FanSection Blog

Michigan State smoked Louisville on Sunday 64-52 to reach the Final Four for the fifth time in ten years - the most of any college basketball team during that same time period.  So you would think Spartans fans would be approaching the 2009 Final Four with a ho-hum attitude.  Think again.  Michigan State fans have been the most hungry for merchandise and tickets since the Final Four was set this past weekend.

Joining Michigan State in Detroit next Saturday for the two semifinal games are North Carolina, Connecticut, and Villanova.  With those programs and their respective pedigrees, we were expecting some solid merchandise and ticket sales for the Final Four. So far we haven’t been disappointed, but I’m a bit surprised that Michigan State is leading the pack so dramatically.

So far, State fans have bought 15 times the amount of merchandise as their counterparts, with this tshirt shown here being coming in at #1.  Total merchandise sales have come in at almost $60,000 thus far through March Madness.

On the ticket front, we’re not able to say definitively who’s buying tickets, but we sold over $8,000 worth immediately following the Michigan State-Louisville game.  With the Final Four in the Spartans’ backyard of Detroit, it’s not surprising that State fans will be turning out in droves.

All said and done, we’re pleased with the performance of our merchandising and ticket offers.  We’re still in the process of completing the overall implementation and are happy that we’ve been able to drive over $80,000 simply by announcing offers to our users.  Once we’re able to make merchandise and tickets a formal part of the product, we think that will significantly increase the visibility and performance.  Stay tuned.

Preliminary data from a study sponsored by NeoEdge Networks, a casual gaming ad network, and Zappos.com shows that brand advertising within online gaming showed signficantly more lift than brand advertising on TV.  The study won’t be complete until March 31, but if the rough data is accurate, that’s a great data point for the digital advertising industry, especially those in casual gaming and social media.  Here’s the most interesting paragraph from the Adotas post:

In some interesting preliminary data, advertising inside casual games prompted a 48 percent increase in brand awareness, with 61 percent increase in brand awareness with multiple game plays. (Recent studies show that television advertising provides a 9.8 percent brand uplift; Radio 8-10 percent uplift; and Banner CTR have declined to less than .20 percent.) Being conducted by NeoEdge Networks, a casual gaming ad shop, along with advertiser Zappos.com, the new study’s initial results show that 80 percent correctly identified Zappos.com as the advertiser who allowed them to play the game for free.

From TechCrunch:

According to Vicki Cohen, Executive Vice-President at Frank Magid Associates, the preliminary results show a 5x increase in unaided brand awareness over TV advertising where a game included a Zappos.com ad. Other key findings according to the release: over 80% correctly linked Zappos.com as the advertiser who “allowed them to play the game for free” (who knew gamers were such a grateful lot?), while 56% had a more favorable impression of Zappos.com because of their trade-off of watching an ad for free game play.

We’ve seen some similar data come out of some FanSection-specific advertising campaigns.  While we don’t have casual gaming in our applications in the strictest sesne of the term, we do have a very popular never-ending trivia game that users spend hours playing every month.  In our first foray into sponsored trivia, we ran a campaign with the Texas Department of Transportation which was documented in a case study last year.  In that campaign, users that were exposed to sponsored questions a second time showed anywhere from 120% to 480% lift in retention of the core brand message for the TxDOT.  We think that represents some very powerful data that shows that engaging users with key messaging is paramount to succeeding in social media and casual gaming.   The NeoEdge data validates that and I’m excited to see the final results of the study when it’s complete.

Making the rounds of the blogosphere today are reports that CBS saw a 65% year over year increase in videos streamed for it’s March Madness On Demand service.  The service also reportedly attracted 56% more unique visitors than in 2008.  Combine both numbers with the fact that TV viewers are also up 9% and you likely have a goldmine for CBS.

Sponsorships of the online service have included a wide range of brands from Coca Cola to State Farm to Pontiac (how can they afford to sponsor anything?).  There’s also a great little featured called the Boss Button that allows you to toggle away from the video should your boss happen to drift by your office or cube during the middle of the game.  That feature was sponsored by Comcast this time around and has been clicked 1.5 million times during the first two rounds of games…presumably on Thur and Fri of last week.

Overall, the tournament appears to be successful for CBS although I’m guessing that it will be some time before any official numbers are released.  From a branding perspective, many brands have opted for dual TV-online sponsorships that put a consistent message in front of consumers regardless of how they’re watching the game.  I’m looking forward to seeing additional numbers from brands because that’s exactly the model we would like to follow with FanSection communities.  We offer brands the ability to extend their brand message from on-field and on-air mediums to the exact same sports properties and teams online.  That’s a key part of our advertising message and one we’ll continue to drive home using the examples we’ve seen from CBS.

The last few days have been a whirlwind around Watercooler.  March Madness has started with a bang in the FanSection community and the final numbers are in for the 2009 Bracket Challenge:

• Total Monthly Active Users - 1.6 million
• Total brackets completed - 1.3 million

This is much bigger than we ever thought it would be since we topped out at about 350K users last year.  The huge growth can likely be attributed to the fact that we had a much larger community of sports fans to target with an upsell this year, but we also can’t ignore the fact that Facebook itself is a much bigger community from which to draw new users.  Either way, we couldn’t be happier about the performance of the Bracket Challenge application so far.  We’re more than double the size of the two nearest competitors: Sports Illustrated and CBSSports.  Not bad for a little start-up in Mountain View, CA.

That’s not to say that it hasn’t been without its challenges.  Getting almost 2x the number of users we were planning hasn’t been the easiest thing to deal with from an infrastructure and support perspective.  We have a great team here at Watercooler though and so far we’ve managed to keep up.  Thursday morning was very interesting though. We’ll likely have another surge on Monday as users come back to see how they’re doing after the first two weekend of the tournament.  We’ll be ready.

And checking in on the monetization front, we’ve had pretty good success with merchandise and tickets.  From a merchandising standpoint, we’ve sold almost $20K in gear the last few days with big sales expected once the Sweet 16 is set.  I’ll post again with follow up info when I have it.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from the staff at Watercooler!

Some people celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by cramming into the first Irish pub they can find with hundreds of their closest friends.  Others head to the grocery store to stock up on Irish beer that they probably haven’t even considered buying since March 17, 2008.    At FanSection, we go green.

Not only have we changed all of our sports headers to green today in honor of the Irish, but we’ve also been selling a fair amount of green apparel for the last few weeks through our partnership with Team Fan Shop.  Green gear is all the rage these days.

So without further adieu, I give you the Top 5 Green Sports Fans based on our top selling St. Patrick’s Day merchandise:

1. Boston Red Sox - not too surprising given that most Red Sox fans are also Celtics fans…not to mention the large amount of Bostonians with Irish heritage

2. University of Florida Gators - when you have a game called the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party (yes, I know we’re not supposed to say that anymore), it should come as no surprise that Gator fans are embracing St. Patrick’s Day

3. Chicago White Sox - Evidently there are a large amount of Irish Americans living on the South Side of Chicago

4. University of Alabama Crimson Tide - I can’t imagine that there are many Irish Americans in Alabama, so I’ll assume this is a school pride/let’s get our drink on thing

5. University of Georgia Bulldogs - The second half of the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party

Other notables purchasing large quantities of green apparel are the Arkansas Razorbacks, Texas Longhorns, and Philadelphia Phillies.  It’s not too late to get your shamrock shirt for next year.  So throw back a Guinness, down some corned beef and cabage, get your green on and have a great St. Patrick’s Day!