Basketball Champions League hosts Club Marketing & Digital Workshop

MIES (Switzerland) - For the fourth consecutive year, the Basketball Champions League hosted a Club Marketing & Digital Workshop from Tuesday to Thursday. 

All participating teams were invited to this workshop that highlighted some key commercial and marketing concepts and offered cutting-edge insights on media and digital strategy, fan experience and engagement. 

"It is a great pleasure to organize such Club Marketing & Digital Workshop for all our participating clubs," said Patrick Comninos, CEO of the Basketball Champions League. "Especially in this delicate period, where engaging your fans and marketing your brand are paramount. The main objective of such a workshop is to align all stakeholders on digital, marketing and commercial aspects, but also to emphasize all media and digital services offered to our clubs. This type of meeting is part of a larger effort to grow our community, share and gain experience and develop the competition together."

An assessment shared by our participating teams. "Some of the BCL clubs are very well experienced with marketing communications especially those who play 3+ years in European competitions," said Efe Sekerci, Head of Marketing & Communications for Tofas Bursa. "For me it’s very important to share good experiences to other clubs. That can also make a good synergy among BCL clubs and bring their management staff closer. Good synergy makes a good competition (not only at the court level but at the level of marketing communication activations as well), good competition survives and this sustainable market lives with decent (also new) partnerships. It’s all bounded."

"All clubs (actually everyone around the world) are currently facing very different and unseen problems. These kinds of workshops help the teams to face the current situation, sharing experience and points of views with other teams. It also allows to foster new ideas. Being connected and sharing ideas to solve problems easily," he added.

George Aivazoglou, Vice President, Head of Fan Engagement & Direct To Consumer Europe & Middle East, and Zach Aronberg, EME Marketing Manager and Social Media Lead, for NBA Europe, were among the speakers and presented key insights on NBA marketing and social media engagement.

Igor Kubik, Strategic Partner Manager at YouTube, gave a comprehensive presentation on the various fan engagement and revenue generation growth possibilities on the YouTube channel.

"This is a very important meeting that we look forward to every season for different reasons : the exchange between all the clubs is an exceptional way to discover and be inspired by different ways of working and communicating," said Pierre Fleutelot, from JDA Dijon, who also presented (together with Jaime Ruiz Tomé from Hereda San Pablo Burgos) some of the best practices in terms of digital strategy from a club's perspective.

"What I also like about this annual meeting are the presentations from different world structures which are enriching and invite us to see and think further, bigger. The various exchanges that we have during this meeting allow us to adjust our communication thanks to the good practices presented by the speakers, but also to be able to enrich it through the group work that we carry out together. A way of asserting that it is a competition made for the clubs and by the clubs," he added.

Michael Lynch, Partner at 3 Emerald Marketing and former Head of Global Sponsorship Marketing at Visa Inc. and Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer for the World Surf League, was also present to share strategic marketing and sponsoring guidelines.

Rina Rasolofoniaina, Senior Social Media Manager at ONE Championship, finally developed and presented the digital and social media content strategy of ONE Championship, a Mixed Martial Arts property based in Singapore, widely considered as the largest global sports media property in Asia.

"For us, it is important to have these kinds of workshops because we can learn so much from it," said Johannes Nusko from Brose Bamberg. "During the season we look at ourselves most of the time so it's great to be able to see what other teams and companies are doing and experiencing. It gives us the opportunity to stay in touch with them and gain important insights. Also it's just nice to see everybody from the BCL family from time to time again."

"As already mentioned, they give us additional information. Most importantly, they keep us updated with the latest trends. For us it's not always possible to try out all the things we would like to do. With these workshops we can see how other teams are handling those topics. That helps us avoiding mistakes when we get to try it ourselves. Adding the knowledge of experts from the NBA, YouTube or others is the icing on the cake that shows what can be achieved. At the same time it gives us a path on how to be successful at a smaller level, too," he added.

Due to the current situation, the workshop was organised online and gathered 64 representatives from all participating clubs