service? While football clubs may have the MNOs concerned that they may be reduced to delivery pipes when it comes to soccer content, there may be someway to go before this can be translated across all brands. But the rules of the game have  changed…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Content, Personalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.