Quote:
Originally Posted by chillibowl
as usual brilliantly summarized.
speaking of global reach, what are your thoughts on F1's online reach in general? it was poor to none existent in the past but has it gotten better in your opinion?
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Well the official website is certainly a lot better, although I did notice that when I clicked on buy tickets for the BGP (for example)it didn't actually do anything although Silverstone have the tickets on sale on their website...I am sure they will claim big web stats for visitors and page impressions, etc but actually turning those into something tangible as a value for team sponsors is not easy.
FOM has not really embraced social media and sees You Tube as threat to TV rights exclusivity rather than a promotional tool. It also only has 33,000 follower on twitter which doesn't strike me as a lot for a global sport, FIFA (football) for example has 2.2 million followers on twitter. Also on the F1 website there is no link to the twitter feed and no twitter feed/stream from teams or drivers.
One problem that F1 has is that FOM does not promote F1 globally, it relies on the promoters of each race in each country to promote their event both online and offline, so you will have varying degrees of reach. FOM get's paid upfront in rights fees and TV rights for the vast bulk of the income, so as they have no risk or need to attract any ticket sales themselves, there is no need for central promotion - or so it strikes me.
A good barometer of any sport is to go out in the street and ask passers by to name (say) 5 grand Prix circuits and 5 GP drivers and 5 F1 sponsors and see what results you get, the reasoning for this is that you can claim as much promotion and coverage as you like but if people haven't heard of (or can't recall) any of them it's all wasted....