While the passion in Turkish football is well known, the size of the fanbase is often overlooked. The Turkish SuperLig boasts a huge audience across its social channels, one that offers significant potential for brands. To get the low down on the market and the opportunities it represents, we spoke to Tim Mangnall, CEO of Capital Sports Media, who have recently signed deals with leading SuperLig club’s Galatasaray, Sivasspor and Göztepe, to help them maximize the value of their digital rights.
Hi Tim, thanks for speaking to us today. What is the main business focus of Capital Sports Media and what inspired you to start the agency?
The main focus of Capital Sports Media is to change the landscape of sports across Turkey and beyond. Our focus is to drive new spend into the Turkish Football ecosystems and creat better opportunities for brands when working with our club partners. What inspired me to start the agency was the huge opportunity and consumer engagement for all parties that work with and are connected to Capital Sports Media. We see and understand the future of Turkish Football; we believe it is a truly undervalued, “sleeping giant” in the world of football and to have the opportunity to develop and drive this market forward is extremely exciting for us.
On your website you refer to “The future of brand partnerships in sport” – what do you see this future looking like?
COVID from our perspective has changed the future of sports forever. Over the last year, we have seen exponential growth across all digital platforms and the future for us is 100% digital and data. Brands are expecting better insight, data, engagement and want to connect closer to fans than ever before and the only way to do this is by making sure that all media assets, partnerships and activations are backed by tangible data that is valuable to the brands we work with.
Capital Sports Media have developed a strong presence in Turkish football having signed agreements with Galatasaray and more recently with Sivasspor and Göztepe. Why have you targeted Turkish football and how are you supporting the different clubs that you work with?
The Turkish market is unlike any market in the world. The passion and the engagements of the fans are unparalleled and, with the history of the clubs, and the staggering number of people that watch, week in week out, Turkey was a clear market to implement our business strategy and help to develop the league, and the clubs, we work with. There is still huge potential to develop and implement new ways of working, more than any other developed league in the world and that is why we have invested in Turkey and the Super Lig. We support our club partners by working with them to implement new tech, bring new media partners, drive new revenue and, more importantly, share with them our data findings to allow them to strength their existing sponsorship relationship and develop a better understand of the assets they have.
What are the key values and benefits that you feel Turkish football can offer brand partners?
Turkish football offers brand partners not only one of the most passionate fanbases in the world, but also the opportunity to connect with millions of fans every week. When you look at the TV viewership and social media numbers, they are some of the highest in the world and brands can use this to create a strong market position and connect with an audience who are young, tech savvy and looking for inspiration from brands.
With a combined social reach is excess of 78m, Turkish Super Lig is immensely popular with a strong digital fanbase. What opportunities do you see for clubs to generate revenues from this digital audience and what role will data play with helping them do so?
The social media market in Turkey is still essentially in its infancy and there is a long way to go to realize the full potential of each club and their fanbase though social media platforms. The clubs are starting from scratch with regards to generating key revenue streams from a digital audience and this is why Capital Sports Media is taking over the social media rights of our club partners to create new revenues. The opportunities right now are endless and we are working with brands and agencies to bring every opportunity to life and one of the key facets in this data. Data is driving our decisions behind every piece of content, with regards to how we monetize it, which posts are the most valuable and what time of day works best. Data for Capital Sports Media is key to moving budgets from other formats onto our social media platforms.
Thinking about the different digital assets clubs can generate, do you feel these are best used to add value to existing partnerships, bring in new brand partners or a mixture of both and if so, why?
I’d say it is a mixture of both. The existing partnerships within the clubs are still yet to fully utilize the digital assets, so there is a big opportunity for us and the clubs to develop these partnerships. However, we are also seeing interest from more digitally focused brands that just want to focus on digital assets rather than traditional partnership models that exist in sports.
Why have you chosen Horizm’s inventory management platform to help you maximize digital revenues for the clubs you represent?
Horizm, as a leader in the field of social media valuation, was an easy choice for us, as they give us the tools in real time, to track our clients’ campaigns, capture data and provide insight on how it can be monetized. The platform is extremely user friendly and the granular level of detail they are able to deliver is exactly what Capital Sports Media needs to help us on our mission to change the landscape of sports across Turkey.
For more information on Capital Sports Media please go to www.capitalsportsmedia.com
