In case you didn’t catch it, Splash! is Strictly Come Dancing with diving rather than dancing. Gabby Logan and Vernon Kay present, celebrities dive, professional divers (and, er, Jo Brand) judge, the audience vote, eventually Eddie the Eagle was declared the winner.

It might not be highbrow, but it was definitely entertaining. Daft and undemanding, Splash! is family friendly and Tom Daley is charming and inspiring. Some of the Seven League team dove when they were younger so they know how difficult it is, and a prime-time TV show that might potentially inspire more people to take up the sport can only be a good thing.

There have been a few improvements suggested for the second series. Many are suggesting that the celebrities should dive several times each, just like they do in the Olympics, in order to fill the 90-minute episodes. Personally, I’d like to see Splash! work on having a great social media presence.

Although “#splash” was being used on Twitter there was no prompt from the show itself to use this hashtag. This visualisation of tweets during the first episode below shows that there was no shortage of Twitter activity, but Splash! did nothing to encourage, steer or join the conversation.

There’s no Splash! Facebook page, no official Twitter account, no Instagram. Tom has a fantastic social media presence and was merrily tweeting backstage Splash! info, holding Q&As on Twitter, Instagram-ing photos and uploading blooper reels and ‘best dives’ to his YouTube channel, it’s not the same as having something official and tangible with the Splash! brand.

Or maybe that was their strategy – Tom is social media gold so they could rely on him to cover the social media side of Splash!. But if that’s the case why not get Gabby, who has over 250,000 followers, and Vernon, who has over a million, involved too?

It’s not hard to promote a hashtag or upload a few photos to a Facebook page. Fingers crossed that when Splash! comes back it’ll put as much thought into the social media as it does the show. I’ll leave you with this video — an example of just how powerful a tiny prompt to talk about something on social media can be.

Movie promotion has changed in recent years, to the point where promotional posters are having to be adapted to make sure that they’ve viewable on a mobile device. Increased use of the internet, especially on mobile devices, means that there are a thousand new ways to reach a potential audience, and some movie marketers are exploiting this to their full advantage.

Some, like the people behind 4.3.2.1 and Star Trek Into Darkness are using social media to create buzz around their film. Others are using the internet to target specific groups of people online — such as in the run up to the release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo when fans of the novels were hit with targeted ads and a specific campaign that tapped into their love for the books. Others, however, aren’t being quite so obvious. They’re taking digital marketing and having a little fun with it, creating some very cool things in the process.

The Grumblr
Remember Monsters Inc? They’ve made a prequel called Monsters University. It’s coming out in a few months and as part of the promotion they’ve created The Grumblr.

The Grumblr is a Tumblr supposedly written by a Monsters University student. It includes memes, heavily filtered square photos of campus life, chats about essays, GIFs, hashtags, all the things you’d usually find on the social media of a 17-25 year old. Except it’s all to do with monsters.

It’s brilliant, showing the tone and a few snippets from the movie without being blatantly promotional. Plus it links to the website for Monsters University, which is so similar a real academic website it’s almost painful. Apart from the bit where they sell four-armed hoodies in the store, obviously.

The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises were the final two films in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  Batman has such a huge existing fanbase that marketers could have gotten away with the old posters-and-interviews technique. Instead they took the huge, rich world of Batman and made something quite brilliant with it.

Let’s start in reverse. When the website for The Dark Knight Rises was launched, it was just a black webpage with a recording of men chanting underneath it. However, when the chanting was analysed with a spectrograph a hidden message was revealed — #thefirerises. If you tweeted that hashtag then you’d get a reply from @TheFireRises, who’d link you to another webpage where you could put in your Twitter account and your profile pic would be added to a larger mosaic that formed the first clear photo of Bane.

Even though the photo was unveiled by clever-clogs Batman fans way before the mosaic was completed, it was a cool idea — and it was followed up with a huge website that let fans peek into the Batman world.

But it was nothing compared to the campaign for The Dark Knight. I left it ’til last because it’s quite astonishing, involving treasure hunts that blend the online and offline worlds, over 31 websites, mobile phones with exclusive content hidden in the middle of cakes, an online newspaper, …it’s no surprise that it had over 10 million unique participants in 75 countries. It was a huge, mind-blowing campaign, but this video explains it all very neatly.

Conclusion
There are so many other sterling examples I could talk about, such as Super 8‘s online treasure hunt and the Monsters Foursquare campaign that I wish someone would look at and expand upon, but the point is clear. There are a hundred different platforms to reach audiences on nowadays, and thousands of different ways of using them. You can use digital to create a world that will extend the film experience beyond the two hours someone sits in a cinema, and create some really nifty things whilst doing so.

Every year I come back from SXSW mentally energised and physically exhausted. This year it was worse as I also spent a couple of days working with the great guys at Houston Dynamo, and I was lucky enough to be asked by George Scott and Craig Howe to speak at the NFL digital media summit just before sxswi kicked off in earnest.

Even Mr Howe’s teeth dazzle

Hot topics included editorial impartiality, social controls, second screens, stadium wifi and all the usual challenges around reach/retention/revenue – all things we deal with all the time at Seven League. Those are hot topics in the digital sport community – not so much at sxsw as a whole. In fact, I’d hoped for more coverage of sport at this year’s festival. Last year, when I spoke about Datatainment, it seemed like there was a head of steam building up around digital/sport as a topic, but it seemed to drop off this year. There was the WWE talk on social and then Arsenal‘s excellent Richard Clarke talking us through the challenges ofwalking the tightrope of editorial/commercial/fan vs club when it’s a matter of love, not fandom. But other than that, sessions on sport were few and far between.

But I don’t think you can go to Austin just to focus on your everyday line of work… you get so much more by broadening your mind and soaking up the inspiration around you. In the end I only got to 3.5 conference sessions (every time I go it seems to become fewer, or maybe the schmoozing/meeting/partying just gets more) but they were all well worth it. I got lucky.

The guys from Leap Motion were appropriately geeky… great looking tech and lots of references to star trek.

Elon Musk is ridiculous. Talk about vision without limits – really inspirational stuff talking about Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity.. and also about his 5 kids and how you can do email while you’re with them (nb. mention of the nanny was a crucial footnote). Only downside of this talk was that half the women in the audience became pregnant just at the sight of him.
And then my favourite, Stephen Wolfram, nailing the audience’ brains to the wall with computational delivery, computational panache and uncompromising computational logic. Nailed to the wall and then sprayed with a mojito – that’s how my brain felt, and I only got to stay for half his talk. I’ve been a long-time follower of Wolfram Alpha… and it was great to see everyone being awed by the scale of the project.Nate Silver left me a bit cold – but then I’m aware of his work and I’ve been so data-obsessed in the last two years, I was always going to be difficult to please on this one.

Serendipity and Sore Throat

The best thing about Austin was, as ever, that you can walk down the street and bump into Dan Hon – grab a coffee for half an hour – and plug into a mate you respect and admire… to talk work and babies. Ok, so it’s not just the inimitable Mr Hon… but he’s a proxy for all the people you connect with. Long-time Portland resident and sports pr expert Charlie Brooks, TechCity’s Pasa Mustafa (over the rugby at the Irish bar Fado, our yearly meet watching Six Nations), hanging out with Evan, Dennis and the wonderful, welcoming foursquare gang, checking in with Will McDonough and the KickTV crowd (at fado again, you see the pattern?), a brief meet with Mark from Spurs, the lovely ladies of Barchick, top Swede Dag Larrson, the partyful personalities of Poke, pitch-winning Makie ladies, the Makerbot masters… you get the picture, I’m sure. The best thing was that none of these meetings was pre-arranged – that’s the serendipity of South-by. My only problem was that, by the time I’d got to the foursquare party on Sunday night I could hardly croak a word. There were those who found this to be a good thing.

Government Intervention

Normally I just line up a few conversations myself, but with Seven League growing in reputation and size, we entered for a SXSW and UK Trade and Industry government scheme to get some help with lining up meetings… and it went really well. With much thanks to the ladies of the UKTI, in particular Una and Tracy, I had an excellent couple of hours on the British stand in the conference centre (the only time I went in there) with four fast-track business-speed-dating meetings. All very interesting, some very useful. If you’re thinking of doing something like this next year, then it’s the Platinum Service you want to apply for.

And if you do all these kinds of things and more next year… then I can thoroughly recommend the restorative powers of South Congress Massage. Keep it weird Austin, that’s the way we like it.

We’re delighted to announce that we have begun a unique collaboration with top sports lawyers, Couchmans LLP.

Over the next few years we think there are going to be fascinating, challenging and complex developments in sport around the use of social media – whether at fan, player, club or governing body level. This collaboration will enable us to enhance our offering to Seven League clients by pooling our commercial, strategic and operational skills with Couchmans’ undoubted legal expertise.

There will be projects where it makes sense for the client that we work closely together, and others where we simply advise where necessary. The beauty of this relationship is that, in an ever evolving world of digital media choices where legalities are developing equally rapidly, this kind of collaborative approach makes a lot of sense.

Press Release – Couchmans enters Unique Digital Collaboration with Richard Ayers Seven League

Contact:

Couchmans LLP: Nick White

Seven League: Richard Ayers @richardayers or info[@]sevenleague.co.uk

At the moment there’s not much more to say… all the exciting stuff is too hush-hush to be mentioned on a blog, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot to get our teeth into.

Only one note of interest to digital practitioners out there is that the Head of Digital, Mark Coyle, is going to be building a team. If you’ve got skills and a high calibre cv, then it could be worthwhile pinging him. More details on linkedin.

What a collision of people… EPSN doing a live broadcast, the massed media, the young players, all the management of all the clubs AND, standing immediately behind the club execs are the fans – right there, in their faces, chanting encouragement, excitement or, my favourite, the sardonic “Don’t screw it up, don’t screw it up …” or “You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know…”. Can you imagine this happening in the Premier League? It would be phenomenal.

Tension builds. Toronto FC use their 4 minutes, then take another 5 minute timeout… which isn’t a toilet break – it means a trade’sgoing on… and then the deal is announced. TFC swap their position as 4th picker with the Vancouver Whitecaps… who promptly select Kekuta Manneh – a forward from the Austin Aztex school. The diminutive young man steps up, scarf-clad, and thanks God, Parents, Coaches … for making the opportunity for him.

Five picks in, and 4 of them have thanked god first. Most go for their parents second, coaches third.. some even remember to thank the team that picks them. The Premier League should have a draft like this for the drinking game alone.

Pick 6 goes with thanking ‘the Lord’.

Pick 7 ups the ante to ‘my lord and saviour Jesus Christ’.

The vocal Columbus Crew get their first pick as Ryan Findley, a nice young manwho’s “very blessed to be here” from Notre Dame… (doesn’t thank god, does thank parents and coaches) – but his baptism is heralded by a loud “Ryyyyyan Fiiiiindley” chant from the Crew. What a way to start your professional career.

Excitement in the bar at the Westin hotel last night was bubbling over – with discussion of who’s going to be the first pick (The Guardian has a view), but just as much with digesting a great day of talks and discussions as the MLS hosted all the clubs in a conference which is part of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America annual jamboree.

We’re delighted to announce that MLS Digital’s Chris Schlosser made his first pick yesterday – and it was Seven League.

Using our experience of working in the Premier League with Manchester City FC, our broader experience of sports clubs and organisations and our wealth of experience in digital media, we’ll be looking at club growth strategy across the league.

The best part of this trip has been meeting the people and hearing the high level of digital discussion. There are lots of challenges that are identical to those that face UK sports bodies – and many that are the same as any digital media business – but every market has its own distinct issues and we’re very excited about digging into them over the course of our work.

Thank you to the MLS Digital team and all the clubs I’ve met so far for the warm welcome. We look forward to accelerating the league’s digital performance together. As for today, may you get the picks you want.

Let’s get this clear: Manchester City’s budget for digital isn’t huge.  As I have said time and time again, when I was Head of Digital the budget was the smallest I have had in my career since I left the BBC — and that was an age ago.

Last week eConsultancy journalist David Moth wrote the article “Why do Premier League clubs offer such an awful user experience” in which he bemoaned the poor UX on Barclays Premier League official club sites. David kindly exempts MCFC from the critical comments because he rates the UX highly. But it doesn’t take long before the comments by users on the story are citing the imaginarily massive Man City budget as the reason.

Today, at Sport Tech Meetup, although I wasn’t there, I hear there was more praise for the MCFC service and yet more disparaging comment that it was all down to having deep pockets.

This thinking is just plain flawed.

Good user experience comes from clear thinking made visual. It comes from knowing the audience, understanding the behaviours, having clarity of purpose in the business and the ability to deliver on that thinking.

As I wrote in my eConsultancy comment, the people before my time deserve the credit. Poke were architects, Aqueduct delivered (and still do), the internal team led by inimitable Victoria Stansfield (delivery) and Chris Bailey (content) and the head honchos at City gave them the leeway to deliver. Did the UX redesign cost a fair bit? Yes, probably. Good people cost money. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely.

What’s more important is whether there is a long term benefit to the business – whether there is an adequate return on investment. I believe there is – and the proof of the pudding will be in the eating as Russell Stopford, Head of Digital, his bosses and his team, continue to be bold enough to invest (time, effort, focus AND money) in the digital service.

Commensurate investment

I just described the investment in the MCFC digital services as ‘bold’ and, on a moment’s reflection, I’m not sure that’s accurate. It’s bold in football, certainly. City is the current holder of the Sports Industry Award for best website, as well as a smattering of digital industry awards for various services including mobile and social. City undoubtedly has a very strong reputation for being a digital leader in football, but also in sport as a whole. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube executives are regularly heard heralding the Club’s work at conferences to the extent that audiences are getting bored!

Today’s MCFC team using splash page and facebook to drive fan engagement – AND to recognise the fan community.

What was most pleasing at the SIA last year was that we beat the Guardian’s sport section and TalkSport. Media companies. For a sporting club to be judged better than media companies at digital media felt like a real accolade, especially two services of such high calibre.

So what’s really relevant is whether the investment is commensurate with the opportunity.

Of course I don’t have exact figures (and even if I did, no NDA would let me blog them) but from my work across sport and other industry sectors, I am sure that Man City’s digital spend is slightly on the light side compared to most emerging brands and growing businesses of similar size who are attempting to use digital media to their advantage. MLS clubs, for example, don’t need to be convinced of the value to their business of digital media – their investment, as a percentage of revenue, is significantly higher.

So why does MCFC’s digital service stand out?

Speaking of my own time as HoD, the then CEO of City Garry Cook, and also my immediate boss, believed that there was a need to leverage every opportunity to deliver a better service to fans, to engage and entertain, to inform but also to listen – and to reach out to all fans on all platforms. So, facilitation from on high is crucial.

But the desire to be innovative, to adapt, and the confidence to be able to run the service to high standards at the same time as developing new products and grasping new opportunities – this is what really makes the City service stand out. That and the access given by the football players and staff, the great content generated and putting the fans’ needs first.

I have employed the some of the same strategy and tactics  – not similar ones, but exactly the same – at organisations as diverse as the BFI, a small legal practice, a friend’s craft business and the Premier League Champions. The principles don’t change – but how you apply them does.

The key is not in the size of the investment, but in what you do with it.

UPDATE:  I should add that I’ve just been told that there are lots of very complimentary comments at STM, but often accompanied by the ‘not that we have their budget’ comment which may just be a reflexive caveat rather than an intended criticism <partially-gets off high horse>

This blog is the online home of Seven League. My name is Richard Ayers and I founded the company.

We believe that digital media can have a transforming affect on the way society works and we want to use our combined 70 years of experience to help accelerate the digital performance of organisations – particularly in sport. Better digital means more awareness, interest, enjoyment and participation which means better lives for everyone.

Clients include:

• Manchester City FC
• Limelight Sports
• The England and Wales Cricket Board
• The International Cricket Council
• The Rugby Football Union
• Harlequins Rugby Union

We often consult, but we like to roll our sleeves up and help deliver the strategy, tactics or innovation we recommend. That often means embedding with an organisation to help make their digital ambitions a reality as I did at Manchester City.

Social media and Data are two of the areas that have been particularly prevalent in our work over the last couple of years, but they’re by no means the only ones. We also have a broad range of content, commercial, operational and technical skills that mean we can deliver websites, mobile apps and connected tv apps.

What makes us unique is the ability to deliver – over any platform – creative, engaging, sometimes innovative services that are commercially and operationally rock solid.

Why a blog?

Until now we haven’t needed a place on the web – all our work came through recommendation. But as our reputation has grown, so we now find people want to know about the company without necessarily getting in touch – and this blog can help with that.

We also intend to use this for raising thoughts and ideas or giving more detail on talks and events.

A lot of the previous work we blogged about, particularly about Datatainment, is available on my personal blog.

Thank you for reading.

Richard

ps. If you’re wondering where the company name comes from… it’s from literature and games. Happy googling.

The following is an article I’ve just written for Leaders in Digital Sport‘s “Leaders” bulletin. The data gods in question are Gavin Fleig and Ed Sulley of the MCFC Performance Analysis team.

Do you know a bit about football? Or a lot? Can you remember the score of a game 5 years ago when you were standing in a stadium on a wet wednesday night and your team lost 3-2 after going down to 10 men in the 63^rd minute?

That made-up match might not be the right details, but if you’re a real football fan then you probably remember something similar – as well as a selection of other random details from times past and fixtures forgotten.

Does that make you a statto?

Most people will react badly if you call them a statto. It has become a pejorative term – as portrayed bySkinner and Baddiel‘s Fantasy Football League comedy sidekick or maybe long before that – and although there’s a grudging respect for the feats of memory that sporting stattos display, there’s also a lot of laughter behind the communal hand.

The stereotype is that stattos remember facts. Data. They don’t necessarily remember meaning or turn that data into knowledge or, better still, understanding, let alone the peak of the information pyramid: wisdom.

So data’s got a bad rep – it’s the domain of stattos and geeks.

But I have seen football data that delights.

Over the last 6 months I’ve been working closely with the Performance Analysis team at Manchester City FC. Gavin Fleig and Ed Sulley have been informing and enthusing me (a footballing muggle) with their explanations and demonstrations. They are sporting data gods.

Every movement of our players in a match, in the gym and on the training pitch is recorded, converted to data, analysed and presented back with expert understanding. It forms part of the whole picture that informs training and performance improvements. No-one here is called a statto and yet they all accept their statto status.

The reason why I’ve been working so closely with them is because I think they hold the solution to a challenging problem for football. It is this: How do you bring together people with a lot of knowledge of the game and those who only have a little? The fan from Manchester and the fan from Minnesota. The established and the uninitiated, or, as I like to call them, the veteran and the newcomer. Of course a Minnesotan might actually be a lifelong soccer fan, it goes without saying, and there are definitely people in the UK with low levels of knowledge (myself included) but generally speaking the average Mancunian knows more than the man in Mumbai.

Frank Skinner, Ed Sulley (Statto) and David Baddiel. (ok, so it’s Angus Loughran who played Statto)

You could argue for hours about what makes a ‘fan’ vs a ‘supporter’ or ‘follower’ but leaving those definitions aside, I believe there are a couple of major challenges for any club that wants to increase the number of people who care (to whatever degree) about the activity of the club, but have a range of experience of the game: 1) veterans do not necessarily welcome newcomers and 2) it is tricky to talk to fans with varying levels of football understanding.

I don’t think that Gavin and Ed have the solution to problem no.1. But I think that data, digital media and performance analysis might hold the solution to no. 2.

In my view, broadcast media is bad at addressing multiple audiences. It picks a target audience and aims at it. In the case of football coverage in this country, the BBC’s MOTD and Sky’s MNF address fans who are closer to the veteran end of the scale. There is little explanation for the layman.

Digital media, on the other hand, is perfectly suited to explain the game to the uninitiated. We have restrictions about what we can do with match footage, but we can use performance data, put it in an application that allows the user to choose a comfortable level of knowledge and let them play with the information. What’s more, they can do it at their own convenience and at their own speed.

This is what takes data into a new sphere – we can move from data journalism through data visualisation and, hopefully, to the holy grail of engaging an audience: data entertainment, or (forgive me) datatainment.

Gavin and Ed have been able to show me how the data can tell a story which gives me greater understanding of the strategic context of a game. I now appreciate some of the chess-playing tactics of managers and the expertise it takes to carry out those plans.

Over the next few months at City, we’ll be starting on a journey towards datatainment. We’ll begin by launching prototypes that start to make the performance data transparent and, with the help of the audience, we’ll progress towards making truly entertaining data-led products.

I can’t wait for the audience’s reaction and I’ve no doubt it will be voluble whether in praise or pillory, but if even just one stato and one newbie both get information and perhaps enjoyment out of our prototypes, then we will have started off in the right direction.