INTERVIEW: ESPN Star Sports' Zecha on how sports marketing is shaping up in Asia

Zecha explains that ESPN Star Sports has a multi-pronged marketing strategy with a variety of products and services that it distributes around Asia.

"We’re always making sure we’re strongly marketing our brands in a smart way because when we bring our brands and content to the region, it has to be of high quality and there’s always value-added content to the match or game such as support programming. It’s not enough to just show the games, but  produce support programming for the content such as a magazine show for analysis, trends, and behind the scenes content."

In an ever-changing world where technology is at the forefront, sports fans now are reaching out through various media devices to get access to their desired content, either through television, online, mobile or print. Not only are people watching more television these days, but they’re also interacting with media and the digital space more than ever before, Zecha says.

"Thus advertisers are understanding that consumers are consuming media through different touch points and they want to be associated with this content through the different mediums. Today, most advertisers tell us that they want 80 to 90 per cent of their budget spent on air, while 10 to 20 per cent of their budget allocated to online or on mobile," noted Zecha. 

He continues, "They realise that if they are not connected to the different mediums, they would not be able to hit those subscribers that are accessing content through different devices. Thus for them, the integrated approach is very strong. We see the integrated approach is the best way to go as a media company through our brands and products, and the advertisers understand that too."

Zecha believes that there are many ways to market sports, particularly in Asia where it is on the rise. As an example he cites Formula One expanding its season schedule to allocate five races in the region – China, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and India.

"Sports brings out passion and promotes a clean, youthful, athletic lifestyle and  environment which people gravitate to. When you have athletes that excel through great competition, people would be passionate about it. Everyone wants to be part of a winning team and support a winning player. ESPN as a multi-media platform allows brands no matter who they want to reach – whether they are young, old, male or female – that they can reach out and touch them through advertising or sponsorship of ESPN’s services via TV, broadband, online or mobile," explained Zecha.