The SIG Column – 14 March

Chime Communications’ purchase of Fast Track gave the sports
marketing agency a multi-million pound price tag but the deal represented more
than just a financial success story. Drew Barrand, head of media at Sport
Industry Group, explains…

“It’s easy to get carried away by the financial implications of this week’s
big agency news story but in truth there’s a larger issue at stake here. Selling
their agency to Lord Bell’s Chime Communications to the tune of £15m represented
something more wide reaching than just a smart piece of financial business by
Fast Track’s management team.

By joining Chime and moving to become part of the network agency world, Fast
Track became the last major UK sports marketing agency to lose its independent
status.

This is not to denigrate the achievements of the smaller agencies plying
their trade in the UK sports marketing industry who remain independently owned
but, with Fast Track now part of a bigger network, all of the major players now
report in to a bigger global fish.

Big media networks looking to snap up sports marketing agencies has been a
growing trend for a while now but with all the major players taking up the
opportunity, is this lack of independence something that we as an industry
should be concerned about?

Let’s look at the positives first. Putting aside for one moment the huge
payday these deals can bring a sports marketing agency, there are undoubtedly
major advantages in being part of bigger, wider global networks.

Access to their new sibling agencies’ clients and much improved financial
muscle with which to impact the market are the two biggest plusses for the
agency concerned, ably supported by the ability to play on a global stage and
the prospect of offering clients an increasing array of services.

Nor is it just the agency that wins. As an industry we also stand to gain
from this trend if only because it shows the growing demand in which sport as a
marketing vehicle is now held within the wider media world.

With brands reducing the vast millions they spend on TV advertising to look
at other, more effective ways of reaching the consumer, sport is perfectly
positioned to provide the answer – a fact that has clearly been noticed by the
powers that be in the hierarchy of global media.

The fact is that the agency networks need to be able to tell clients that
they can ‘do’ sports marketing and having two people in the corner of an office
in the outer reaches of middle America can no longer justify this claim.
Experience is needed and the networks are buying it by bringing in the formerly
independent experts.

And so to the negatives. Becoming part of a bigger business brings with it a
host of increased administrational duties but, ignoring the red tape issue for a
moment, the single biggest problem is the perceived loss of flexibility.

Network agencies will claim til they are blue in the face that they are
flexible businesses but in truth it’s a claim that’s difficult to believe given
that every single decision of any standing will need to go through more board
meetings than most independents have in a year to discuss their entire business.

Responding to clients’ increasing need to react quickly to market moves is
the biggest challenge facing agency networks today and there is a danger that
sports marketing could lose its speed of thought by signing up to the big money
world of global media.

Add in to this the pitfall that many fall prey to of no longer giving the
client the single-minded attention they had previously, and all of a sudden the
scenario doesn’t look so rosy.

One of the biggest advantages of sport is that it reaches consumers on a very
personal and emotional level. Handing over control of sport’s future marketing
approach to the global media factory that other marketing platforms live in
could turn this personal relationship into just another commercial message.

Consumers are advertising savvy and they don’t like to be knowingly sold to.
They haven’t minded it with sport in the past because the focus has been
on the sport and not the advertising. If this scenario reverses, as it could do
by sport joining the world of big media business, then sport will be in danger
of losing its biggest selling point.”