Miami Marlins, Fox Sports talk about current and future opportunities in Latin American sports
The marketing and information machines that complement the U.S. professional sports industry have been eyeing Latin America, a well-known hotbed for baseball and soccer, for some time and are increasingly looking for ways to tap into the sports-crazed rising middle class.
“We’re focused on the four Ds… digital, demand, data and distribution,” said Patrick Ilabaca, vice president of corporate marketing communication and business development for Fox Sports Latin America. “You have to be involved internet and social media.
He and a group of panelists discussed current and future opportunities for professional sports in Latin America at WorldCity’s Global Connection of Oct. 28.
The most important countries in the region for Fox, Ilabaca added, include Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Brazil.
Yet there’s also “Venezuela, they love their baseball,” said Juan Martinez, director of multicultural marketing for the Miami Marlins. “Even though the political climate is what it is, it’s been a great new market that obviously has huge disposable income and baseball is their passion.”
While many companies are working to expand the reach of professional sports throughout the region and engage fans and potential fans, professional teams like the Marlins are trying to expand their footprint through hosting exhibition games and setting up academies to get talent into their teams’ pipelines.
“We’re in a very unique marketing, being that so many players have residences here and they live in Miami or the Caribbean it’s a no brainer for us to do business with these folks,” Martinez said. “How do you… not just do business with the normal sponsors, the Coca-Colas of the world, but the tourism department in the Dominican Republic, Goya or Del Monte, it makes sense for us to do so as a business.”
A challenge to reaching Latin American consumers, however, is they don’t all have access to all the technologies those in the U.S. do making it harder for sports marketing organizations and content distributors to
use their normal arsenal of tools to reach fans.
“I think sports marketing agencies like ours try to identify best practices in the U.S. and try to adapt them to the realities of each market in Latin America,” said Andrés Cárdenas, an account director for Octagon Sports Marketing.
The company links sports teams with corporate sponsors, but as the way people receive their sports news changes so must the way companies distribute their message. “Consumers are so used to sponsorships just messaging them,” he added. “Sometimes they send the wrong message and people stop consuming the sport because it becomes boring to them.”
The answer is to find ways to engage fans with their teams, and thus their sponsors. The simplest and most common to do that is through social media.
“We launched an aggressive social marketing initiative about two years ago and now we have over one million Facebook friends in Latin America,” said Ilabaca of Fox. “We have an outsourced team that’s putting out information and we get 500 to 600 comments after every single thing we do.”
The main demographic for the campaign is men between the ages of 18 and 45, yet it’s also those with more disposable income who can afford to pay for the channels that cover the game and those who have devices like Blackberrys or iPhones to engage online.
With the continued strength of economies across Latin America, and the World Cup and summer Olympics descending on Brazil, that group is only expected to grow.
Global Connections is one of seven event series organized by WorldCity to bring together executives on international business topics. The Global series is sponsored by Florida International University’s business school, Comcast Business Class and by real estate company Waterford at Blue Lagoon.
The next Global Connections forum is scheduled for Nov. 18 and will focus on Security in a High-Tech Latin American World.