On the 13th and 14th of June YAK Agency will take part in the Sport and Digital Marketing Festival, the Italian event dedicated to Digital Marketing applied to sport. Marco Dalla Dea, Managing Partner & PR Director at YAK Agency, will be one of the speakers of the second day of training and updating. In particular, he will give a speech dedicated to Social Media & Sport, and he will share YAK Agency’s specialization in sport communication.
Here is the exclusive interview granted by Marco Dalla Dea to the Sport and Digital Marketing Festival.
Sport Digital Marketing Festival: a few words to describe your job.
Marco: YAK Agency is a communications agency specialized in Sport, Tourism and Retail. We have been working in sport for over 10 years, and we have collaborated to the Olympic Games in Rio 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016, in addition to many other events in 65 countries in the world. We offer integrated communication strategies - digital and traditional - and we put several tools at our customers’ disposal. We believe in specialization: you cannot do anything for everyone, so we have focused on our passions.
In our agency I follow above all sport clients and I deal in particular with strategies and public relations. I have a multidisciplinary approach: I am professional journalist and I teach advertising techniques at the University at the same time. I’ve been working with the international federations of Summer Olympic Games since 2005, which gives me an “insider’s point of view” on these issues.
In the last few years all this has resulted in a special focus on social media. At YAK Agency we believe that these tools need to be managed with an editorial approach: no one-off actions, constant quality in contents, building of brand awareness through posts, and conversion through ads.
SDMF: how do you see the social future of Sport Business?
Marco: We cannot speak about social media as something new anymore. I signed up for Facebook on the 8th of August 2008, the first day of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Ten years have passed since then, so I don’t think that we can consider social media as independent tools, enclaves of creativity, free from the logics of the system anymore.
The future - or better to say, the present - is integration. Integration of different distribution channels (with television, first of all). Integrations with technologies (like virtual reality and on court technologies). Editorial integration between different platforms. Integration with people’s lives: I am sure that the importance of actual events to create engagement will increase - above all in sport. Integration with the venues. And, of course, advertising integration. Advertisement, indeed, is the driving force of all that we are talking about. If an online service is free, it means that we and our data are the products, which are sold to the advertising industry. And advertising on social media will become more and more refined and precise, to extract value from each niche, a notably important concept in sport business.
SDMF: would you tell us a particular example of a notably brilliant, winning or amazing social media campaign that has struck you? In other words, a brief story of digital marketing applied to sport that is worth telling?
Marco: We have seen many brilliant campaigns in terms of creativity, results or application…we are spoilt for choice, so to remain impartial I’ll use as an example a campaign carried out by us. This is not a notably brilliant campaign. It is not striking. Maybe it is not even nice. It’s a small example, but it has taught us a lot and for this reason I would like to share it with you. I’ve chosen this example just because it reveals a lot about the value of niches in sport business and about the potential that social media have to use and give value to them and, in some cases, to create them.
After Rio 2016 one of our clients asked us to create a campaign to attract new fans of clay shooting. In this sport there are obvious barriers in the beginning: where to do it? How does it work? Do I need a license? Where to take the rifle? To whom can I ask? All these questions have very precise answers, and the Italian Federation make a great work to promote this sport. However, the potential target very ofter does not even ask these questions and people keep away from this sport.
Italy had just won many medals in this discipline in Rio. Through a campaign that integrated editorial contents on Facebook, search and social advertisement, an online booking engine to book free trials, and the organization of a series of events in several Italian regions, we brought some thousand people to register and try a new sport, and we did so in few months and with a very limited budget; with the necessary investment to buy some advertising pages on a national newspaper, we reached an across-the-board target all over Italy: people that passed from a click to a shooting range, rifle in their hand, to try a new sport. Many of them then decided to become effective members and new athletes to all effects.
The niche did exist, it was out there. It existed, although it did not know that yet. There were thousands of people interested in this sport, curious, ready to try, to “convert”, as we might say. Having prepared the strategy and the tools in the right way, the conversion funnel developed naturally, bringing to a better result that the client would have expected.
All this has taught us, or better to stay, has proven that every sport has an active target (people that have a passion for a sport or that are already doing it) and a potential target (curious people, ready to get involved, if they get the chance), which can already be found online, to work on to create value. This is the “magic” of social platforms.
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