You reckon Fox were averaging 300k in ratings for the BBL because of billboards?

Right....

For those that don't know about advertising and how it works, I'll give you an example. A few years ago, service stations had old signage not the whizbang stuff you see today. About 8 years ago I helped get a sign approved for a convenience petrol station, and the cost of the signage was around $30k. After one month of the sign being up, the sign had paid for itself through increased patronage and revenue. There were no other external factors at play (ie. no roadworks, no recent upturn in vehicle traffic, no new traffic attractors that had opened or reopened in the vicinity in that month). In one month, the signage added enough new customers from the passing traffic that it generated an additional $30k for the store. that is why people advertise. it works.

With what FFA have achieved with the new deal for Foxtel and the inpending disaster for FTA,I would like to know why FFA aren't accountable.
Gallop and co like to talk up higher memberships,crowds and ratings,yet when this translates into a well below expectations six year Foxtel deal.(Probably less than Buckley and Lowy could have got almost two World Cups ago) and less for FTA on a Sat night ,surely that is a massive fail.
Normally when a new CEO promises to grow a business and fails they get the boot.What is the Board doing?What are the KPI's?

You forgot to say the Gallop is actually the anti Christ hiding in the FFA bunkers ... and SBS are the angles pure with no faults and beaten and taken advantage of by the out of control FFA ... 

I can see your reasoning as one day the anti Christ gets a bad coffee and has a tummy ace and then lets fly at SBS for no good reason... 

SBS rightly respond by moving the channel, broadcasting from in-house and reducing A-League coverage on TWG... then for the next two years write constant cough cough cough supportive articles about FFA. 

Just back to my post """ you said Saturday night was a problem"""" I said 


So continue to play the man not whats said ... BTW which part is wrong

1.... FFA gave the wrong games in season 1
2....  SBS refused change their broadcast style
3..... I think FFA from season two provided decent games, 
4.... but never the best .....always saved for Saturday night

And yes SBS moving channels, broadcasting from a TV screen at Sydney HQ, changing TWG and then moving it to near unwatchable times, and constantly writing articles about FFA in lets be fair not a kind way ... thats all fair and reasonable .....  I should not call it a dummy spit .. 

Let me ask you this:
Is your company on the news 4-5 times a week?
Is your company in every major newspaper? On every major radio station?
Does your company occupy 2hrs a week on an FTA network for 30 weeks a year?
Do kids idolise your staff and have posters of them in their rooms?
Is your company broadcasted across the globe?
Do 60,000 people flock to see your company at a day at work?
Is your company on every major sports website?

Or to ask another way - do people pay your company millions a year to advertise their brand on the front of it?


The only point advertising serves for the A League is controlling the message. As midfielder has stated, there is a lot of negativity surrounding our code. If we stay silent, then we don't control the negative undertones in the bulk of what is being said about our game

Being on channel 10 doesn't stop 7, 9, SBS or ABC from being negative. Being on one billboard doesn't stop another from being negative

The FFA simply have to create their own message and broadcast it. That's why an unknown and unproven league of largely state league players was able to kick off in the heart of the AFL / NRL finals

When the FFA stay silent, no amount of billboards advertising the match day and time will counter the constant negativity

And when they do speak, 3 days before the season kick off, its telling people they gotta have a team. Gimme a fucking break


This world is like being in a crowded room of 100 people all talking at the same time. The FFA's current approach is to wait until everybody draws a breath at the same time and then beg people to pay attention. The early FFA knew the only was forward was to be part of the constant chatter. That's why it was able to do much much more with less resources, a less appealing product, and being broadcasted solely on payTV

You make a reasonable point and I think the collapse in the relationship between FFA & SBS reduced the ratings to what they could have been... This has had an effect on the  FTA part of the deal.

I think the Fox deal is OK, 57 million for 6 matches is not that bad given our Fox ratings... The Fox A_league part has gone from 25 million to 57 million.... 

The FTA, overseas & digital bit seems unlikely to reach expectations.

But your overall point of FFA needing to be accountable I agree and is about to happen... 

There will be a change in governance procedures within five months and FFA will be forced to step aside from much of what they do.

I have faith in both the game and the many people in it ... its going to get a lot messier first but it will happen... I hope what we replace it with is better than what we have .. I am confident it will be..

^^^^
  Mark & Blue
You are both 100% right, an there are more 100%’s out there.

What is true is Football sits in the Australian sporting environment which is made up of say 100 + years of history and tradition. Nothing anyone does will cause dramatic change.

We are in a evolution, not a revolution.

More over and if I may take Mark’s marketing hat a second… we have many different groups to market too… and each has a way of being marketed too… to take only three of our tribes.
1… Home Ends,
2….. Soccer Mums and their kids
3….. Eurosnobs
The wants out of a match day experience between say the Home End, Soccer mum and kids and Eurosnob are in many ways different.

How do you decide which tribe or tribes you go after is a difficult call and one can annoy the other… i.e. crack down on home ends to get more soccer mums and their kids… How do you counter negativity in the press akin channel 10 [arguably our new broadcaster] making a connection between the Manchester bomber and Football….WTF …

We are close IMO to a major bump but there is no one solution, there are lots of things by lots of people needing to be done better….

Would like to know how many would tune in without the amount spent on TV advertising, Billboards and Articles about a tv show. 

Delusional

This is why sports bodies opt for spin - at least among the gullible it is swallowed whole!

The deal is for $50 million and almost certainly includes everything (contra, FTA "fall-back", internationals that are sell-able, streaming rights, etc). There is an extra $5 million a year for two extra teams of prescribed location and $15m bonus for undisclosed FTA and Fox ratings in the last 2 years. To save face after sowing so much false hope, the deal was announced with  a headline figure that had everything loaded in to it. 

In the previous deal the allegation is that the A League component was talked down so that the FFA could keep the A League club distributions down. 

yeah agree. a month or so ago the FFA put out the word to the clubs to brainstorm new ideas to bring more revenue to the game. I'm not saying the clubs shouldn't be doing this (of course they should), but isn't this primarily the responsibility of the FFA? 

Now, if the A League was a separate entity, the FFA could just sit back and relax whilst the money rolled in. It seems they are doing this and wondering why there's no money.

Well, as I said, Fox was getting 300k ratings for the BBL, which is a very large figure.

It's no surprise the BBL would get triple that number on FTA, with our without billboards (the AFL and NRL experience simlar ratios).

It would appear that it's only the A-League which doesn't experience that same ratio, often getting 1:1 between Fox and FTA.

And no amount of billboards will improve that.

No surprise there really

Football was an exclusive PayTV product for a long time. You couldn't watch the A League, Euros, EPL or even the Socceroos

A lot of football fans would have subscribed or found regular spots where they could watch games. I predicted the ratio would be 45:55 before a game was even played on FTA and I was pretty damn close

Some people did a simple multiplication of 3.33 on the payTV numbers and decided they were broken. It was SBSs fault etc... The numbers were never broken. It was foolish to expect 250k-300k for Friday night A League games based on drawing a straight line between two numbers for other sports

I agree with your possible explanation of why the ratio doesn't hold true for the A-League, which has proven to be pretty reliable for other sports, perhaps more accurate to say I agree in part.

There is still something strange going on there which cannot be explained merely by assuming that all football fans already had Foxtel (that's a huge assumption), and let's be honest, the ratio was often less than 1:1 which is crazy in the extreme.

Other possible things at play:

 - the ratings system often gives odd results for SBS, different demos, generally attracts a specific socio-economic crowd, etc.
 - I would argue it's a sign that the A-League, and perhaps football more generally, lacks the wide mass appeal associated with other sports.  People often mistakenly point to participation rates - but that has zero correlation with the sort of rusted-on support which makes people set aside time and money to watch their favourite sport (be that live or on TV).

yep the a-league is dead

It works but it depends on who is being targeted with what. For traditional brick and mortar businesses it's very much true: "a business with no sign is a sign of no business." But it simply doesn't apply for different industries. Have you ever driven past a billboard advertising pornhub? Of course not. Marketing is about knowing where the fish are and knowing what to use for bait. Many businesses don't need marketing at all. Not a cent.

Put it this way. Your generic sports fan, who watches all sports half the time doesn't even know the HAL or FFA cup is on due to the lack of advertising. These are the people who dont hate football but would watch it. A lot of Eurosnobs fall in this category too.

Best example I can give, is as a consumer I am probably the hardest to advertise to. I watch Netflix/Stan so foxtel/FTA (apart from football) is out for me, I dont listen to the radio, I listen to podcasts, my only source of news is facebook. Now I am up to date with football because I seek it out. However through facebook (shares, likes, memes, suggestions, comments, etc on my news feed) I can still tell you whats going on in the NRL, big bash and some major AFL stories. The football stuff I actively have to look for. Essentially the FFA needs an advertising company to build hype and sustain it over the season like the other sports do. There is no excuse for this because they get basically a free run in summer.

The FFA cup and HAL should be everywhere, on the signs at westfields, on the radio, billboards, social media should be basically spamming people with what games are on, or any stories, if there are no stories at the moment there should be one about how Tim Cahill and his favourite place to eat in Melb, or rumours about who may sign with what club, or how Baro says the a league is the highlight of his career, how many HAL produced players are going to bigger better things like Mooy, Mile, Ryan, Langerak, etc. This is what the other codes do. Hell even do a piece on active support to educate the masses on how its not hooliganism.

A lot of people seem to forget that big NRL and BBL games are on Saturday nights as well. There is nothing on TV on a Saturday night and to be frank, any sport on a regular commercial network would get the same kind of ratings. There are thousands and thousands of people, myself included, who will watch a Saturday arvo/night game of NRL that i have no interest in at all simply because I'm less interested in a rerun of animal hospital.

Just being on a commercial network would see a huge jump in viewers just out of boredom and lack of other things to watch. This didn't happen on SBS and wouldnt happen on ABC. If we were to go to ABC it would be because we had to and it would be the worst option following SBS. Thankfully ABC totally fucked up the Liverpool game and now have probably missed the chance to ever telecast any sport ever again.

Am I the only person in Australia that just flicks through all the channels, and watches the most interesting thing on.  Half the time I would have to specifically check to know what channel I was watching.

Your saying you would watch Animal Hospital over the NRL if the NRL was on SBS, why?  Would you not find it.  Do you go nothing on 7, nothing on 9, Animal hospital it is?

Only thing i use a TV for is football, all other shows i want to watch i'll just stream.

Reverse for me, I stream all my football and only watch TV for the news.

I actually do the same thing you do. For your average TV watcher in the FFAs key demographic though, id say they mostly flick between the commercial channels and don't consider ABC or SBS much. Its hard to draw casuals in if you don't put the content in their faces either.

Well i do stream most of my football as well, but it is great when i don't need too.

Is anyone else using Kodi and if so how are you guys streaming the A league?

My old man has Foxtel so I use his login details etc for Foxtel GO so I can stream fox sports and the bein sports channels on my pc.

Then you have all your NPLs which stream through Facebook and YouTube.

Most night my tv sits idle, whilst I'm on the pc and the mrs watches Netflix on the iPad in bed. She also uses the SBS and ABC apps a lot for Q&A etc.

If the old man got rid of Foxtel I'd seriously contemplate getting it put on just for the bein sports channels, or look into an alternative at least.

Cannot stand the rubbish on FTA tv these days.

Football and documentaries for me.

With you there. Id miss Hogans Heroes. 

From a personal perspective, there are a few things that interplay with the poor FTA ratings.

Firstly, majority of the people in my football circle that regularly watch games have Foxtel and this is their default source of football content, be it HAL or other leagues. Irrespective of which FTA channel games are on, they will watch Fox, not FTA.. I believe these guys are the core rusted on viewers that will always watch. 

The more casual football watchers don't have Fox, but they know games are on SBS and they will turn on if there is a game of interest, meaning Socceroo's, visiting Euro teams and things like finals attract their attention, but often HAL games wont be watched because it isnt their team, or they have other "habits" on Fridays but they will keep up to date with scores & "follow" a team.

With respect to the wider non-football community, unfortunately there isn't enough engagement/promotion and so there is little to no connection or interest. My background is European and have a fairly large family, I am the only one that actively follows the HAL. The only HAL players my family can name are Archie Thompson and Cahilll, but they know Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, Suarez, Ibra, etc and it is nothing to do with being Euro-snobs (they are AFL nuts), its the fact these players and Euro teams are constantly in the main stream news. 

Final point is HAL is getting stale. 2 years ago (before we got Fox) , we would watch every HAL game on SBS & stream others of interest, this year we probably only watched half of the matches and also didn't attend as many as previous years. This lack of interest is driven by:
- the repetitiveness of a 10 team  league (Victory & City played 4 times this year & was almost 5x) ,
- the constant recycling of players among clubs makes it hard to create any attachment with the team as who knows where they will be next year,
- it's increasingly becoming a retirement league (just check out the average age stats) 
- a few of us also feel that the quality has dropped off compared to a couple of seasons ago, some matches this season were un-watchable 
- active support has also dropped off dramatically and matches dont have the same energy

This sentiment is also being shared by others in the football circle and majority feel we have stalled, if not going backwards. Cant say that I have the answers, but 1 thing I know for sure is that more variety, interest & media attention is required and probably easiest way to do that is by adding more teams. 

I disagree

On one hand you have invented a mass of ignorant people who have missed the A League despite it existing pretty much every where for 12 years
Then you go on to demonstrate that as a normal human you do normal things, like socially interact, and by doing so you are informed

Every Australian is a human just like you. People act like people (surprisingly)

There is no such thing as a generic sports fan who only watches the ads of 3 stations. There is also no such thing as a Eurosnob who will suddenly pick up the A League because they saw an ad for it

I'm not special by knowing about the A League. Neither are you. We haven't done anything remarkable to get insight into this 12 year old league that is on the news of every major station and an in every newspaper, and on the radio for over 30 weeks of the year

This is not an ignorance issue. It is an apathy issue. The solution is not to create a message. It is to choose what we are syaing

Some good points.

May I add that I hear a lot on this board about the league being stale, etc.  But to be honest, you could describe pretty much every club competition in the world as stale (Juve has just won the Serie A for the 6th consecutive season, which is about as stale as things get).

It's too easy to throw around words like stale.  The old VFL had the same 12 clubs unchanged for 61 years before a new team was admitted.

In truth, it takes many decades to establish solid rusted on support, who follow club and league regardless of what's happening on the pitch.

In the meantime, there's a massive churn factor.  That churn factor exists in all sports, i.e. people losing interest, and new people getting an interest, meaning there's never a massive drop off in interest, lost fans are constantly being replaced.

The main problem is not so much that there's a churn factor, but being only 12 years old, there are fewer people to draw on to replace those who naturally lose interest from year to year.

AFL clubs like Collingwood might have one million potential fans out there who are willing to purchase a membership from year to year - the churn factor does not affect them because there is such a huge fanbase to replace lost members (unless they have a very long run of poor results).

A club like Victory might have 250,000 potential fans from which lost members can be replaced, which is a good position, but clubs like the NIx and Mariners might only have 75,000 potential fans to replace lost members, so it becomes a big challenge overcoming the churn factor - over a 12 year period, the Mariners may have lost 30,000 members, some of whom may have re-signed years later, others need to be replaced, but that gets harder because you are eating into a small base of only 75,000 potential fans, of whom less than a quarter are likely to buy memberships from year to year.

Stale is the right word. The issue is the league first of all it recycles upon its already average players, there is not enough youth being given the opportunity. It is also stale because there are only 10 teams, the same 10 teams year on year. You lose interest when you play a team every 10 weeks, it is also stale because there is nothing interesting happening at the bottom or top end of the table for the entire season because of the finals system and lack of relegation.

The league has stagnated because it has reached the peak it can with this 10 team closed shop system and it really needs some new life to get the interest back.