Women’s Pro Soccer Puts Best Marketing Foot Forward
The Women’s Professional Soccer league survived a rough first year that saw its regular season leader, the Los Angeles Sol, disbanded in an owners’ dispute. Now, with two new expansion teams in Philadelphia and Atlanta added to the roster, WPS is preparing to launch its second season with Kick-Off Week promotions tailored for three of its team locales.
The campaign from Pereira & O’Dell will include TV, social media and online ads, but the most interesting part will be building-side projections of star players from the Washington Freedom, Sky Blue FC and Chicago Red Stars that will go up in their home markets before the teams’ home opener games later this month.
The projections will go up for three nights before each team’s opening game and will show the WPS star, the local team logo and its opponent, and the date, time and place of the match. Viewers will be encouraged to “defend” Chicago, Washington DC or New Jersey. (The Sky Blue Football Club makes its home in a stadium at Rutgers University in Piscataway NJ.)
They will also be invited to text “WPS” to a mobile short code along with a short message of support. That message will then show up in an automated crawl under the ad’s headline.
“Projections have come a long way with high-definition images that are brighter and to scale,” P. J. Pereira, co-founder and chief creative officer of Pereira & O’Dell, said in a release. “The gigantic projections will seem as if the players’ warm-up exercises are actually shaking the foundation of the building. And that is what we’re looking to do: Shake things up.”
The out-of-home ads exhort viewers to “See Extraordinary”, which also serves as the tagline for a 30-second TV spot to air on April 11 on the Fox Soccer Channel during the inaugural “WPS Sunday on FSC” broadcast.
In addition to the outdoor-mobile cross-platform promotion and the TV spot, WPS will also be promoting Kick-Off Week on its Web site, and those of its eight teams. Promotional messages and content will also appear on the WPS “Fan Corner” community site, on its Facebook page, and on Twitter, where players will be tweeting from the sidelines this season.
Tying into the overall campaign theme, fans on Twitter can “talk trash” in the days before game day by posting with the #DYT hashtag, for “Defend Your Turf”.
Following its rollout for 2010 Kick-Off Week, the “See Extraordinary” theme will be used later during the WPS All-Star Game presented by the U.S. Coast Guard, and the WPS Championship, the league’s two most important national events.
“Our 2010 campaign includes more guerilla marketing and grassroots promotions with new media elements to energize hardcore fans and build buzz for the league on a broader scale,” WPS marketing director Rachel Epstein said in a release. “These initiatives will not only command attention but craft team loyalty at both niche and mainstream levels.”
At the end of March the WPS Web site unveiled a number of new enhancements in preparation for the coming season. These included the first-ever WPS Fantasy Challenge, in which registered fans get to choose their dream roster from the WPS players and follow their virtual teams’ fortunes through the coming season.
WPS Fantasy Challenge players will amass weekly points based on how their players perform in real games. Weekly prizes of team fan wear will be handed out for high point scores, and the top ten overall fantasy team owners at the end of the season will receive prize packages, including an assortment of Puma soccer gear for the point winner.
In a press interview this month, WPS commissioner Tonya Antonucci reported that the league’s season ticket sales are up 20% and local team sponsorships have increased an average of 150% from last season.
She said the WPS is aiming for modest fan growth this year of between 5% and 10% and an average of 5,000 fans for each of its eight teams, up from 4,600 per team in 2009.
