Leagues for new times

The changes in media over the last two decades have diluted the power base of formerly monolithic entities like NBA and Major League Baseball abroad, and even basketball leagues like the PBA locally.

Granted, the audiences reached by today’s new medium have expanded, but exponentially, so has the competition. The television industry in the US for example, once dominating up to more than 90 percent of entertainment, crashed below 50 percent of its own national market share years ago.

In his celebrated book, “The Third Wave”, Alvin Toffler predicted the third revolution in the history of mankind. In 10 years of research for the book, he cites the previous turning points that caused society to leapfrog ahead at an accelerated rate. He listed first the Agricultural Revolution, where breakthroughs in both the method and volume of farming helped man’s population expand. Second came the Industrial Revolution, which revolved around the discovery of iron, allowing man to lay down railroads and travel greater distances faster, and construct taller buildings so more people could live in one place in greater concentration.

Toffler’s third wave was the Information Revolution. He correctly predicted that the advent of the Internet would cause another shift of power, from authorities like doctors, lawyers and professors to common men. One other effect of placing so much information in the hands of so many is the loss of censorship and control, as well. Now, every little misdeed of a public figure can be visible to millions of people instantly. The repercussions can be most greatly felt in the entertainment industry. Giant record store chains have collapsed.

There is also much less control over the sources of information.

It has been an accepted rule of thumb in marketing that it takes five times as much effort to attract a new customer than it does to retain an old one. In many sports leagues (the NBA and PBA included) the most famous players in the game get old, injured, less athletic and eventually retire, preserved only for all eternity in their video game incarnations. How do sports leagues hedge against this inevitability?

What have leagues tried to do and what have they done to fight for their audience share?

Invade new markets. Just as the NBA penetrated China with Houston Rockets-Sacramento Kings games in Shanghai and Beijing in 2004, the PBA steadily went outside Metro Manila, even holding the All-Star Game in Cebu almost a decade ago. New markets are not jaded, are still excitable, and want to learn more about the new attractions. They are more pliable, and more easily influenced, providing you get them into the coliseum or in front of the TV in the first place.

Use the new media. Social networking is the Goliath of today’s youth.

The penetration rate for Internet in the Philippines is supposedly at 70 percent, but it could be much higher because of the undocumented mom-and-pop Internet cafes around the country, which number in the thousands. Facebook, Twitter and newer sites offer access to tens of millions of people. The Web Marketing Association even has thorough qualifications for sites hoping to achieve recognition internationally.

Among their criteria are design, ease of use, interactivity, use of technology and innovation.

Instant access. The best sports sites in the world have live streaming, real-time updating of game scores, free downloads and other benefits that keep a browser trapped online. They try to offer every possible marketable permutation of their product, including the heavily-pushed merchandising component, a weakness of local sports leagues in the Philippines. Sports sites are competing with online versions of newspapers, radio and television programs, and even commentary sites and various discussion fora. They are, technically speaking, the center of their own new media competition.

Getting them younger. All major sports teams and leagues in the US have their own community outreach, fund-raising and educational programs. The NBA has its own reading program, as well, making sure they hook youngsters onto good habits, among which is watching the best basketball players in the world. What has been a challenge to sports leagues in the country (not to mention older products like soft drinks and presumably fattening alcoholic beverages) is bridging the generational gap. Young people want their entertainment faster, louder, more outrageous. How do you package a sport that essentially stays the same to suit their tastes?

Greater media penetration. The paradox is that, since everyone has access to the Worldwide Web, content providers like sports leagues are in a race with their own media partners. Who will scoop whom? Who gets the story first? And with increasing competition comes a sense of desperation. Even trivial information becomes important. And publicly maintained sites like Wikipedia even publish inaccurate or even false information. This writer has just chosen to ignore erroneous personal and professional information that has been online for a long time.

Local sponsors are attracted to investing in the Junior NBA program, for example, because

 it gets their ad onto the NBA’s site, which in turn rings an untold number of eyeballs to their product.

Rising prices. Fans are already privy to the fact that sports leagues (and even sportswear companies), report strong profits every year mainly because these are buoyed up by price increases inflicted upon consumers year in and year out. How much did concessionaires sell their popcorn, sodas and sandwiches 10 years ago? This insidiously shields the larger audience from the facts of smaller audiences and competition from other entertainment outlets. Not just that, formerly non-competing industries are now at loggerheads. Would you rather watch a movie, see a basketball game, have a snack, or buy load for your cellphone? The fastfood and recording industries have made substantial adjustments in prices just to avoid being run over by their own text-crazy constituents, and at least make it an even fight.

Text component. A new frontier, especially in the Philippines. Some data points out that the country is second only to China in terms of sheer volume of texts sent out on a daily basis, but we are number one per capita. How does one take advantage of that trend?

How do we get a piece of the disposable income that Filipinos have just given carte blanche to telecom companies? If you could get one subscriber to get one text per day from a sports information service, we are talking about tens of millions of pesos in revenue. Per day. And it does not even measure the amount of awareness attached to it.

There are so many challenges to anyone running a sports league not just in our country, but worldwide. How will they keep up and a league for new times?