The Executive Director, Media Investments at Media Reach Nigeria, Mr. Yinka Adebayo has stated that for the lower leagues in Nigeria to get sponsors and advertising brands to have interest in the league, the football needs better positioning and clean up.
Speaking to Sports247, Yinka sighted the carefulness of brands and the force majeure holding them from getting involved with leagues such as the NNL and NLO.
“Brands are being very careful because the current state of our football isn’t where it should be. Passion and perseverance are what has helped our football go this far but we have not positioned the leagues properly,” he said.
“Brands want to be associated with stuff that is clean and well structured and packaged. No brand wants to be associated with what is unorganized or unstructured or anything negative such as violence or the likes,” he added.
Mr. Yinka who has over 20 years of experience in the field of Marketing Communications with a key focus on advertising & media, started his career with Promoserve Limited and worked with a few other Advertising Agencies and on several multinational clients like Pfizer International, Honda, NIIT, Tower Group, etc. before joining mediaReach OMD. His experience spans a wide range of products including FMCGs, Telecom, Banking, Automobile, and Airline industries and he feels whatever those league bodies have to offer should be put in numbers.
“Talk about ‘we have a lot to offer’ coming from those leagues. That’s just a rule of the thumb, put it in numbers instead. The game we play in marketing is a game of numbers because what you can’t count you can’t manage. The moment you can count it, it becomes manageable, so you must state the ‘whole lot’ in content.”
Most brands are looking for Return on Investments (ROI), what do they get when they put their finances to work here, what are the deliverables, and would my image be affected if I associate with this company.
“Can we comfortably take our families to see a football match in a Nigerian stadium? You as the head of the family, you’re not assured of your safety yet if violence breaks out and those are things European leagues sell on, so we have a lot of mopping and cleaning to do to get to that stage where brands would instead be running after the league rather than the league searching for brands,” Yinka concluded.
