Ed Erhardt

World Screen Weekly, October 23, 2008

President

ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales

If a media company has a strong, identifiable brand and fiercely loyal viewers, it is well positioned to cut through today’s cluttered multichannel, multiplatform media environment. And that is certainly the case with ESPN. It is recognized around the world and has faithful fans that associate its name with quality sports coverage.

Ed Erhardt, the president of ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales, has been leading a sales team that translates these brand attributes into enticing opportunities for advertisers across the numerous platforms under the ESPN umbrella, including ESPN’s seven U.S. networks, ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine, ESPN Outdoors, ESPN Radio, ESPN International and ESPN Mobile and Wireless. Erhardt’s team is also responsible for ESPN’s programming that appears on ABC.

Erhardt is keenly aware of the audience fragmentation in the market and how advertisers are constantly trying to navigate through it. “One of the reasons why sports, and in particular big event sports, are so valuable now is that advertisers know the audience is passionate about the content,” he says. “And, depending on the event, the audience is not only large but pretty constant.” For advertisers, sports are a safe buy.

“The reality is that the combination of passion, big event, big audience, safety and now more than ever, of sports being a genre that is probably one of the best [genres] for multi-screen applications. It’s very attractive programming to be able to bring to the market.”

ESPN has an extraordinary relationship with sports fans, explains Erhardt. “So their expectation of us is that whatever screen they’re using, ESPN will be there to help them enjoy the game and understand the game: it’s not only what happens on the field, it’s what happens before the kick, after the goal, in the studio, and so on. We’ve excelled with that multi-screen approach because our research now shows that sports fans tend to migrate to the most available screen.”

As an example, Erhardt’s points to a children’s soccer game on a Saturday afternoon. The parents are watching their kids while at the same time keeping an eye on their mobile phones to catch up on sports scores, updates or highlights. If fans are in the office, they’ll go to ESPN.com because the computer is the most available screen. “If they’re at home and we have a big event on, or if they want to get their fix of SportsCenter, they obviously migrate to the TV screen,” explains Erhardt. And audio is also a very popular venue for ESPN; its podcasts are regularly among the top-ranked on iTunes. ESPN also offers live streams of ESPN radio stations through ESPNRadio.com.

ESPN has been able to leverage its extremely popular programming in significant cross-platform deals, which are becoming increasingly important for the company. “For us it really starts with the idea, not necessarily with our platforms,” notes Erhardt. “It’s about creating an idea that takes advantage of the platforms that are pertinent to the advertiser’s marketing objectives. So in some cases that will be all of our platforms, but in many cases it will be television and digital, or radio and television, or print and digital.”

Erhardt cites two examples of such deals. The first is one ESPN did with the insurance company Geico. “Geico has a terrific history of creating characters that endear the brand to consumers: the lizard and, of course, the cavemen,” explains Erhardt. “We felt, what if we were able to take the cavemen and make them spokespeople for ESPN’s upcoming schedule and its Fantasy Football programming? The Geico brand is cheeky like we are and we had an opening for a sponsor for our ESPN Fantasy Football game, which is a huge, huge business now in the U.S.—we’ve seen 85-percent growth just since 2006,” Erhardt continues. “We ran all those spots, branding the cavemen on the fantasy site on ESPN.com. Fans can enter their picks through mobile, through digital, as well as see how the experts are doing on our Fantasy Football shows, which appear on both ESPN.com and on ESPN. Geico gets that relationship to all of those brands and that is an example [of a marketing initiative] that traveled across all of our mediums."

ESPN has applied the cross-platform approach to its international channels as well. In the U.S., ESPN had made its premier program SportsCenter available exclusively to one advertiser. Erhardt and his team decided to replicate this model for a cross-platform buy for the U.S. and Latin America in a deal done with Warner Bros.

“The idea is one advertiser has all of SportsCenter to themselves,” explains Erhardt. “It’s an hour-long show, we cut the commercial load from 16 minutes to eight minutes and we basically let the advertiser use the eight minutes anyway they like. If they want eight 30-second spots, they can do that. If they want four 2-minute spots or billboards at the beginning and end with callouts to get you to ESPN.com and so on and so forth.

“We took that idea to Warner Bros. for the Will Smith movie I Am Legend,” he continues. “We cleared all commercials in SportsCenter in our six different feeds throughout Latin America and just ran Warner Bros. versions in both Portuguese and Spanish. And then had the website support it.”

Both initiatives started again with the fan in mind, explains Erhardt. “Would the fans be interested in having the cavemen help them play Fantasy Football? We think so. Would the fans enjoy SportsCenter from one advertiser with less commercial interruptions? We think so. Can those ideas travel across platforms, across screens or across continents? We thought that in those two instances they could.

“We don’t think, We do it this way in the U.S. so that’s how we are going to do it in Brazil or London,” continues Erhardt. “We know that the process of starting with the fan and thinking creatively about how brands connect works everywhere. And if our brand promise can continue to travel through all these various media around the world, then we are going to be ahead of the game because we understand our brand so well. And media companies don’t always have the luxury of being a brand—they are just a medium. So if you understand your brand really well, it sure makes it easier to be creative with advertisers. We want to bring that idea around the world and find the right way to do it in every country.”