Ian Mallon: Munster Premium 'isn’t Drive To Survive...it’s much more’
UP CLOSE: Simon Zebo at Munster Rugby Squad Training, 10 Acres, UL, Limerick this week. Pic: INPHO/Ben Brady
MUNSTER RUGBY believes if it can get its new premium content platform right, it can offer greater access, insight and value to fans, than the current Netflix or Amazon Prime fly-on-the-wall offerings.
The organisation has joined F1, Manchester City and Arsenal by allowing the cameras in to record behind-the-scenes footage, but in a way that will be more authentic than a ‘Drive to Survive’ or ‘All or Nothing’ style documentary series.
Success for Munster’s media strategy will be 10,000 users - paying €42 per year, or €4 a month – but with no set timeline for that delivery.
Instead, the key focus will be on building trust amongst players, coaching staff and employees and creating an atmosphere that is natural and gives a greater glimpse of reality rather than the overly produced models available.
According to Head of Commercial and Marketing at Munster Rugby, Dave Kavanagh, the club’s new premium content offering allows a warts and all lean-in on the good times, and more compellingly, on the not-so-good.
“The success of this won’t be dependent on success on the field,” explains Kavanagh. “The main actors and personalities who make up the content means fans will experience all emotions in different scenarios - that’s why the content is so good.
“It will be every bit as compelling in good times, as it will be in tough times, and the team has bought into that concept.”
While Munster have effectively soft-launched the service in recent weeks the Key Performance Indicators for early growth and commercial success will take a backseat for Year One as it finds its feet.
Sponsors and commercial partners will also watch from the rear.
While some branding and logos will be evident to viewers, this, Kavanagh insists, is not a sponsorship asset, but a fans-first offering, particularly for those who do not get the opportunity to travel to Thomond Park or Musgrave Park regularly.
In its added ambitions to reach overseas audiences and Munster fans abroad, the organisation is open to what success looks like, and what the pick-up will for what is a giant leap into the digital unknown.
Prudency will obviously be central and while there are targets the full potential of success is still an open book.
“Year One will probably make a slight loss,” explains the former head of commercial with the Lions and Six Nations. “After an initial period you tend to refine your approach and content, and we’d love to get up to 10k people - if it goes beyond that, happy days.
“But we’re not being unrealistic with those numbers, we will continue to take a very measured and prudent approach and respond to the needs as we go.”
The issue of editorial control is one which Kavanagh doesn’t hide behind; this isn’t content produced by independent journalists and film-makers, it’s something from within – and with that comes greater opportunity he believes.
The ‘actors’, or players and coaching staff in this case, will have certain oversight, and while that might offer questions of journalistic integrity – this is ultimately high-value access and entertainment with some control - in the same way as F1, Arsenal or Manchester City control what their partners produce.
So who will be the ultimate ‘managing editor’? Will Graham Rowntree, for example, be the one who has that control and oversight, and what will that look like?
“Short answer, yes, but it is our job to create compelling content so there needs to be that balance,” continues Kavanagh. “While obviously we are not interested in breaching the trust of the players or coaches, and that does mean we are running this past the group,” he adds.
“We’re all new to this, and there are levels of comfort, which will improve over time.
“What’s a really important piece here is the comparison with Netflix and F1, where they’ve invited in outsiders - we’re doing this ourselves, it’ll be a colleague holding a camera, and with that there will be an inherent trust. By building that trust we are being thorough and productive and once we do that we will be able to get on and deliver the very best content for fans of Munster Rugby.”
THE Harvard Business Review, in a 2018 study by INSEAD – the global graduate business school – outlined the role of a chairman as opposed to the job of a CEO.
“The chairman is responsible for, and represents the board, while the CEO is responsible for and is the public face of the company,” records the findings of its members' survey, to establish the sometimes blurred lines which are breached by chairs, new to the role.
At the FAI, things are done a little differently than at Harvard, with an increasing amount of commercial, communications and sponsorship leadership now being assumed by its chair Roy Barrett.
Barrett, the former managing director with Goodbody stockbrokers, made headlines this week when he wrote to JACC Sports Distributors Ireland, the kit suppliers of all Irish teams, terminating a contract that was due to run until the end of 2026.
Perhaps due to the enormity of the JACC issue - with the firm now facing liquidation over a €13m debt - the chairman felt he needed to get involved himself once he became aware of the Umbro licensee’s financial catastrophe.
Barrett presents more publicly than his CEO Jonathan Hill, and he is the central character at media conferences, where often he looks like he’s protecting the London-based chief executive.
This naturally leads to questions about who is actually running the executive office of Irish football, with this week’s developments and Barrett’s central role in leading commercial and communications matters. For some this detail does not matter, but in the realm of corporate governance and NGB oversight, it really should.
Whatever his motivations for getting involved in the JACC issue, there is enormous sympathy for the association, coming as it does two months before Christmas when it would have earned welcome revenue from the sale of large quantities of women’s and girl’s football shirts.
An added difficulty for Barrett will now come with questions about how much he and the FAI Board and Chief Executive knew of the JACC situation, given that the company’s largest creditor, Deal Partners Logistics Ltd, was owed nearly €7.3m.
In other words, what sort of stress-testing was done on the FAI’s existing commercial partners once Barrett strode through the doors of Abbotstown nearly three years ago?
Certainly he or a designated commercial spokesman will have to explain the situation further to the membership and to the Irish public, in a situation which is already costing the FAI serious revenue.
That may take shape in the form of another media appearance by Barrett, who has never shirked such opportunity since he was parachuted into the job in 2019 by Shane Ross and the Government. In the past year alone he has spoken freely to the press about the commercial ambitions of the FAI, Stephen Kenny and of his own CEO’s controversial commercial performance – even taking time recently to attack fellow board members for daring to communicate with the media.
But has Roy Barrett now exceeded what might have been a clumsy overreach, into what looks like a control issue? Perhaps the former stockbroker still sees himself as a CEO or managing director, something which is highly common according to the Harvard Business Review.
“After I became chair, the most difficult thing for me was to unlearn my CEO activism,” offered one contributor to the findings.
The INSEAD survey concluded “that most successful chairs in our study have learned not to jump in with answers or to try to call the shots”.
The biggest question is why Roy Barrett is calling the big shots and not his increasingly ineffective CEO.
SPORTS Information Services (SIS) and Racecourse Media Group have secured the multi-million media rights package for Irish horseracing.
Horse Racing Ireland’s Media Rights Committee will now enter a period of negotiations to thrash out the financial details with its preferred bidders who will provide an array of services covering Streaming & Digital, International Fixed Odds, Direct-To-Home, Free-To-Air UK and International Tote.
The deal will run from 2024 to 2028, and is unique in sports due to the quirk that the successful bidding applications have been approved before financial packages have been agreed.
That process will be agreed between representatives from HRI and racecourses, with no further detail offered or given on the value of these arrangements, or on the length of time these talks will take.
Those details will be key.
