by Carl Magnusun
High School sports is huge in every city across the nation. Families, neighbors and business owners gather by the thousands every Friday night during football season to see the home team battle its cross-town rival. All week long, in every small town across America the water-cooler talk is about "the big game." Halley Phillips (pictured) is the Director of Digital Marketing for Big River Broadcasting in Florence Alabama. Big River figured out to tap in to that community excitement, and, they figured out how to make a little money on it as well.
RI: Can you tell us about this project?
Halley: This fall we?ve begun covering Florence Falcons? Football via a special hyper-local website www.florencefalcons.tv. Sports is huge in our area and with a new Media Span product we discovered called Game View (we saw a demo at Radio Ink?s Convergence earlier this year) we are able to broadcast our team?s games in HD to your computer, Android, iPhone or iPad.
RI: What?s the response so far?
Halley: We went on the air the day of the first game we covered and told our listeners we were trying a new way to watch the football game. With a day?s worth of promotion we had 3300 viewers tune into the game that night.
RI: 3300 viewers/listeners to an online stream from a radio station is a big number in a big market and you are in a tiny town? Why is this digital offering so popular?
Halley: Like I said, this is a big high school sports town. People around here care about the school, the team and the community. When you create content that resonates with your audience it will be successful. That?s one of the new rules for local media.
RI: What about advertiser response?
Halley: Awesome. Just awesome. This has been a great digital success for us because local businesses understand supporting and sponsoring the team. They understand a live game broadcast that looks professional. We tell them it?s like an ESPN for our town. And they get that whether it?s online or not. Then we give them on air spots, sponsor mentions and then live reads and :15 second video commercials in the game stream. Plus we do a revenue share back to the school of 50% after we cover our hard costs to produce the game feed.
RI: What?! 50%?!
Halley: Yep! The 50% going back to the school gets the sponsor excited and gives us a lot of goodwill as we?re not seen as a greedy media company exploiting the high school?We?re boosters to the school and their programs. On top of that we are getting interest from students who want to learn about sports broadcasting and so we plan to create a sports broadcasting internship for students at the schools we cover.
RI: Getting younger people involved in broadcast is crucial to the future of our industry. Good for you. I was going to ask you about the future and where you see this going and I think you hinted at it saying ??schools we cover.? Are you planning to take this to more communities in your listening area?
Halley: We plan to take this to as many schools as we can support and create a dedicated team within BRB Digital to handle the production and sponsorship sales of our high school sports network.
RI: BRB Digital? ?Since when?
Halley: Since we decided that Big River Broadcasting was going to become a serious online media competitor in our region. We now have a separate operation, BRB Digital, that handles all of our online content and revenue initiatives.
FlorenceFalcons.tv is a wonderful example of good radio?even if it is TV. Halley?s team is coming with the station?s brand behind them and that gives them the credibility to create a new product like this. They invest in the product, listeners respond with their eyes and ears. Sponsors respond by wanting to support the local school team and advertise their business. Their sponsorship results in new revenue for the station and new revenue to the school. The station gets credit all the way around for making this happen. The station, the advertisers, the listeners and school all win. Radio wins.
If you?d like to talk to Halley about this program and how they pulled it off email her at halley@brbdigital.com.
Carl Magnuson is a contributor to RadioInk.com and the Co-Creator and Director of Sales for Social Radio, a stream personalization platform for radio stations. Reach him with your digital content and monetization success stories at Carl@SocialRadio.org.
View the Florence Falcons? sports site at http://www.florencefalcons.tv
Take a look at the Game View platform here: http://www.gameview.tv
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