Sport Industry Group

02 Feb 2012

Maeve Moriaty, Sponsorship Programme Manager at RaboDirect – sponsors of the PRO12 – speaks to sportindustry.biz about the challenges that come with taking over an established competition…

What did you need to do when taking over a competition so closely associated with another brand – Magners – to ensure the RaboDirect PRO12 caught on?

That’s very interesting – there are a couple of factors. I had been working in sports and sponsorship in Australia, and came back to take over this contract on behalf of RaboDirect so I suppose, from my perspective, I came back with fresh eyes. 

The important thing is that we embraced the fact we were a new brand to rugby. Not necessarily new to sponsorship, but new to rugby. The blues and oranges in our logo really stand out, and we really made sure that, visually, we presented ourselves well.

Equally, we really wanted to hone in on our own brand values, based around humour, straight talking and championing what are customers might need or want. The strap-line that we developed around the competition, ‘Rugby Just Got More Direct’, is absolutely what we are living and breathing in terms of bringing a sense of personality to the competition that reflects our brand values. 

We’ve plainly said that we are new to rugby, we want to take a look at things from an avid rugby supporter’s point of view and we want to deliver that to you, and we want to support the clubs as much as we can to deliver that to their fans who, equally, are our customers. 

One of the things we’ve discovered is a 93% alignment between the rugby fan in Ireland and our customers, so it gives us a huge opportunity to engage in the rugby conversation. The combination of all of those things has allowed us to really cut through with the name change and a new look and feel.

Aviva faced a similar challenge taking over the Premiership from Guinness. Does it make a difference, in both cases, that the incoming brand is in a completely different sector to the outgoing brand? Would you do the same deal if you were taking over from a rival?

One of the things I have been impressed with in my time at RaboDirect is that it’s so clear what its brand attributes are, and I think we’ve been able to display that very clearly through the sponsorship. We are very much a challenger brand, very much about our own tone of voice and having some fun. 

I don’t think it would have mattered if it had been in the same category because I think our brand is quite strong in terms of how it presents itself publicly. Interestingly, in the bank category, RaboDirect is quite different to, say, Ulster Bank or Bank of Ireland in the way we engage with our customers or potential customers. We have a fair amount of freedom to have fun with what we do and, for example, engage more actively in the social media space. I think it’s more how you express yourself within the sponsorship rather than the category.

Was the broadcast offering of the competition a pull for you, with live games on terrestrial TV, rather than competitions such as the Aviva Premiership and Heineken Cup on Sky and ESPN?

That was a massive draw for us. 90% of games are on free-to-air television, with a cumulative audience of 10 million people. The thing about the RaboDirect PRO12 is that it’s a rugby fan’s bread-and-butter rugby. It’s your week-in, week-out feed of rugby that we know the fans really enjoy and the fact that it’s easily accessible at no cost, if you’re not going to the game, was a big draw for us. 

Equally, I have to say the quality of the broadcast has blown us away and we’ve had fantastic support from the broadcasters. The last piece of the puzzle I suppose was doing a deal with RAI in Italy, so now we have all the markets covered and are really happy with that part of the equation from a sponsorship perspective. 

How important is digital and social media to you? Especially now the RaboDirect PRO12 audience on Facebook has already outgrown the Aviva Premiership?

It’s very important to us as a banking brand that we are very ‘at it’ in the social media space. We have a 95% customer satisfaction rate, so our customers are very happy with us engaging socially. Our strategy for year one of our sponsorship was about bedding down the name change, and making sure that the public knew it was a new competition, new name, new look and new feel. 

In November we conducted some research, speaking to avid fans in the rugby community – our core target audience of the sponsorship – and our results indicated a 74% unprompted awareness of the name change. That then led us to the digital and social market. We decided we needed to give fans something tangible; that clearly states who we are and what we do. 

We are going down the social media route really heavily and we are in the process of creating a number of League viral pieces that you will see coming through in the near future that will be released through the RaboDirect Rugby Club – a hub for all things to do with the competition for our customers and fans. 

The second piece that we’re doing which we’re very excited about is working with all 12 clubs, offering them support in the social media space and developing projects together that are allowing us all to step into social media in rugby, where we can all learn and benefit. That opportunity will also give us a chance to get out some good, real content to fans. So social and digital is core to our strategy on a whole number of levels.

Can you tell me about the introduction of ‘The Tweeterboard’ that is set to launch soon? 

We are very keen to try new things, particularly in the social space. We partnered with a company in Canada called Tweetspert, and developed a Twitter leaderboard –a bit like a fan ranking system. 

For many months we were calling it the Twitter Dashboard but have renamed it the Tweeterboard and it is actually up and running now in a Beta environment. We’ve learnt a lot about it in the last couple of months and are now going through the final processes to develop a ‘RaboScore’, which will build incentives for fans to communicate their experiences at matches and encourage them to use our hashtags and support their clubs. 

Basically, the more you tweet with relevant content the higher up the Tweeterboard you go. It gives fans the opportunity to demonstrate their activity in the social space and reward them with the kudos of being ranked on the Tweeterboard. It’s a first, it’s never been done before in the world in sport, as far as we know, and we will probably hard-launch at the beginning of March. 

So you’re very much pushing the need to experiment and try new things? 

It’s who we are as a brand, it’s what we do, and so we are bringing that to rugby. We think RaboDirect gives a different slant to how people can consume their rugby and interact with that and we are happy to provide it. We’re not afraid to try new things to make that happen.