19 Aug 2020 — 4 min read
Legia Warsaw is one of the most famous professional football clubs in Europe. The Polish side has won fifteen league titles including the 2019-2020 premier division title, and is a regular participant in the UEFA Champions League and Europa League competitions.
The club’s success off the field and particularly in IT transformation and digital sponsorship is also highly impressive. In this interview, Adam Piotrowicz, Digital and IT Director at Legia Warsaw shares his views and future vision.
Adam believes brands can work more directly with the clubs in the future and says “great engaging campaigns come from working together, sharing ideas and business needs.”
Edited highlights from Adam’s video interview with Sponsor.Online Board Advisor Mark Cornish.
Tell us a little bit about Legia Warsaw?
Legia is the only club that has in 85 seasons never dropped from the highest league in Poland. In the last 6 years, we won five Polish Championships and in the season 2016/17 we also qualified into Group Stage of UEFA Champions League. In addition, we participated five times in Europa League Group Stage and were two times part of Europa League Play-off.
What do you think of sponsorship pricing methods for digital and social media assets?
I think it depends. Every country and club has a specific approach. In my opinion, the problem is with comparing assets and reach with other digital assets available on the market. For example, display and content marketing assets are often compared with portals and big news sites. Sports clubs are not able to deliver such amounts of CPMs. Personally, I would like to compare assets with influencer pricing models. Clubs have very engaged communities and have a big potential to be included when planning the marketing mix. It is worth mentioning that many clubs have just started to complete their digital assets proposals and considering cooperation with media houses or building such sales competences inside the organisation. I think many new ideas will come in the next years.
Do you see more demand for digital and social assets?
Yes, definitely. We can see that more and more brands are interested in omni-channel campaigns and would like clubs to offer a holistic approach to campaigns. In Legia Warsaw we have our production department and sponsorship team that work with partners and help us to build dedicated campaigns on all media channels.
How many fans does Legia Warsaw have?
Over 1 million people visited our stadium in 2019 while running football matchdays and 300 social events. Our following on social media is more than 1.5 million people. The average attendance was approximately 21.000. Moreover, in the last seasons selected matches in European Cups had over a million TV viewers.
What is your vision for the integration of offline and online sponsorship assets?
We are looking for ideas and solutions to connect all the dots and propose to the market, kind of omni-channel campaigns. When I look 3 years ago, our offer included banners, printed matchday programmes or social media activities. Now we have our advertising servers to populate display campaigns across websites and apps. We have dedicated resources to produce branded content and distribute it across our digital channels and social media. We have built competences inside the club to learn, analyse and optimize activities with our partners and we can report objectives and make partners more aware of the results.
What digital or social media projects are you currently working on?
In December 2019 we finished our websites and built a CMS from scratch. We developed new apps for Android and iOS in January 2020. We have some proof of concept projects with augmented reality and projects for youth fans, but Covid-19 has slowed this down.
What advice would you give to brands looking to invest in professional football clubs?
The advice is to contact clubs directly and ask for assets. Brand should consider clubs’ assets in their marketing mix and work closely with clubs. Great engaging campaigns usually come from working together, sharing the ideas and business needs and work out the best scenarios.
Recommended