Digital Media and Sports Advertising

Advertising and sponsorship in the area of sports continue to be a prominent way for companies to receive brand exposure to a desired target audience and obtain a brand association with a popular entity. The fundamental advantages of advertising and sponsorship in sports now combine with digital media to provide more extensive and unique opportunities for companies to promote their brands and potentially better connect with their customers. It is clear that digital media do not replace more traditional forms of sports advertising and sponsorship, but rather represent additional vehicles for promotional communication. This chapter begins by providing an explanation of the goals and advantageous characteristics of a sports sponsorship for a company. This review is necessary because developing an agreement with the sports property is required for sponsors to obtain exclusive rights to content (footage of that sport), and logos they could use on their product packaging or in their advertisements to better communicate a brand association. The chapter then offers four examples of companies using digital media to execute their sponsorships with sports properties: Sprite and the NBA, Verizon and the NFL, AT&T and the Masters Golf Tournament, and Wise Snack Foods and the Boston Red Sox and New York Mets. A fifth example looks at how sponsors are using another prominent media destination for the sports audience, ESPN. The chapter reveals the endless possibilities of what a sponsorship using digital media can include in the area of sports.

The "Digitalisation" of Youth

The digitalization of youth signifies their complete immersion, active participation and involvement in the production, consumption and sharing of digital content using various interconnected/interfaced digital devices in their social network interactions. A prerequisite to successful commercial communication with young people is having a good understanding of new media, along with their social and psychological framework. The behaviour, motivation and emotions of youth in general and in relation to digital technologies, especially the meaning attached to mobile phones, the Internet (mainly social network sites) and games (computer-based and portable) should also be addressed if advertisers aim to reach this target group.

From Consumers to Producers

If reality television is any indication, people have an interest in being known. For some, creating and possibly starring in some form of user-generated content can be a route to being a reality star. The Internet provides a way for consumers to share their documentaries, antics, music videos, and even commercials with other users. Several marketers have capitalized on this trend by combining the desire of users to create their own content with the time-honored concept of a sweepstakes. The purpose of this chapter is to present a model of consumer engagement that encompasses user-generated advertising content. The model will then be placed into context by discussing specific examples from 15 user-generated advertising contests and making theoretical connections for each of the key contest elements.

Making Personalization Feel More Personal

The gold standard for customer service is catering to each individual’s unique needs. This means providing them undivided attention and helping them find what they want as well as what they will like, based on their prior history. An illustrative metaphor of the ideal interpersonal relationship between retailers and consumers is the “sincere handshake,” welcoming a familiar face to a familiar place and saying goodbye until next time, best symbolizes an ideal interpersonal relationship between retailers and consumers. In this chapter the authors offer a four-step cycle of this personalization process, which abstracts the key elements of this handshake in order to make it possible in mass digital consumerism. This model offers an ideal framework for drawing out the key lessons learned from the two previous stages of media evolution, Micro and Mass, as well as from social science and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to inform the design and further the understanding of the rich capabilities of the current age of Digital Consumerism.

Adonis or Atrocious

A virtual world is an online representation of real world people, products, and brands in a computer-mediated environment (CME). Within the next few years CMEs are likely to emerge as the dominant internet interface. In addition to corporate websites, companies will operate virtual stores where customers can browse and interact with assistants. However, due to the newness of the medium advertisers still struggle to figure out the best way to talk to consumers in these environments–or to decide if they should enter them at all. In this chapter, the authors look at the role of avatars (digital spokes characters) as sources of in-world marketing communications. The authors discuss conceptual issues such as how an avatar’s appearance and the ability of the visitor to customize this appearance may influence consumer attitudes and behavior and how conversations with other avatars can serve as a potentially valuable starting point for buzz-building and word of-mouth marketing campaigns. They conclude with some specific suggestions based upon “lessons learned” regarding issues advertisers need to consider when choosing a spokesavatar to communicate with residents of virtual worlds.

Performance-Enhancing Media

With the billions of dollars at stake in sport enterprises, it is not surprising that advertising permeates every facet of athletic competition as companies attempt to increase awareness of their products to the millions of sports fans around the world who continue to make it a multi-billion dollar industry. Today in sports, it seems that everything can be purchased, even “virtual space.” For advertisers, however, the proliferation of exposure is not indicative of over-saturation, but rather presents a need for innovative ways to reach their target audiences. Like athletes who use intensive workouts and nutritional supplements, advertisers are looking for performance-enhancing broadcast options. Virtual advertising is a relatively new, performance-enhancing technique that can improve a company’s competitive edge. Following an examination of mere exposure theory, this chapter will turn to a discussion of the benefits and opportunities of virtual advertising in sports events, and finally will explore the potential controversies and drawbacks surrounding virtual advertising technology.

An Opportunity for In-Game Ad Placement

It is argued here that the potential connections video game advertisers can build with consumers makes this new medium a strong force in the digital media world. A meaning-based model is introduced to explain the fluctuation of meaning over time, which is caused by the individual and social interpretation and integration of signs and symbols. The history of video games will be comprehensively interpreted through this model to explain the active identification going on between consumers and video games.

Teaching Taboo Topics Through Technology

Solving the problem of how to provide effective health education on diseases subject to social taboos is an immediate need. The social stigma of HIV/AIDS is particularly prominent in the developing world, where 95 percent of all HIV-infected persons live. Millions of people risk death from HIV/AIDS while cultures and laws resist change. New approaches must be created to provide education despite whatever social, structural, cultural, and legal barriers exist. Fortunately, the emergence of new media and information and communication technologies (ICT) has provided new ways to help bypass social taboos and provide effective education. This chapter discusses these challenges and presents criteria for evaluating the efficacy of educational campaigns aimed at promoting awareness relating to taboo topics using a specially designed HIV/AIDS curriculum—Interactive Teaching AIDS—as an exemplar. It incorporates key pedagogical and communication theories and approaches in order to maximize its efficacy. To provide psychological comfort and promote coherent understanding, this ICT-based application couples the presentation of biological aspects of transmission with culturally-familiar euphemisms and metaphors to communicate ideas about prevention measures. Created using a rigorous, iterative, and research-based process, the 20-minute application provides detailed yet accessible culturally-appropriate explanations of all key aspects of HIV/AIDS prevention. For people living in areas that cannot easily access explicit HIV/AIDS materials due to social, cultural or other constraints, the positive results of the authors’ study suggest that it is possible to design curricula that are socially-acceptable and accurate, that promote significant gains in learning, retention, and changes in attitudes. Furthermore, these materials can encourage learners to proactively seek more information regarding the taboo topic and share prevention information with others. Educators who are reticent to teach about such subjects due to embarrassment or lack of health expertise can utilize similar approaches to educate students.

Consumer Reviews on Retail Websites

Consumer reviews on retail websites are now established as a common type of user-generated marketing communication online. To provide a comprehensive and well-defined framework for researchers and marketers who are interested in its implementation and evaluation, a synthetic review of existing studies on the consumer reviews are conducted here. More specifically, the prevalence and popularity of consumer reviews of retail websites, the motivations behind the review activities, and the effects are examined in detail. Three important message characteristics of the reviews - volume, valence, and value - are also identified and discussed. After this assessment of the current status is completed, the focus is shifted to a more existential question about the consumer reviews: Whether the reviews posted by consumers are essentially “commons,” an entity created by members of a wide open community and amendable to exploitation by consumers and marketers alike, or “intellectual properties” of the online retailers who collect and manage them. Subsequently, a view that regards the consumer reviews as social capital is presented, followed by a discussion concerning moderation and reputation systems as quality control mechanisms.

Electronic Word of Mouth and Consumer Generated Content

With the Internet, even ordinary Web users can conveniently create and disseminate media content. The notion of User-Generated Content (UGC) or Consumer-Generated Content (CGC) captures the user-as-producer feature and refers to content that is not generated or published by professionals on the Internet, unlike traditional media. An important type of online advertising that makes use of CGC is eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) advertising. Defined in terms of situations where consumers refer products or services to other consumers on the Internet, eWOM is closely related to CGC and can be applied to many online forums for UGC and CGC. With this in mind, this chapter seeks to define and categorize eWOM based on different online platforms of CGC, review existing research in eWOM, and, finally, extend the use of eWOM to health promotion by examining characteristics of eWOM in an online breast cancer bulletin board.