Bonding With Fans Who Can't Get Enough.

Bonding With Fans Who Can’t Get Enough

(Source - NYTimes.com)

THE Pittsburgh Penguins, who had a major draw in their young center Sidney Crosby, were looking for an innovative marketing approach to spring back from recent National Hockey League troubles. Fan morale by 2008 had been dampened by the team’s loss in the Stanley Cup finals to the Detroit Red Wings that year and by the 2004-5 N.H.L. lockout when the season was canceled after management and the players union could not agree on a contract. The Penguins decided to help rebuild ties with fans via cellphone, a campaign that the team says has resulted in a fivefold increase in sign-ups for its mobile fan club. That response prompted the team to offer more mobile options for its coming season in its new arena. “We did a lot of research, including focus groups, online surveys and arena surveys to see how we could best reach fans season round,” said Jeremy Zimmer, the team’s director of new media. The research helped the team focus on its fans who agreed to be contacted by cellphone, about one-fifth of its 1.5 million person fan base; the team defines its base as those who have watched, attended or listened by radio to at least one Penguins game in the last year, Mr. Zimmer said.

The Penguins hired Vibes Media, a Chicago mobile marketing company, to help it create the Pens Mobile Club, where fans could receive news, recaps and commercial offers — including free tickets from Chevrolet to the Pittsburgh auto show and discounts on Coors Light beer at local bars — on their mobile phones. The result has been an increase in club members to 72,440, up from 14,000 in the 2008-9 season, the team announced last month. Like the Penguins, more sports teams and leagues are communicating with fans intensively by mobile devices, largely because they are “incredibly passionate and identify with their teams so they are accepting of receiving a lot of information,” said Ben Davis, a founder of San Francisco-based Phizzle, which works with clients like the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers, which sends 1.5 million text messages each month — including scores, statistics, news and other updates — to its mobile subscribers.

The Cavaliers’ mobile alert program also delivers fan-requested content, like game schedules and team statistics, Mr. Davis said. The team partners with companies like the roast beef sandwich chain Arby’s for enter-to-win-via-text contests where winners — of a free meal or a coupon — are chosen randomly. Phizzle also works on mobile marketing with the National Hockey League’s San Jose Sharks and the Nashville Predators, the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, and with Madison Square Garden — where the New York Knicks and the Rangers play — this fall. In the 2009-10 season, N.B.A. Mobile, which has 100 mobile applications, had more than 1.7 million downloads, according to figures from N.B.A. Digital. The N.H.L. has started a mobile site, m.nhl.com, which displays live game scores, and summaries and recaps of the scoring for completed games. Teams also are mindful that some two billion tickets — for sports and other events — are projected to be purchased via mobile devices this year, and rise to 15 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research, which tracks mobile commerce and marketing.

“Mobile has a lot of tentacles, from building a database of fans, reaching commercial sponsors, selling tickets and merchandising,” said Michael Falato, vice president of sales for Txtstation, an Austin, Tex., mobile marketing company that works with sports teams like the Miami Dolphins of the National Football League. Over the last two seasons, the Dolphins’ text club more than quadrupled its initial 8,000 membership, he said. Fans can text — but not call — in questions and comments to the team’s daily afternoon radio show, or, for example, text in a choice for most valuable player during the football season. And texts are tied to prizes like free tickets and other awards like upgraded stadium seating, said Wayne Partello, the Dolphins’ senior director of content and creative. Mobile marketing raises a team’s public profile and is especially valuable for collecting data on fans, sports marketing experts say. That data can later be tied to commercial deals that benefit the team, like signing up subscribers to cellular carriers like Verizon or AT&T — which several teams, including the Penguins and the Dolphins, do.

“It’s all about selling eyeballs, and mobile brings it down to the individual level, “ said Stephen R. McDaniel, associate professor of sports marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Maryland. This is a win for sports organizations, he said, “because the team is building and maintaining fans, and, at the same time, it is enhancing its second revenue stream that comes from sponsorships and promotions.” No team “has the silver bullet,” said Jack Philbin, president of Vibes Media, which also helped the Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks last season add 30,000 fans to their mobile database. But, “this is the most intimate device we can use.” Last season, the Penguins increased its number of mobile fans by teaming up with Delta Air Lines in a text contest in which fans could enter a random drawing to win two plane tickets from Pittsburgh to Paris. The campaign was promoted online and in radio spots as well as at games, and in two weeks, the team attracted 34,000 entries. Of those, more than 3,000 joined the Pens Mobile Club.

The Penguins also have iPhone and Android applications, and a BlackBerry app is in the works. The apps offer news, archived video, game schedules, statistics and standings and the ability to follow Twitter conversations about the team. Other teams, including the Dolphins, Baltimore Orioles, the Chicago White Sox and the Washington Capitals, also use Twitter to give fans the latest news. When the Penguins play this fall, those seated in the new 18,000-seat Consol Energy Center will be able to connect, via cellphone, with the Yinzcam Mobile video system, a pilot project with nearby Carnegie Mellon University. The system allows those in the arena to simultaneously watch the game from six angles. They also will be able to see game statistics, roster and other information, and view instant replay, accompanied by in-phone ads from the sponsor, Verizon — but only in the arena. During intermissions while the ice is being resurfaced, ticket holders will be able to send text messages that will appear on the scoreboard, vote for the best player and receive real-time game statistics, Mr. Zimmer said. The Penguins system will also allow tracking of which seating section has the highest amount of texting, and fans sitting in postgame traffic will be able to text in comments and questions to the Penguins call-in radio show, he said.

In the Pittsburgh area, the Penguins mobile effort is focusing on more than 100,000 fans ages 21 to 24. Students often stood in line for hours to buy discounted tickets and were turned away when the game was sold out, Mr. Zimmer said. So the team worked with the apparel company American Eagle Outfitters to set up the American Eagle Student Rush Club, whose 15,500 members can be notified by cellphone texts about ticket availability — or absence of tickets when a home game is sold out. Each alert, which carries “AE Student Rush” across the top, also includes a promotional offer like the one recently that said the 4,023rd student to reply would win four free tickets. The Penguins are having some fun as well. Recently the team notified, by cellphone, its Rush Club members about a “student flush” day. The Penguins promised the first 400 students a T-shirt and an early look at the new arena if they showed up to help test the Consol Energy Center’s sanitation system. One day in early June, the students converged and simultaneously flushed all the arena’s toilets “so we could see if everything worked,” Mr. Zimmer said with a laugh.

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