It was June 2014. I was checking my phone literally about a hundred times a day to see if we would secure a title sponsor and still have a team the following year.
To see if we would keep a hundred jobs.
That’s part of it, though. Waiting for phone calls, waiting for emails. Waiting. Like waiting for the girl in middle school I had a crush on to call me back.
But this time I was waiting for a call from Netflix. We had put together a plan to kick off its European-branding campaign in a way nothing else could. We were in talks to announce a naming-rights sponsorship of our top-level cycling team just before the start of the Tour de France, the world's largest annual sporting event.
Each July, 12 million people watch the Tour in person from the roadside, and the three-week race gets 3.5 billion TV views worldwide. Team Netflix would have been front and center for hours each day in no fewer than 190 countries.
I’d pulled every lever I could to make it work on our end, and the sponsorship fit their target market perfectly. We even got Robin Wright to put in a good word for us (thanks again, Robin!) and made our case empirically and emotionally.
Netflix said no.
They had their reasons, of course (and, no, they had nothing to do with cycling’s sorry doping scandals). In short, they decided that if people were watching Team Netflix athletes riding in the Tour, then they wouldn’t be tuning into the company’s own programming.
"We can't promote that," I was told. Which was too bad, for Netflix. They’d missed out on the best deal in sports sponsorship, especially when it comes to the younger generation.
That may sound self-serving for me to say. After all, I founded and still direct the US-based Cannondale-Drapac cycling team. But I've seen the landscape of sports marketing shift dramatically in just the past five years.
The increasingly participatory nature of millennials and the democratization of sports viewing have the potential to reward forward-thinking companies. Consider, for instance, that there are more events than ever before available through live streams.
Traditional team sports do not have the same appeal to millennials that they did to older generations; millennials want to participate in sports and their orbiting cultures, not simply sit in recliners with their remotes and consume them. This tech-savvy generation is finding ways around traditional broadcasting avenues, streaming huge amounts of content, sports included.
Considering all that, is there a riper fruit for the picking than pro cycling?
Sports that combine social, environmental, and competitive aspects have huge potential in the realm of sports marketing and sponsorship. Cycling fits perfectly in the new paradigm. It’s clean, it’s hard, it’s beautiful, it’s accessible. And it’s booming.
Go to any major city, and you’ll see millennials cruising around on their bicycles, and there are bike lanes popping up everywhere. In no other sport is there a line that connects the kids out learning to ride bikes and bike commuters to amateur racers and world-class professional cyclists. They all experience a similar thing.
How many NFL fans can go out and smash into each other every Saturday? Not many who want to stay out of the hospital.
An uncommon advertisement
This is where I think Netflix got it wrong.
Investing in a team is far more effective than a standard TV ad buy, which is what's available in nearly all the major sports. A business can buy an advertisement in proximity to competition — that is, in commercial breaks during football games — but not inside the competition, as is the case with bike racing.
With a cycling team, you’re buying the team competing on television for the bulk of the program, a program that’s actually paid for by the brands buying ads during the commercial breaks.
Sponsors of teams usurp those ad buys because they’re woven into the stories of the athletes and the race itself. Most of us tune out ads during a football game, but it’s impossible to ignore sponsors in cycling. They’re on the clothing, but they’re also on the air for hours each race, and then in the media all day, as commentators announce the team names and myriad publications cover every race. Sponsors become part of a team’s identity. That’s just not for sale in any another sport.
Authentic relationships + authentic content = huge upside
The relationship between team and sponsor and consumer is genuine. Sponsors aren’t merely paying athletes to endorse their products; they’re paying for the athlete’s airfare, coaches, and physical therapy. They are invaluable members of the team and they keep the show on the road. This support shows through and warms the hearts of an often ad-jaded audience.
For Netflix, this would have been the perfect move because it captures the already established massive audience of Tour de France viewers without paying a media competitor to be ignored during a commercial placed in the race. By putting its brand name on one of the main actors in the content people were viewing, Netflix would have used the efforts and money of competitors to promote their own channel. Genius pirate swashbuckling!
I still hear that "no" from Netflix. It’s the struggle pro cycling faces.
The thing that makes pro cycling sponsorship great is the very thing that undercuts it: It’s unconventional.
No corner-suite executive gets canned for rubber-stamping TV ad buys in prime time, but for some reason the same expenditure on a cycling team can raise eyebrows.
Never mind the fact that, in terms of per dollar spent, pro cycling teams produce better quantitative global marketing metrics (impressions, views, audience size) and qualitative metrics (fan-to-brand loyalty) than any other single form of advertisement available, inside or outside of sports.
Those dollars spent help purchase an audience engaged in cheering for teams with commercial names, as opposed fans forced to consume, or mute, annoying ads that force the audience to tune out.
One of our former title sponsors is a wonderful example.
Garmin, a company that was involved with cycling on a title-level for seven years, saw its market share, brand recognition, and overall revenues soar in the fitness sector after launching its products through a named team: Team Garmin. It was the exception that had enough lateral thinkers in corporate headquarters to figure out that the real bottom line is sometimes better when you take a few risks. And with risks come rewards.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my phone.
American Jonathan Vaughters is a former professional cyclist and the manager of the US-based Cannondale-Drapac Pro Cycling Team, which competes in the Tour de France.
SEE ALSO: Why the sport of cycling is like no other
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