Dwayne Wade - Digital Marketing Genius?

by Brian Reich | 15 Feb 2007, 2:00am

This weekend the best and brightest of the NBA (and thousands of fans, agents, marketers, corporate flunkies and hanger-on-ers) will converge on Las Vegas for the NBA’s All-Star Weekend.   Perhaps the brightest of all the stars shining on Sin City will be the Miami Heat’s wunderguard, Dwayne Wade.    You are probably familiar with Wade’s greatness on the court - he is a three-time all star (having spent only four years in the league) and  led  the Heat  to the NBA championship last season.   He has endorsement contracts with everyone from Converse, Gatorade and Topps to Lincoln, Staples, and T-Mobile (disclosure: T-Mobile is a client).

But did you know that Dwayne Wade is also working to revolutionize the way sports marketing is done online?   So says BusinessWeek:

The next week, in Chicago, Google reps preached moving beyond “independent sites” such as Wade’s. Those sites, along with charity appearances, TV ads, and video games, make for an “episodic” relationship between the athlete and fans. But digital media allow for brands to be built daily or hourly —what Google calls “dialogue” marketing.

Wade, a Google user himself, liked that concept. So Team Wade gave Google the go-ahead to develop a plan that would make Dwyanewade.com an integral part of fans’ daily digital lives. Wade’s camp and Google are in talks that they hope to conclude by the end of March. The goal? A fully interactive site built by Google with Google Search functions embedded. Fans would get a customized mix of e-mail, sports news feeds, flash games, and promotional messages. Hundreds of Wade basketball videos exist on Google and YouTube, and Stroth wants to link them to Wade’s site. “This notion of user-generated content is unbelievable,” Stroth says. “We want to fuel that.”

Such a Digital Age strategy, Wade figures, will put him a step ahead of rivals such as James and Anthony in the race to be the next Jordan. Talking about brand-building in Miami’s arena, his Sidekick in one hand and a basketball in the other, he shows a flash of the ferocity he brings to late-game heroics. “No question about it,” says D-Wade. “I want to be the No. 1 guy.”

Google couldn’t be more right about the concept of the ‘dialogue’ with online users and Wade couldn’t be smarter than to tap into this concept.   The sports marketing world, though it talks a big game, is painfully behind most of the corporate and entertainment world when it comes to the effective use of new media.    Everyone is struggling with how to give up some control to the user and the NBA (as well as Major League Baseball, the NFL, and to a lesser extend the NHL) are struggling more than most it seems.   The leagues, and the teams, are  building  glossy websites  and stocking them full of blogs and  social networking tools.   But few are taking full advantage of the social web.   Nobody, except maybe Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, feels comfortable putting themselves out into the digital space personally to have an unstructured, unfiltered conversation with the fans (where is the virtual equivalent of the late Lamar Hunt shaking hands with fans on opening day of each seaons?).   Rights deals limit, or prohibit,  the  flow of  game broadcasts across the internet (so you aren’t likely to see a really creative mashup of dunks - the modern day mixtape if you will - appear on  YouTube anytime soon).    And good luck finding more than a smattering of citizen journalists in the sports arena.

Why not?   The leagues, teams, owners,  and players  haven’t figured out how to make money from the free flow of information and experiences across the internet.   I’m not sure anyone has, but I can assure you that locking down the rights to everything and controlling how people interact with your sport with such a heavy hand  is not likely to win you many friends online.   There are countless other benefits to letting the passion of sports and the experience that people have with player personalities as well as  the teams (and the leagues generally) that are monetizable   — and will be through incremental opportunities going forward.   First step for all involved should be to watch and learn from what Dwayne Wade and the folks from Google are trying to do — and then get on the stick and change the way they participate in how sports are marketed and experienced.  

TAGS : Sports