As consumer habits evolve in a digital world, the different methods for brands to reach them expand and become more complex.
I want to introduce you to a concept known as Advertising Fatigue, which is the idea that consumers can become overwhelmed and unresponsive to constant exposure to advertisements. This fatigue can lead to a decrease in ad effectiveness and can make it harder for brands to connect with their audience.
In this age of digital media, where a consumer is bombarded with advertisements from every direction, it’s common for people to develop a sense of apathy or even irritation towards these ads. This phenomenon, known as Advertising Fatigue, poses a significant challenge for brands trying to reach their audience effectively. But don’t despair, there’s a solution.
So, what’s a brand to do in this world of ad fatigue? They could stick to the same old, hoping for the best. But let’s be real, that’s not going to cut it anymore. Today, it’s not just about reaching people. It’s about connecting with them. And while reach and volume are still important, deeper metrics matter more and more.
In the sports industry, sponsorships are still a main source of revenue for rights holders and sponsors are beginning to place a focus on deeper metrics that reflect sentiment, engagement, and even performance.
So we sought to ensure Unyfy addresses those needs. In this article, I dive into Unyfy’s sponsorship features, the importance of lifetime value, and use cases from some of our clients.
But first, a bit about Unyfy.
Unyfy: a Digital Toolkit for Rights Holders
Unyfy is our community and platform builder tailor-made for sports clubs, leagues, and associations. In addition to engaging with your fan base, nurturing relationships, launching events, and more, you can offer new engaging digital inventory to your partners.
Most of our clients are naturally interested in offering their partners new options to engage their fan base. Because sponsorship is so central to the sports business, we aim to bring our clients digital inventory that delights sponsors and fans alike, is scalable, and has measurable performance.
Here is a quick breakdown of our approach to sponsorship activations in Unyfy:
- Launch your platform and nurture your community with content, digital events, rewards, and other gamified features to grow your audience.
- Learn more about your fans as you gather more data-based insights into their individual preferences.
- Allow your partners to activate their sponsorships on your platform using Unyfy’s digital inventory.
- Provide your partners with detailed performance reports on their activations, with a lot of KPIs being tracked.
Overview of digital inventory in Unyfy
There are various features available to Unyfy hosts that can be offered as new digital inventory for your partners.
Here are some examples:
- Sponsored Content: Partners can present any type of multimedia content
- Sponsored Interactions: Partners can present various interactive formats such as votings or ask-me-anythings
- Loyalty Rewards: Giveaways is the name of Unyfy’s loyalty engine. With it, you can reward basically everything your fans do with loyalty points or badges.
- Sponsored Spaces: Create a branded discussion space for fans
- Sponsored Digital Collectibles: Digital collectibles in Unyfy can be presented by your partners
- Sponsored Vouchers: Branded vouchers present a way to give your fans special discounts
All of these inventory types work well alone. By combining them, your partners can unlock the next level of digital activations and create engaging campaigns with multiple touchpoints. They might begin with a content piece that converts fans into a branded space and rewards the fans for their engagement there. You gain access to multi-touch digital inventory that is easy to set up and manage.
Measurable Results
While the mechanisms to activate sponsors are vital, the means to track and optimize those activations are equally vital.
Thus, your admin backend comes with detailed reporting for every partner and every campaign that you run on your platform, including data on the reach, engagement, and performance of all activations.
Additionally, we track your fans’ lifetime value as well.
But quickly, what is CLV or Customer Lifetime Value?
Think of it as the long-term relationship value of each fan. It represents how much revenue a fan can bring to your brand over their lifetime as a loyal follower within the Unyfy platform. High CLV can be a magnet for top-tier sponsors. It’s a sign of a strong, loyal fanbase that’s likely to engage with the sponsor’s branding and products, making a sports brand more enticing to potential sponsors. But, you know what? Understanding CLV can also help sports brands pinpoint where their fan engagement might need a bit of a boostSo it is a simple formula really:
- Create an engaging digital experience
- Increase fan loyalty, CLV, and revenue
- Activate sponsorships
- Grow your platform and audience
- Repeat
Let’s break down what we mean by activating sponsorships in creative ways next.
Braunschweig Loewen’s “Loewe of the Game” Sponsored by VW Financial Services
Basketball Löwen Braunschweig is a professional Bundesliga basketball team and they wanted to create an engaging activation including one of their core sponsors: Volkswagen Financial Services. So they created a new right and digital activation campaign around the “Loewe of the Game” that is crowned after every game on their platform.
The activation combines two inventory types you find in Unyfy: sponsored votings and sponsored digital collectibles.
First, the fan community can select their favorite player of the game in a vote, presented by the partner. The winner is then immortalized as a digital sticker that fans can collect.
This method not only increased fan interaction but also created opportunities to reward users for completing collections. It further opened the door to offering special rewards like concessions or tickets to holders, adding an extra layer of interaction and engagement.
Sammeldeinteam’s “Free Sticker Week” Presented by TorAlarm
SammelDeinTeam, a digital collectibles platform for the German men’s national team by German publisher Axel Springer, leveraged the Unyfy platform to present a “Free Sticker Week,” sponsored by TorAlarm. This approach combined the allure of digital collectibles with the excitement of an engaging event, effectively boosting fan interaction and enhancing brand visibility.
From this campaign, over 15% of the platform’s user base at the time downloaded the Torarlarm app.
The success of this campaign highlighted the potential of using digital inventory to create a compelling and interactive advertising experience that delivers results even for conversion-driven companies.
Conclusion
At Unyfy, our commitment to continuous improvement ensures that rights holders and partners always have the best possible tools at their disposal. Our team works closely with your commercial team to create tailored proposals for your partners. This collaborative approach ensures that all parties can fully leverage the power of our platform to meet and exceed their advertising goals.
Stay tuned for more updates and insights from Unyfy as we continue to explore and redefine the frontiers of digital advertising.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Unyfy can reshape your digital advertising strategy and enhance your fan engagement, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
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