Menu
In-Depth

PGA Tour CMO dives deep into golf fandom

Joe Arcuri, PGA Tour chief marketing officer, has been on the job for less than a year, but the veteran brand marketer has wasted little time pushing the property to attract a larger, younger audience while staying faithful to its core fan base.

 

Arcuri, who joined the tour as CMO last June, brings decades of experience to the tour’s newfound marketing efforts. Prior to joining the tour, he was head of brand marketing for Newell Rubbermaid and before that, he worked for years in marketing for Procter & Gamble.

After joining the tour, Arcuri and his staff worked with the Boston Consulting Group to dig deep into the tour’s fan base.

“We captured demographics, psychographics, media consumption habits, and fans’ habits and perceptions across all major sports, including golf,” Arcuri said. “We analyzed several distinct golf fan segments that has led us to an insightful and actionable look at today’s golf fan. This breakthrough study has provided the foundation of our overall fan segmentation work and drives our creative and marketing plans.”

Joe Arcuri is using research to craft the tour’s marketing plan.pga tour

To target younger consumers, the tour’s marking approach relies heavily on technology and new media, with Chief Media Officer Rick Anderson overseeing those efforts.

“My primary focus is to grow new fans now and in the future,” Arcuri said. “We have a fan-first lens to ensure our media deals, our partners, our content, even our on-site tournament experience reaches beyond our core fans. We’ve done in-depth research on who our fans are and who are the fans we need to reach. We’ve been building content and programs in order to reach them.”

Consider the tour’s foray into augmented reality. The tour recently unveiled its new PGA Tour AR app that allows fans to see 3-D images through iPhones and iPads of featured holes at various PGA Tour events, including the upcoming Players Championship and the Tour Championship. The AR app also allows viewers to track and compare shots from various players.

The tour last month partnered with Xumo to stream live tournament play and video-on-demand content through a dedicated, free internet provider channel on various smart TVs.

Last year, The Players Championship was the first major sports event distributed through a live 360 virtual reality experience on Twitter. The tour then struck a deal with Intel to distribute live VR and live 360 video through Twitter at six tour events last year and in 2018. The next live VR experience will be in May at the Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio. The tour was also the first sports league to have a VR app on the Oculus platform and the first sports league to develop content on Amazon Echo.

“We are trying to aggressively innovate,” Anderson said. “Where a lot of the technologies are found are at places where we have a broader demographic. We always have our core fans but we want to make sure we are bringing content to where people are.”

The tour is creating more than just behind the ropes branding efforts. Under Arcuri, the tour is pushing to develop on-site content that focuses on more than just competition, including concerts at tournaments, fan zones, and other ways to drive fan engagement.

“We are going after a more social fan,” Arcuri said. “One who is really interested in outside the ropes and inside the rope stories. We are curating content for them and placing it where they want to consume it. They want different content and they want it on different platforms.”

To attract more fan engagement, the tour loosened social media rules at tournaments so fans can post video and photos of on-course action during events. “It’s a great source of content directly from our fans,” Arcuri said. “It increases our reach.”

Despite the new efforts, Arcuri knows that the tour faces more fan engagement challenges.

“The biggest challenge is understanding that you need to see the story in multidimensional ways,” he said. “It’s not just competition. We need to understand bigger story angles. What are the story lines outside the ropes that different fan segments are interested in?”

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

Shareable URL copied to clipboard!

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2018/04/02/In-Depth/Arcuri.aspx

Sorry, something went wrong with the copy but here is the link for you.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2018/04/02/In-Depth/Arcuri.aspx

CLOSE