Al Jazira Sports & Cultural Club – Abu Dhabi (2010)

Overview: The club is a house to many UAE’s top athletes in a variety of sports. Football is the most important of course, however the club hasn’t won any league championship yet and is considered young between his Abu Dhabi football rivals. The club owns a world-class sports facilities that can fits around 46,000 spectators, a hotel and amazing office spaces, yet all of the above hasn’t been managed and utilized the best way, if I can nicely put it this way.

Challenges: From the marketing perspective, a lot of challenges needed to be addressed:

1. Bringing people to the stadium
2. Sales of match tickets, sponsorships and other venue bookings
3. The Match-day experience
4. Fans relationships
5. Internal advocacy

Achievements: We understood that not all challenges could be adhered to at once, and although our role was set to taking care of digital marketing, we’ve managed to accomplish many milestones on different ends. We’ve looked at the overall marketing strategy and identified areas of quick-wins and areas of long-term development:

1. Website: The website of the club was not only dysfunctional but also damaging to the brand, so we’ve initiated a quick fix solution just to make it acceptable for the human senses, and directly put an entire digital marketing plan, sent RFPs, and selected the best firm to develop a word-class portal that reflects the image and vision of the club.
2. Digital Inventory: Looking at the digital assets of the club was a real challenge. The club employs four in-house photographers and video takers, and they’ve taken terabytes of photos and videos, covering everything around the club from small dinner parties to pro-league finals, yet digging into these hundreds of folders on five different computers was a nightmare. So, we’ve decided to use online social networks… in that case, we were able to 1- effectively manage and organize our content and 2- engage with fans on a personal level on their favourite channel – the internet. We’ve put in place policies and procedures, selected appropriate social networks, train the photographers/video takers on how to use these online services and start uploading. It works as a blast. Not only finding a photo from last season or an interview of last week’s match was easy, but it was also so much fun. We’ve discovered that people are sharing content with their friends and giving us a lot of “likes” and positive comments.
3. Big Screen Content: Mohamed Bin Zayed Stadium, the home of Al Jazira, has gigantic and stunning screens on its both ends. These digital screens have never been used besides displaying the score and time during match events. We decided that this has to change, and immediately started developing audiovisual content that raises the bar in terms of creativity and branding. Important to note here is that we’ve used in-house resources and made dramatic changes with close to zero budget. Changes that wow’s spectators and added a lot of value to their match experience.
4. Match-event Experience: The club wants to attract people to the match, yet once they arrive there is nothing pleasant about the journey. We’ve set a priority of dealing with match-day experience and looked at areas of direct improvement. We’ve created ideas that not only added a lot of fun to the experience but also grabbed a lot of free publicity by the media. Here is a few of what we’ve done:
   • Best Seat in the Stand: the time before the game kicks off is usually a boring minutes of waiting. We’ve decided to have a part of the North Stand to be staged with comfortable sofas, waiter services, food & drink, goody bags and other prises. Then, we’ve used the big screens and a wireless camera projecting its feed live on screens and when the music stops the person who can see him/herself on the screen would take three of his friends to the best seat in the stand.
   • Barclays Kick For Cash: Halftime in football is another 15 minutes of waiting. This wasn’t the case after Barclays sponsored our Kick for Cash initiative, where 5 fans will have the opportunity to kick the ball from the centre spot into an empty goal, should they score, the walk home with 25,000 Dirham.
   • Man City FC trip: We were also keen on bringing all the anticipation into the crowd, when a draw takes place each match and a lucky winner will win a trip for two to watch Manchester City FC playing.
5. Advertising: Having live attendance in a football match is a challenge for all UAE clubs, and most of these clubs including Al Jazira use every possible method to bring people inn especially for key matches. However, instead of spending on paid-fans, we’ve tried to use marketing that brings people for the fun of the game and also builds brand equity. We’ve used advertising smartly and managed with low budget to attract thousands of spectators to our games.
6. Community Project: Another milestone was working with the community and engage schools and universities to be part of the club. A community project was launched including tournaments, social activities and events. The project is still on the way and producing excellent results.
7. Ticketing, Loyalty and CRM: Building relationship with fans starts by discovering who they are. That is why the club needed a proper ticketing system, database servers, a CRM platform and an eCommunications tools to effectively build and sustain relationships with spectators. We’ve done just that. The journey is now very close to complete, where spectators will use their bar-coded card to enter the games, the system will identify who they are, since they are registered online, then the system reports their attendance so they will get into the appropriate loyalty scheme and be sent specific marketing communications. This makes marketing very targeted, very personal, very effective, very efficient and very satisfactory for everyone. More details on this system are available upon request.
8. Internal Communications: There is no conceivable success for any organization with the complete buy-in and cooperation of the internal stakeholders. We found that people aren’t engaged in the club, aren’t motivated about their jobs and operating on their own or within a very limited cells. Again, thinking cloud-applications, we’ve introduced Google Apps, sold it internally, done the training for staff on the benefits and started using it. We started with specific department with plans the project will spread into the entire club.

Al Fateh Sports Club – Al Ahsa (2010)

Overview: Al Fateh Sports Club in Al Ahsa region western Saudi Arabia. The club has recently climbed to the Football premier league in the country and been doing excellent results ever since.

Challenges: As a new player in the premiership, Al Fateh needed business oriented minds to grow the club financially and commercially. They also needed systemised marketing strategies and brand engagement in all levels. However, all of these activities needed funds to make them happen and these funds should come from strong committed sponsors. This is easier said than achieved of course, the club is a new player and ranked 8^th in the first season, so chances were very limited.

Achievements:

Stage one: No planning is planning to fail. Keeping this our motto, we’ve embarked along with Al Fateh management to set a comprehensive action plan for the year to come, including the projects that we think would work best and aligned with Al Fateh’s vision. Then we moved into mapping viable commercial assets, innovating others, pricing them, and listing them in an interactive document that allows potential sponsors to electronically select the assets that find fitting their budgets and marketing needs. Then, we created a strong case around sports sponsorship as a medium for PR, Marketing, sales and others, answering the questions of “why should a company choose to sponsor a club?”, “how does sponsorship fits in a company’s overall marketing strategy”, “what benefits can a company get from sponsorships?”… The document also includes case studies and statistics around sponsorship from around the globe.

The outcome of stage one was:

1. Yearly Action Plan Gant Chart
2. Strong sponsorship document
3. Interactive list of innovative commercial assets

Stage two: At the moment, stage two is work in progress, where after signing an important sponsorship deal with Kia Motors, the time now is to move forward with top-of-the-line marketing initiatives. Two weeks ago, we’ve organized a brand purpose workshop and as a result we now have created a statement of purpose for the brand Al Fateh that will be held sacred across the club.

What is next?

• Brand Development
• Web Portal
• Ticketing & CRM
• Corporate Campaigns
• Match-day Experiences

Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank – Abu Dhabi (2010)

Overview: Abu Dhabi Islamic bank pride itself with Islamic values. At the heart of Abu Dhabi ADIB is one of the pioneering banks in terms of application of financial services that is sharia’a compliant.

Challenge: Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank wants to launch an internal campaign following a new brand development. This renovation of ADIB’s brand identity comes along with a whole set of brand attributes, vision, mission, values and work ethics that reflects a new era in the bank’s history. How to educate and leave an impact on the bank’s 1,600 employees?

Achievements: We’ve tackled this challenge on the following counters:

1. Leadership briefing: to make sure we have the buy-in from everyone at the bank, we started with the top. A briefing session from the CEO and board of directors explaining the plan and their roles of facilitating and capitalizing on the upcoming events.
2. Brand ambassadors programme: The bank is big, around two thousand employees distributed on hundreds of branches across the UAE, so we can’t effectively coach each and every single employee on a man-to-man basis unless we’ve got millions of Dirhams to spend. Alternatively, we’ve selected key individuals and opinion leaders within the bank that we think they have the ability to inspire the people around them and act as role models and brand ambassadors. Then we put them together for a workshop full of activities and fun exercises that makes the brand attributes memorable, so that they leave with the right knowledge and tools to help others understand and live the new brand of ADIB.
3. Brand values training – Train the trainer: this is another concentrated session for handful of ambassadors who outshine the rest in terms of leadership, presentation skills and understanding of the new brand. This group will be given intensive two-days training plus other material and handouts so that when they are back in their branches, they’d need to organize training sessions for their colleagues.
4. CEO town hall: Finally at the end of the two-month inauguration program, a CEO town hall was launched in which the new logo was revealed. The event attended by all employees in one gigantic hall in Abu Dhabi and attended by board of directors and prestigious figures in the country. The CEO finally had an inspirational speech by its end the logo was revealed with a blast audiovisual representation.
5. Supporting collaterals: of course we’ve planned and executed the above-mentioned events from scratch. This includes creating ideas, generating concepts, artwork, music, effects, interactive digital material, films & video and other printed collaterals. Producing an internal communication campaign from A to Z was the end product.