The Big Interview: Mick Desmond

All England Lawn Tennis Club commercial director Mick Desmond speaks to sportindustry.biz about forging successful commercial partnerships and building the brand at The Championships, Wimbledon.

The Wimbledon brand is built on history and tradition; it seems almost from before a time of commercialisation. How do you preserve this timelessness while still meeting commercial needs?

In terms of preservation, it’s a balance. History and tradition is a very important part of the brand: we’re trying to personify tennis in the English garden. That’s very important but at the same time we’ve got to innovate.

In terms of commercialisation, you won’t see brand logos around the ground, apart from where they would naturally appear. On-court, people are playing with Slazenger balls, the umpires and ball boys are dressed in Ralph Lauren, you’ve got physical Rolex clocks and off-court, you’ve got Lavazza coffee and Stella Artois beer being served. On-site, you’ll see the brands as the brands appear.

Off-site, we work with our partners to celebrate The Championships. The great thing about working with our partners is that they see Wimbledon as the hero brand and want to celebrate their relationship with us. Firms will work with us on their activations and their advertising but on-site they all buy into the fact that we’re not going to plaster the site with banners, logos, otherwise the brand disappears. The premium they enjoy disappears.

The best example we had in terms of showing our partners what the site would look like if we did this was the 2012 Olympics. Two weeks after The Championships had finished, we handed over the site to LOCOG [the London Committee for the Olympic Games] and invited all our partners. The grounds were covered in pink and plastered with advertising and they were shocked. They said it just didn’t feel like Wimbledon.

This timelessness of Wimbledon is what creates value: this is the brand and how it’s reflected around the world is a celebration of it. If we stay true to the brand, the premium we get from our partners will continue to come in.

What sort of brand makes a good partner for Wimbledon?

Well, we don’t have sponsors so effectively all our partners are official suppliers, either of a good or a service.

So what that really means is that we don’t have a long tail of partners. If you look at Manchester United, which is a fantastic brand and a complete success story, they have about 100 partners. Could I name them? No. But credit to them, they’ve chased the money and it works for them.

We don’t seek to have a long tail of partners. At the moment, we’ve only got 13 partners and the most it would ever be is 15. And they have to provide something to us and it’s that celebration that becomes the partnership.

Our partners are very important to us. And our broadcast partners are very important to us too. By the far the biggest income that comes into the club is our broadcasting. They pay us huge premiums, over and above other sporting events, partly because the site looks so stunning.

In all our research, in our partners’ and broadcasters’ research, Wimbledon is one of those sports that transcends the usual audience; it’s an event as well as a sports event, like the Olympics and the Augusta Masters, because it has its own story, a different narrative to the rest of sport.

For us, a good partner is one that is happy to work with that and celebrate it.

Is your relationship with the BBC an example of this? How important is it to you?

It’s very important. To be fair the BBC, they’ve always been cutting edge with us and we’ve been together for coming up to 80 years. All their innovation has been here: the first outside broadcast, the first colour broadcast, the first HD broadcast, the first 3D broadcast in sport in the UK. They’re very good partners.

I can’t think of a media partner in the UK, and this is having competed against them for 24 years at ITV, who can deliver what they deliver for The Championships because it’s not just about the tennis. If you think about this week and the amount of on-air promotion that’s going out across their radio and digital assets, we’ll be fully immersed in their news, breakfast and kids coverage. All of a sudden the BBC becomes Wimbledon.

Looking around the world and seeing the types of partners that we have, strong as they are, it is very difficult for a free-to-air advertising partner, certainly in Europe, to take us because they’re not willing to put us in their prime time, whereas the BBC just clear the schedule and that’s that.

It’s good for them. Back in 2013, when Andy won here, the BBC earned a 17.5 million audience, their biggest audience for any programme in the UK by a long way.

And for us, it’s not just about the money, it’s about the coverage, reach, narrative, the vision, and that’s like all our partners.

Can you put a price on that? When competition opens for the broadcasting rights, could the BBC be outbid?

The BBC could be outbid every time. But providing they remain competitive, our desire would be to remain with them because they do such a fantastic job for us.

Wimbledon’s partnership with Slazenger is in its 113^th year and it has just been renewed for another four years. What makes the partnership so successful?

First and foremost, it is because it outdates all of us. It’s been here from the start. It’s part of the brand because it’s become so synonymous with the brand to so many generations, who have grown up watching Wimbledon and playing tennis with Slazenger balls.

And it’s because they’ve stayed true to their brand as well. Like I’ve said, it’s a celebration of a partnership. Each championship ball is different because you have a ball for each surface and Slazenger work very closely with us in terms of the quality and consistency of the ball. They carry out lots of testing and they work very closely with our ground staff.

It’s not just about money. Of course we want to be competitive and get the best deal we can. In certain categories, we have brought new partners in or we will go out to tender but where we have an incumbent who performs and continues to stay competitive, providing a good marketing fee for us and celebrating our brand then we therefore won’t put it out to tender.

You’ve previously mentioned a need to engage with a younger audience in the UK. How do you do that and how successful has it been?

All out digital assets become far more important there. It’s not just our website or our app, we’re very engaged with social media, we have a good relationship with social media from more established Facebook and Twitter through to Periscope and Snapchat and that’s very important.

But I think we’re doing a good job. If you look at the mix we have in terms of people coming in, you’ve got that core middle-England audience, you’ve got the corporates, you’ve got the royal box and the members, but if you walk around Henman Hill, it’s fantastic, you’ve got people sitting on blankets with a few beers or a glass of champagne watching the big screen and engaging with Wimbledon as they would any other sporting event.

We want to keep up this mix. We want to protect that qualitative aspect of Wimbledon, that something special, but we don’t want to be elitist. We want to engage and allow people to celebrate The Championships.

The Championships, Wimbledon runs until 12^th July 2015.

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