Just because you haven't doesn't mean that nobody hasn't.

The power of subliminal advertising

Its all about building brand awareness, which can then be translated into the potential of larger sponsorship income for the game as a whole.

If plastering lorries with advertising didnt work then companies wouldnt waste their precious profits on having custom paint jobs for their lorry trailers







Its rather typical of RL fans to rubbish a form of marketing that is used successfully throughout the world and which people see every day of their lives.

Pfft! What do you, Coca Cola and Nestle know about advertising? Nowhere near as much as Starbug, littlerich and Keith, I guarantee.

Sorry you're losing me, I've suggested it could be a better deal than taking the cash that was on offer

I think a few people are missing the point. Nobody is saying it is a bad idea to have trucks with SL teams/logos/adverts on them. It's a great idea. Wonderful. More power to their elbow.

The issue is whether 200 trucks with a logo is worth £750,000, which is what the RFL apparently turned down from Betfair. If you'd told me that the whole fleet of 2000 trucks were going to rebrand, then I'd probably agree that there's a case to be made. But Stobart have got large TV exposure, national newspaper references and access to the 100,000 or so regular paying fans who watch games live, and the total cost to them is to repaint 200 trucks. That seems like a phenomenally good deal for them. But the purpose of sponsorship is that the sponsor gets the exposure by stumping up some decent readies which the sport in question can then spend. Here, we get nothing to spend, a really quite minimal amount of free advertising on 5% of Stobart's fleet of trucks, and bugger-all else.

Doing a bit of maths, and assuming that average entry charges are £20 (which might be a bit steep in places), then each club would on average need to attract an additional 2678 paying spectators to make up for the cash they lost by not taking up Betfair. That's 206 extra people at every game on average - on top of any increase they may have received from their existing marketing efforts. I'd love to think that every club in SL is going to add 206 extra people. I think the chance of it happening are slightly lower than my chances of beating Usain Bolt in the Olympic 100m final this summer.

Which means that we have taken a net loss on this deal.

The only possible saving grace to this would be if the RFL started announcing additional sponsors contributing cold hard cash in addition to the Stobart trucks. If they do that, and Betfair were unwilling to let them, then the balance sheet starts to level up. But at present, this remains at best a fantastically optimistic shot-in-the-dark for the RFL, and at worse the sort of shafting by the Stobart negotiators which will have them wetting themselves in transport cafe's up and down the land.

But this deal isnt about fans through turnstiles but subscriptions and advertising revenues to SKY that will ultimatly lead to a better SKY deal, the RFL have taken a risk, it could be a massive success , or a huge failure, nobody will know for a few years , I'd guess it will fall somewhere in between , but what is certain, the cash the clubs would have recieved wouldn't have been spent on marketing

I thought the sl club voted for this not the rfl?

They did

Let's say the league average attendance is 9k (it's around that I'm sure, if it's higher then this percentage decreases) an average increase of 207 extra people per game is a 2.3% increase across the board. I suppose that's a challenging target but it's hardly like what you're suggesting is it?

No. I don't know if it's a good or bad deal. How can you be so sure it is either? What I'm saying is that it's interesting to me. I like the idea because it's innovative and of course it may not work. Just taking the Betfair deal has its financial benefits but again I like the sound that was coming out of the sport about image and integrity because it's what we do. So there are a few things that are aligned enough for me to say "Why not?"

I'm open to feedback on why that isn't reasonable because it feels like a well thought out point of view to me.

Sky get free advertising too, so long term I think sky are more than likely to look on League very favourably in future years IMO.

We've basically taken out an incredibly cheap advertising deal worth more in value than the money we could have gotten from Betfair. I don't think it's a bad deal at all, I think it's what the game has needed for a long time - greater exposure.

How much does it cost to sign up a truck? £1-2.5k surely at the least. These are big wagons as well. Could be costing up to £0.25m to physically produce the graphics. Then there's the value of paying for 100 adverts all year round, which I can't imagine being cheap at all.

Then there's the fact that we've not locked out our sponsorship, so we're open to take money from other places still. We've not finished signing people up, there's still money to come in.

Then there's the space on the wagons to advertise commercial partners, which we are doing so far with Heinz Big Soup, which will then push up the value of them deals as we're increasing their exposure.

Then there's the fact that Sky is advertised, which will hopefully lead to an increase in viewing figures, which in turn will reflect on our next television deal (which will get us far more money for the game than our title sponsorship has ever gotten us). Even if they don't go up too much, we've still added value to the Sky deal by advertising them.

There is one hell of a lot of potential in this deal. It is potentially worth far more than any of our other offers, and could see us bringing in more money through associate sponsors on the side AS WELL AS increase our own exposure. What's wrong with that?

This is a new relationship with a new corporate partner. Play our cards right and we could grow to many more of their livery as well as hard cash, which in turn could see us bring in more from other associate sponsors, etc. If we keep sticking our hands out wanting straight up cash in reutn for a lock out of all sponsor deals, we'll end up in the same position over and over again... and then moaning about it!