This past Wednesday, we hosted our monthly Meetup in Barcelona entitled Football Innovation with Rakuten, where we cover the topic of Football Innovation: delivering new value in a disruptive environment. We had the pleasure of hosting Vanessa Åsell Tsuruga, Senior Manager – Global Sports Digital Strategy, Global Marketing Supervisory Department at Rakuten. Vanessa guided us through Rakuten’s approach of reinventing the fan experience through its own Rakuten FAN-TASTIC Cup as an example of a sponsorship activation. Watch the video here
In Japan, Rakuten is very well known and has high brand awareness, but it had a challenge to reach other countries. Right before 2016, the company made a strategic decision to use sports as a platform to start building the brand out internationally:
“By using sports as a platform, we thought we could massively and rapidly increase brand awareness, and the result turned out to be very positive”
In 2016, it decided to become the Main Global Partner and the first-ever Global Innovation and Entertainment Partner of FC Barcelona. When it comes to find new partnerships, there are 3 things that Rakuten focuses on: 1) the ecosystem, 2) brand awareness, and 3) business opportunities.
Once you sign a contract with a right holder, that contract only gives you the rights to do activities… but you need to activate those rights, which means you need to think about digital activation and involving the fans init. An example is the Rakuten FAN-TASTIC Cup. Rakuten’s team is very focused on the fan; everything it does is centered around the fans.
Each sponsorship activation has a different approach and is done in a particular way, but Vanessa highlighted that when she activates a sponsorship, there are 3 things Rakuten always keeps in mind:
¨As a fan, you should experience 1) cognitive, 2) affective, and 3) physical experience¨
Q: How do you measure the success of sponsorship activations?
A: ¨Looking at brand awareness, and also at monetization. You have to bring the money back. I know the fans, their views, the engagement we can generate. So, from a digital point of view, the parameter we look at is the content engagement of each sponsorship activation¨.
On Friday November 29th, Rakuten is launching Matchday, a series of eight episodes taking a behind the scenes look at FC Barcelona’s 2017-2018 season. Register to Rakuten TV to watch it!
¨We use sports to try to tell our story and also expand the brand globally¨
Check out the photos from the November Meetup here