When members of the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators gathered for their annual convention last month, there was the usual talk about revenue generation, but also conversation about fan analytics and fan experience. With student attendance on the decline, NACMA presented its members with a research project that surveyed students about why they do or don’t attend games. Becky Parke, an assistant athletic director at Arizona State University and the new president of NACMA, shares her thoughts on the direction of collegiate marketing.
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Collegiate marketing used to be, ‘Hey, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s try it. It sounds like fun.’ Now, it’s more like, ‘OK, can we measure that?’ College athletics has always been a business, but now it’s run a lot more like a business than it used to be. There’s no comparison.”
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Photo: COURTESY OF BECKY PARKE
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About the NACMA research project: As an industry, student attendance is a huge concern. If students aren’t going to the games now, why would they go once they’re out of school? We needed more in-depth information about why students attend or don’t attend games. What we found out is that connectivity and Wi-Fi is a factor in their satisfaction once they’re at the game, but it’s not really a determining factor on whether or not they decide to attend.
About the emphasis on fan experience: One change we made at ASU was to separate out the marketing and advertising staff from the game-experience staff. Now they’re entirely different. In the past, we just had marketing and they did everything. They’d spend so much time on radio spots and TV commercials and updating digital, then all of a sudden it’s Thursday and we’re wondering what to put on the video board to make it fun. Now we have a staff whose entire focus is on game day. If the fans are doing a blackout, we can work cohesively on programming to complement that.
On schools’ focus on fan analytics: Analytics show what you’re doing and what you’re getting back. It also enables you to be much more targeted in your marketing. At NACMA, South Carolina showed an example of how they worked with a company to look at traffic on their site and analyze the people coming in. Many of them were young alumni who were getting priced out of tickets, so South Carolina responded with a customized offer of a mini-pack of tickets and some targeted advertising.
On spending for the technology that drives those analytics: It’s getting there. It’s not a fad that’s going to go away. Analytics are going to make a major impact on the industry. You have to have the conversation on each campus about whether to hire a company to come in and do this or whether to hire a staff that has this kind of competency. At NACMA, we’re going to take a long look at how to incorporate more tutorials and workshops to help people who are saying, “How do I get started?”
