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Marketing
Good post Andy. I would like to make a few points.
1) Currently, FIRST's main marketing campaign is the Chairman's Award. A big portion of the Chairman's Award is "spreading the good word of FIRST" (read: marketing FIRST). One of the reasons that I'm not a huge Chairman's Award supporter on our team (that is, I typically vote against our team putting forth any big effort to win the award) is because I find it kind of fishy that FIRST's "biggest award" is also the one that gets them free marketing. Maybe I'm too cynical. (Before you send flames, I'm a big supporter of FIRST in general, but that doesn't mean I have to like everything they do.)
2) I've stated this before, but FIRST needs to buy air time to show the competition. CART, the IRL, the American LeMans Series, Trans Am Series, and virtually all other racing series that aren't NASCAR or F1 get their TV time by buying time slots. The series then pays for the time slot by selling their own advertising and keeping the money. It's more or less a giant infomercial. FIRST would be wise to take their lead, buy the time, and then sell the ad space. Like Andy said, I'm sure Motorola, Delphi, GM, and others would likely buy the space. Without this approach, I don't know if FIRST is going to be able to convince a network that it should show the competitions. If they buy the time and the ratings are good, the networks might then decide to take over. Without a time buy, I don't think FIRST has a very good chance of getting any TV exposure.
3) Convince sponsors to do cross-marketing. For example, Honda makes engines and sponsors teams/races on the CART racing series (has anyone noticed that I'm a racing fan?). Honda then indirectly promotes CART by having their drivers and cars in some TV commercials (the latest one getting a lot of air time shows Michael Andretti's Motorola sponsored car and the dialogue, "Will we win? Hopefully. Will we finsish? Probably. Will we learn? Definitely". The reason that they cross market the CART series is that the more people that watch CART races, the more valuable their team sponsorships are (since there are more people seeing their engines in action). FIRST needs to convince more of its sponsors to also promote FIRST in the hopes that as FIRST grows, their sponsorships become more valuable (i.e. the money they spend on sponsorships will reach more people). The only cross marketing I know is National Beverage, and I still haven't seen that yet.
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