What is it for?

Bleacher Report is a global digital sports hub for fans of all sports, in which bloggers create and collaborate on content to create a colourful and creative home for sports news. It varies from its competitors such as Sky Sports or BBC Sports in the sense that it is more open and millennial than the very structured layouts of Sky Sports and BBC.

Does it create a good user experience?

Bleacher Reports’ user experience is a unique one in the sense that it offers a ‘millennial’ home for sports news. By this I mean it is less formal than its competitors, it includes a trending section linking it with twitter and will post articles that would most likely not be approved at some of its more contemporary competitors. In terms of validity of information, Bleacher Report is not the most reliable for information. Nonetheless what it may lack in ‘official news’ it makes up for with more ‘fan orientated content’ and a layout perhaps more easily navigated by a younger consumer. As you can see below the Sky Sports page on the right is more structured, simpler and easier to find information – compared to BR which contains more content and slightly more complicated to navigate.

Improvements for Bleacher Report:

In terms of navigation and interface layout, I believe BR falls into a niche market in the sports news market which especially in England is a duopoly. Bleacher Report is more global than Sky or BBC and covers more sports and posts more information. IF BR attempted to become more structured it may lose its USP and could be detrimental to the sites activity and profits. BR is now owned by a leading broadcaster in the US – Turner Sports. Turner has great success in producing sports programs and sports news to a younger generation as evidenced by the multi award winning basketball show Inside the NBA. Therefore I believe it is owned by the correct brand and has a unique business model that works for them, this is further supported by winning multiple awards – Forbes called Bleacher Report “one of the leaders” among sports start-ups “figuring out the digital space” in August 2011, noting the company’s success in “providing publishing tools to all sorts of knowledgeable sports fans to report and express what they know.” Bleacher Report was also named one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2011”, and was picked by Adweek  readers as 2011’s “Best Sports Media Brand.

My only improvement would be to be more thorough with what is posted onto the site as it loses credibility due to posting of rumours and false news. Nonetheless this could take away from what is different about the site and lose its fast paced feel. My advice would be to monitor customer feedback on articles and if there is a negative response to many of the false news articles then they should consider being more thorough with what makes it onto the site.

When applying the OCHN Framework (Valacich, Parboteeah, Wells 2007) to Bleacher Report, we must analyse the three main components of this framework in relation to the site:

Structural Firmness – Due to who Bleacher Report is owned by now they have capital to ensure the safety requirements of the site are of a good standard. Site security isn’t necessarily as important to Bleacher Report as it is to an e-commerce site as there is no transaction of money. Bleacher Report’s main security problems would relate to what is posted as the majority of the content is posted by sports fans, this means it is hard to regulate everything that goes on to the site and there could be the possibility of an offensive or inappropriate article posted. Nonetheless this article would be removed off the site very quickly.

Functional Convenience – Bleacher Report to its target market is very simple to navigate. You have the ability to customise your homepage by selecting teams or sports that you would like to hear about. In addition there is a tab at the top for each sport and is therefore easy to find the information that you would like. However, the site is aimed at a millennial target audience as it says in their google description. The layout of the site could detract an older demographic who aren’t as familiar with these more blog style news sites such as Reddit or the Huffington Post.

Representational Delight – Bleacher Report does a good job in creating a vibrant and interactive sports hub in which videos, articles, surveys and interactive posts are all converged into one page. In addition it has a constant thread from various social media sites meaning there is new content being constantly updated onto the site. This creates more areas your eyes are drawn to and offers a more fulfilling, exciting and interactive experience than its competitors.

The strict order of importance of the OCHN Framework (Structural Firmness(SF), Functional Convenience(FC), Representational Delight(RD)) is slightly jumbled when applied to BR as the security of the site isn’t of great importance in terms of what makes people come to the site. I would argue the RD is what makes people come to the site due to it being different to other sports news sites, then security and lay out are on par.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1290000/1284624/p84-valacich.pdf?ip=194.81.206.203&id=1284624&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&key=BF07A2EE685417C5%2E7748C8603FAAB869%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35&CFID=998601517&CFTOKEN=69675222&__acm__=1508945163_488edbd2955270ec40e1456cba5f16b8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleacher_Report

This blog will analyse the promotional campaign carried out by DDB, in relation to Game of Thrones Season 4. More specifically it will look at the role Brandwatch, an industry leader in social media monitoring and analytics platforms played in allowing the campaign to be as effective as possible.

Background of the case:

With the start of Game of Thrones Season 4, the exclusive broadcaster in New Zealand – SKY, saw the launch of the new season as an opportunity to promote its paid channel SoHo to current Sky subscribers and sign up new customers. To do this SKY enlisted the help of New Zealand’s leading ad agency DDB to create a tactical campaign to convince New Zealanders to sign up to Sky and/or SoHo.  SKY wanted this campaign to reach an audience that had previously dismissed Game of Thrones saying “it was not for them”, however they knew this audience would likely dismiss Game of Thrones related adverts.

DDB opted to target an audience which were already excited by Game of Thrones, to reach the audience who previously dismissed Game of Thrones. The thinking behind this strategy was that the excitement of the current fans would be perfectly suited to generating attention of those who weren’t interested originally.

DDB had to make the campaign more specific to a New Zealand audience. DDB did this by using a social media and analytics platform called Brandwatch. Brandwatch helped DDB by listening to conversations about the show online in New Zealand to identify the most influential theme in the show as King Joffrey. DDB, using rules, categories, topics and tagging processes were able to compare volume and tone of different aspects of the show and identify Joffrey as the most popular discussion topic and using sentiment analysis showed he also inspired the most passionate commentary.

My Takeaways:  

My takeaway I would like to discuss in regards to this campaign is the use of Brandwatch. With increasing technology available to ‘marketeers’  we are able to be more specific than ever before in choosing who we target our campaigns at, this is vital in ensuring the campaign budget is used efficiently. Brandwatch gathers millions of conversations every day and provides its clients with tools to analyse them, enabling brands & agencies to make smarter data driven business decisions.

In this case study Brandwatch helped DDB & SKY to identify the main theme they should base their campaign around, the controversial character of King Joffrey. SKY wanted to demonstrate to their audience the passion they have for the content they roll out by doing something beyond the boundaries of traditional or digital media.

DDB opted to compare this hated character in the GoT fanbase to a hated character by many in real life. DDB chose to erect a 7 meter tall statue of Joffrey (similar to the Saddam Hussein statue) in Aotea Square in Auckland, New Zealand. They then transmitted a live stream from the square which became Australasia’s’ largest live streaming event. To encourage fan interaction the statue had a rope around it’s neck and with each tweet including #bringdowntheking the rope got tighter giving Game of Thrones fan’s the chance to enact their own revenge on Joffrey.

The campaign was hugely successful reaching 43 million people in 168 countries with 875,000 individual interactions. The reason they were able to have such high interactions and a interactive campaign was due to the specific market research Brandwatch enabled them identify.

Read more about the campaign here:

http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/television/game-of-thrones-fans-can-tear-down-a-real-life-statue-of-king-joffrey-using-the-power-of-twitter

For more info on Brandwatch please visit: https://www.brandwatch.com/brandwatch-analytics/

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