Scheduled for November 22, this year’s Sports Media Marketing Summit has added a new element to its usual array of speakers, networking opportunities and the Sports Media Marketing Awards show: a series of high-octane, seven-minute Master Classes featuring presentations by some of the industry’s most innovative thought leaders.

One of these presentations comes from Bill Bergofin, SVP of marketing for NBC Sports/NBC Sports Network, whose mini-session, “How NBC Brought Premier League Soccer to the Main Stage,” will address how Bergofin and NBC Sports made the broadcasting of European football a momentous occasion not just for loyal US fans of the game, but for all Americans.

“We never approached it simply as ‘opening a series on television,’” Bergofin told Brief, “but [as] a broader cultural play. Thinking broadly opened up new avenues of how we would approach the communication strategy.”

Bergofin’s team started by “arresting the current fans,” ensuring that through authentic and informed adverts and promotion, they “would become our best source of credibility.” From there, they “targeted key markets with the greatest opportunity to create a tipping point. And lastly we made it accessible and approachable for a broader audience to become fans.”

In the end, NBC Sports translated “something big that was happening in the broadest sense possible,” Bergofin said.

They did this not only on TV but on the ground in bars, and online with digital executions for a broader audience such as a social team picker, and short films with Jason Sudeikis illustrating that European football is still football, just not as Americans know it—and that it’s okay, as Bergofin put it, “to not get it as learning is half the fun. We had a lot to learn too.”

Learn more about what NBC Sports learned by registering today for the Sports Media Marketing Summit & Awards, set for November 19 at The Paley Center in New York.

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