The Big Interview: EFL
With the English Football League (EFL) season now underway, EFL marketing director Drew Barrand talks about the governing body’s rebrand and what’s next for its digital offerings…
You’ve recently undergone a huge rebrand, both digitally and aesthetically, what were the main reasons behind the change?
It’s twofold really, firstly, the Football League hadn’t evolved as a brand in well over a decade. Just like anything, it wasn’t that the old strategy was broken, it just stopped being relevant. A lot has moved on in that period, we’ve had the advancement in social media, the growth of digital platforms and things are different to what they were. It just needed that overhaul and modern twist put on it.
The second thing was, were we fit for purpose from a commercial perspective? We’ve got a clear commercial goal in that we need to deliver as much revenue as we possibly can to our member clubs, that’s what helps them to succeed and that’s the real value of being part of the collective model. Essentially, what we needed to do was deliver a brand that people wanted to invest in and drive revenue forward. Be that broadcasters, sponsors, digital partners or whatever it might be and increase the value of the rights that we sell. That was the main thinking at the start of the project.
With the EFL, there’s the national level with local brands, but there’s also an international level, what do you hope to portray on an international stage with the rebrand?
Essentially, it’s about having a very clear description about what it is that you are. One of the big challenges was, when I first started looking at the rebrand, it wasn’t that I actually wanted to change a 128-year-old brand, but the reality was the name, ‘The Football League’ was about as generic as you can get. To someone who wasn’t a hardcore fan of the league, it wasn’t the greatest introduction, is it American football? what league? what country? Particularly when you are talking about international fans.
We needed to come up with a name that was a true reflection of what we were, but also gave people an entry point that was quick and simple. You only have to look at the make-up of what we are, we are domestic club football in England and if that’s what we are, then why don’t we call ourselves that? Hence why we got to English Football League and then for a more modern audience EFL as something you can use across all digital broadcast channels.
Is investment in digital the key for EFL to engage fans moving forward?
It absolutely is, with international fans as well, you can’t necessarily get them to come to our games and our primary objective is to get people to go to games – that is absolutely crucial of driving attendance as that’s what creates the atmosphere and the product. If you’re in a position where you physically can’t get to games because you live overseas or you don’t happen to be around that day or night, we’ve got to find a way to engage and digital is the way to do that. What’s happened historically is governing bodies and rights holders, in real terms, have not been set up to market themselves because they’ve always relied on their broadcast and commercial partners to do it for them. What happens with that, which is nothing against our commercial partners who are brilliant with us, is that their brand comes first, particularly if you’re not considered to be top tier content like the Premier League, Olympics and World Cups. We have to be realistic, we are not and we have to take a lot more responsibility for marketing ourselves and that means you have to actually create a brand, have a narrative, something to say and a way of communicating it – that’s what the rebrand is all about.
With three leagues to cover, plus trophy matches, what are the biggest challenges the brand faces?
It’s the greatest benefit and the greatest curse in a way is that when I looked there were around 300 businesses who are on a day-to-day basis interacting with our brand. 72 clubs that cover the whole country, 200 broadcasters worldwide, any number of commercial partners, all the football bodies – we sit in the middle and deal with the Premier League at the top and National League at the bottom – we are pivotal with The FA. If you can get the marketing channel for those 300 businesses all saying the same thing at the same time that is hugely powerful. The problem is, how do you do it? Developing that level of consistency isn’t something that we’ve been able to achieve in the past and I think half of it is that we didn’t have the right tools. So we created the right tools, we are delivering consistency and we’ve now got a launch campaign called ‘EFL Stories’ which is incorporating the work of the 72 clubs, our broadcast partners are involved with it and the vast majority of our sponsors are too. It shows if you create the right tools and get everybody engaged, you can create that consistency.
What is the aim of the EFL Stories campaign?
I believe that the brand narrative of the EFL is the breadth and depth of its offering, in that whatever you want out of football, the league can deliver that experience. If you want three points, trophies and promotion then we can do that, we’ve got great finals at Wembley, fantastic Championship opportunities with the richest game in the world and all of that. If the reason you love football is because it’s part of your community, family and life, then we’ve got all that too and I believe that’s what sets us apart – we can deliver on both sides.
For us, it’s about how we best communicate that, the best way to do that is to get the people that are part of the community to share their stories because it’s those anecdotes that show the breadth and depth of what we offer. We’ve got a fan of every club and we’ll be pushing their stories out via various different marketing channels to showcase what it is. For some fans, their greatest memory is winning the Play-Off Final, winning promotion or beating their derby rivals. For others it’s about the time they went with their grandad, their cousin and uncle and had a big family moment. We’ve got all of that, we just need to talk about it and that is what EFL Stories is about, it’s about basically showing what is great about the EFL.
How are you hoping to see the rebrand and digital push translate into engagement and ultimately more people attending matches?
What we’ve got to be telling fans is that the EFL is a great thing to be a part of. Whether that’s watching the content on broadcast or digital channels, engaging on a day-to-day basis or attending a match. By communicating the new brand and narrative and campaigns like EFL Stories that’s our best way of doing that, it’s telling people it’s a great thing to be part of.
You had 175 applications from agencies interested and you appointed Realise and NeuLion for digital going forward, what were the reasons behind the appointments?
The biggest thing that we had from a digital platform, which makes us slightly unique, is the collective model under the EFL Digital umbrella. The model works in theory, it just needed a bit of a revamp to appoint some suppliers that could deliver not what a club used to be five years ago, but what it’s going to in five to ten years’ time. A lot of that is around video content, ease of navigation and capability on different devices. As is true of our membership we are beholden to them to make sure we are a transparent process, in that we consider all options before appointing suppliers because that’s what they ask us to do. So we opened it up to the market, 175 agencies applied in some form or another in varying degrees, we needed to do it and it was quite laborious. Some of them weren’t fit for purpose or couldn’t deliver what we wanted and ultimately at the end of the three to six-month process we’ve ended up with two suppliers we believe that can provide an amazing digital platform for our clubs and deliver growth in audience and commercial revenue off the back of that. The hard work starts here in order to build that to go live in June 2017.
What do you hope you can bring to the table that you couldn’t previously offer?
A greater level of engagement and greater level of access to content. It’s no secret that digital is a great way of getting your content across and increasing your eyeballs. You’ve got to have a great platform that enables you to do that, absolutely we have to be fit for purpose and not just now, but also in the six-year term that we’ve appointed these suppliers. That’s the hard bit because no one has a crystal ball and you can’t say what digital is going to look like in a year’s time let alone six years’ time. It’s about being flexible and having partners in the truest sense who can work with you and help you evolve your product. Quite frankly, right now, from a digital perspective, if you were to list rights holders and governing bodies, we’d probably be somewhere near the bottom, but I think very quickly we can get somewhere near the top. That’s what this process is about and this is the starting point, fundamentally we’ve got to build it and the hard work starts here.
Realise has been charged with the CMS for clubs to use, what are the main challenges you want to overcome with that?
The biggest problem with the website and the CMS is it needs to be really flexible. We’ve got huge variants in capability, scope and resource across the league. You’ve got clubs who have one person all the way up to the teams at the top of the Championship who have big media teams. You’ve got to create a platform for everybody to use and deliver on the requirements of all the clubs, some are more sophisticated others are not.
We’ve got to allow teams to be better at what they’re doing, we create the framework but they’re uploading the content and you want it to be as good as possible. That’s what drives the eyeballs and that’s what drives the revenue.
The biggest challenge and one that Realise was really strong at in their response was the real acknowledgement of what clubs need. Sometimes you can deliver something that is far too sophisticated, and that’s where a lot of agencies fell down because ultimately they delivered something that wasn’t fit for purpose, it was too sophisticated. You’ve got to focus on the stuff people can do when people have the time and resource to do it.
With new clubs joining this year, including what could be considered big clubs in Newcastle and Aston Villa and an overhaul in the EFL Trophy meaning category one Premier League academy/under-21 sides are involved, is the bar set a bit higher this year?
I think it’s dangerous to set your brand out by the membership on any given season, it’s a brand for the long term and I’m sure teams like Newcastle will only set out to be with us temporarily. There is a benefit of having big clubs and fan bases as it increases your audience and opportunities, clearly we want to have as many big clubs as possible, but it isn’t to say that some of the smaller clubs are equally as valuable. Some of the best stories that sit at the heart of our narrative actually come from your Yeovil Towns, Cambridge Uniteds, Colchester Uniteds because these are the things that make us who we are.
