By Brian Costa
For decades, professional golf has had a stable business model.
Corporate sponsors pay millions to put their names on tournaments
in deals that also require them to buy commercial time during
broadcasts. That, in turn, drives more revenue to the PGA Tour
through broadcast-rights deals.
But as with all professional sports, the landscape for the Tour
is growing more complex. Traditional television viewership is in
decline. Even as tournaments will pay out a record $363 million in
prize money this season, Tour executives are trying to figure out
how to reach a wider audience through a greater array of media
channels.
At the center of that effort is Joe Arcuri, who joined the Tour
as chief marketing officer in June 2017 after a two-year stint at
Newell Rubbermaid. He previously spent more than 25 years in
marketing, product development and other roles at Procter &
Gamble.
Mr. Arcuri talked with The Wall Street Journal about what kinds
of new fans the PGA Tour is chasing and how it is trying to engage
them. Following are edited excerpts.
Making a connection
WSJ: How is marketing professional golf similar to marketing
consumer packaged goods, as you've done for much of your career,
and how is it different?
MR. ARCURI: What I've found similar is how fundamental the power
of your ideas is, and the ability to create authentic and engaging
connections with your consumer, or in our case our fan. That
remains the fuel of great brand-building, and the Tour brand is no
exception.
The biggest difference is the higher degree of unpredictability
inherent in marketing a sport, given the week-to-week variables of
live competition. What you have to get really good at is real-time
storytelling. You need to be very nimble week-to-week on the story
lines that are occurring.
One example is from last year's Northern Trust tournament, our
first FedExCup playoffs event, when we saw a battle develop down
the stretch between Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth. As the
afternoon progressed, we produced highlights as it took place and
pushed them to sports fans that we knew were watching or involved
in other sports that day.
We were able to capitalize on a moment and put it in front of
fans who didn't know it was happening in real time.
WSJ: What are the Tour's biggest marketing priorities for
2018?
MR. ARCURI: My overall focus is to grow new fans. We have a very
strong and affluent core fan base to build on. But to future-proof
the Tour, we need to make sure that we're attracting and growing
new fans. We've been shaping our marketing plans through a
fans-first lens to ensure that our media, our partnership deals,
our content across all platforms, right to our on-site tournament
experience, will allow us to reach beyond that core fan and attract
new fan segments.
WSJ: Who are those new fans?
MR. ARCURI: We're trying to attract millennials, but also what
we call sports socialites. Those are a more diverse group of fans.
They skew a little bit younger than our core base. They're more
diverse in general, and they consume the product at a high rate on
both digital and social platforms.
WSJ: What makes "sports socialites" distinct from
millennials?
MR. ARCURI: It's not an age thing. It's more a mind-set of how
they want to interact with the sport. They are as interested in
what we call outside-the-ropes stories as inside-the-ropes stories
and competition content. They're interested in what's going on with
our players beyond just the competitive action. They have a broader
sense of the sport and want to engage with it on different
levels.
Fan content
WSJ: What is the Tour doing to try to better engage those
groups?
MR. ARCURI: We are doubling down on our commitment to technology
and innovation. We were one of the first sports to put out our
broadcast via Twitter. We're partnering with Intel to produce and
globally distribute live virtual reality and live 360-degree videos
at our Tour events in 2018. And we've recently relaxed our
social-media guidelines for our players and our fans, to encourage
them to create more content.
Jordan Spieth's holed bunker shot to win the Travelers
Championship last year was a great example, how fans brought that
to life with videos shot from the gallery. We loosened our
social-media rules to allow fans to share these moments, and we
were then able to find and compile them into a compelling clip that
allowed fans that missed it to feel what it was like to be there
when Jordan made that shot.
WSJ: Have any of these efforts to attract more millennials had a
quantifiable impact so far?
MR. ARCURI: During the FedExCup playoffs last year, we saw 29%
year-over-year growth on our digital properties among this group,
and since August of last year, our fans in this segment on Facebook
have grown 39%.
WSJ: The number of golfers in the U.S. has dropped over the past
decade. Do you see potential to build engagement with younger
people even if they don't play the game?
MR. ARCURI: Yes, I think that is key. The growth of Topgolf, the
entertainment-venue chain, shows there's plenty of interest in
golf. It's just how you define consuming the product. Is it playing
the four- or five-hour round on the weekends? Or is it consuming
golf in other ways?
I think you appreciate the game more if you actually have given
it a try, but we're finding plenty of fans who love the game of
golf, love the PGA Tour brand and the events we put on every week,
that you wouldn't call traditional golfers.
WSJ: Tiger Woods came into 2018 looking healthier than he had
been in years. Can the Tour ever build a marketing plan around him
again, given all the injuries he has had?
MR. ARCURI: It would certainly be great for the game to see him
in the mix with the very players he inspired to take up the game.
For me, that would be special.
But that's probably where the real-time storytelling would come
in. We would see. We build our plans around what is happening in
the game. We have so many great players.
WSJ: How has analytics changed your job?
MR. ARCURI: Analytics are key to our fan work. We've been
investing in developing the right fan analytics capabilities, and
believe that we have them. We can do real-time understanding of our
fan consumption across all of our media platforms.
This goes beyond just keeping score on how well we're doing on
fan media consumption. It allows us to quickly learn what content
is landing with each of these fan segments, and therefore which
ones to further invest in or not.
The same example from Jordan's hole-out to win a playoff at the
Travelers Championship comes immediately to mind. Our suite of
social analytics and listening tools showed us quickly that the
content was getting tremendous traction through our own channels,
and we did two things. First, we amplified the content we had
already produced by pushing it through advertising to targeted new
audiences that hadn't yet seen it. And second, we moved to quickly
produce new content, including the mix of fan-collected video I
mentioned to create other ways for fans to experience the
moment.
Mr. Costa is a Wall Street Journal reporter in New York. He can
be reached at brian.costa@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 19, 2018 22:24 ET (03:24 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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