Bleacher Report is planning an extensive marketing campaign later this year aimed at boosting its still oft-debated consumer image.
The Turner Sports-owned digital sports media outlet is interviewing creative agencies that would aid in developing a broad online and offline marketing campaign. Bleacher Report executives declined to specify the agency candidates either interviewed already or slated to make a pitch. No specific timetable exists to make a decision, though Bleacher Report plans to have creative appearing sometime this year.
The goal of the marketing effort is elevating Bleacher Report’s brand, which is still derided in many corners of mainstream sports media, despite increased engagement. The overall Bleacher Report-Turner Sports digital roll-up ranked fifth in the most recent comScore rankings of digital sports media reach with nearly 56 million unique visitors. Among individual websites, BleacherReport.com ranked second only to ESPN.com.
But it’s the company’s open-source journalism origins, which created several incidents of questionable content and has been almost entirely abandoned in favor of paid, professional talent, that still forms much of Bleacher Report’s public brand.
“A big priority of ours for this year is building the Bleacher Report brand,” said Dorth Raphaely, Bleacher Report general manager. Raphaely, previously the company’s vice president of programming, analytics and quality control, assumed the new role at the start of this year. “We’re second in audience, but somewhere between 7 and 10, at most, in the industry in brand awareness. We need to have those two things match up a lot better than they have been. Getting an agency to help us is part of the ongoing maturation of the Bleacher Report brand.”
The use of an outside marketing agency to help with branding and audience awareness is somewhat rare for a major digital sports outlet such as Bleacher Report. Many of the site’s key rivals have focused their own marketing efforts through internal channels, often in concert with their sister TV, radio and print outlets.
Bleacher Report consumer marketing has mostly centered around similar efforts, including promotion on Turner Sports’ programming such as NBA and MLB coverage, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the PGA Championship. But in its nearly eight of years of existence, the company has yet to conduct a coordinated, multi-platform campaign.
