It's football sponsorship gone mad...

... but LOLz nonetheless

Merthyr Town's ground to be renamed the Cigg-e Stadium

man utd's results yesterday were behemoth

http://i.imgur.com/8XP1x8m.png

Got headline numbers or a good link?

“Last year we spoke about how we would use a scalpel rather than a spade when it came to segmenting our sponsorship opportunities across categories and countries,” said Woodward.

“The US market is under-penetrated. It is a very big media market, the most developed sports market in the world.

“But we don’t want to deals that are quick and wrong, that tie us up and we regret afterwards.

“We believe there has been an inflection point from 2010-11 when interest levels in football have increased. In the last three years the number of people watching Manchester United has gone up by between 30 and 35% each year. NBC reported peak viewership for our game against Chelsea last month was the biggest weekday afternoon audience since the Olympics.

“It is moving away from being a niche sport and into the territory of competing with some of the top sports in the country.”

“I am reminded of a statement by Rupert Murdoch,” said Woodward in a conference call to shareholders.

“There is a reason sports cost a lot. It is the most important content on TV, period.”

I wonder how that Chelsea game went down in the US

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/manchester-united-announce-record-financial-results-with-huge-increase-in-commercial-revenues-8824122.html

just gives the headers but the revenue increases are p impressive

will help them when they slip out of the CL

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/7/31/1375299135826/Beeline-005.jpg

Beeline, the Official Telecommunications Partner of Manchester United in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

from:
http://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2013/aug/09/manchester-united-financial-sector#/?picture=414065143&index=0

the white poulet

Beautiful

Yep.

The shoddiness of that ad enrages me. I mean it's nice that we get to lol at it, but y'know people are giving them money, they deserve better.

Don't think that's United's fault though?

In a sane world these kinds of insane sponsorship deals would subsidise affordable ticket prices but hey that £70m of annual interest won't pay itself.

Did I read that Arsenal have a subsidised section for younger fans this year? I've often thought that they desperately need to do this, and now I don't know whether it's actually happened or not.

in ten years they will be the greatest fans in the game, supporting manchester city

There were loads of kids at Sunderland (supporting Sunderland). Also loads of empty seats. Plenty of big gaps around the CL games I've caught too.

I used to be pretty meh about affordable tickets because lots of people want to see games and how else do you decide who gets to go? But I've been getting a bit more David Conn of late.

Norwich City were the first club to come out and say they would not be sporting Stonewall's rainbow laces this weekend in support of removing homophobia from football. Stephen Fry, board member and ardent supporter of the campaign is sure to be pleased. But what is the club's noble reason for turning down the request? Apparently 'Norwich have discussed the matter with Stonewall, explaining that the organisation's partnership with Paddy Power conflicts with their own relationship with SBOBET and use of the promotional material would set a precedent other good causes would attempt to follow.'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/10320384/Gay-rights-group-criticises-sexual-innuendo-slogan-of-anti-homophobia-rainbow-laces-campaign.html

However the group 'Football v Homophobia' says it withdrew support for the campaign after the bookmaker refused to change the tag line.

A statement from the group said: "Our discomfort is with the reliance on sexualised innuendo and stereotypes about gay men.

"We feel it is incongruous to run a campaign aiming to change football culture whilst using language which reinforces the very stereotypes and caricatures that, in the long term, ensure that homophobia persists."

Srsly what the fuck has Paddy Power got to do with this, NGOs need to stop [working so closely with commercial interests using a non-sexual metaphor]

the use of the "banter" or "football banter" like it is a definable legal term is really prominent in all the coverage of this. not that this hasn't been on the rise already, like "merely banter" etc said by rooney's lawyer when he threatened to stare some twitter amoeba to death.

now is that the right photo for that story?

i'm sure there are people from charities/campaign groups who will explain how important the contributions of private companies are to the work they do to which i wd retort something along the lines of "get tae fuck 21st century"

waheyyyy, nice 1 klats

paddy power's general marketing tone is the fuckin worst

the "hey mug punters lose more and quicker!" industry's marketing tone is pretty bad as a whole

ime ngo management is barely any diff to like buzzfeed or whatever, no accountability, no long term strategy, just come up with some terrified clueless shit for the hits so you can survive the next round of intercinine slaughter

would feel a greater sense of good being the milk technician at nestle

which industry is different mind xp

yeah to a large extent a lot of voluntary agencies are in an endless funding chase to support the inevitably short-term projects they set up but i think maybe a few moments of quiet reflection about "what is the point of us?" wd be great every now and then. without even thinking about the thousands of local micro-charities across the country fighting each other for every penny to do the same work

sorry personal bugbear appearing in wrong thread

Nah pp's is specifically wacky bantz & xenophobia xp

darragh correctly reminding us that all marketing is equally shit and evil good point

not OT imo, football clubs/the game itself could do with the same thing

i think the Prem has refined its mission statement down to "everybody grab as much as we can, while we can" tbf

yeah sorry for for overcynicism but cmon guys mass advertising

guy was collecting for special olympics at the local shop the last day, had a table and folder and the lot, i had a couple of quid and tried to give and nope, only accepting tenners or twenty quid entries into a draw, but he had to give me a two minute shpiel with pics and eyes-shut-stuttered paragraphs from the folder and we were just so sick of each other by the end of it and can you just stop for a sec and think of the mindset of the ppl that sit in a room, never going near the public nor attempting the job they send these poor schmucks out to do, designing this harebrained fuckery. are they doing it for the networking or do they pay themselves very handsomely, or both?

i gave the tenner, how could i not. maybe that's the point. idk.

i was totes sincere: re marketing

xp

see: whoever's bright idea it is to employ gurning, over-familiar students to stop me in the middle of the high street like they know me and offer me hugs in exchange for a monthly contribution to Greenpeace or whatever

are the hugs monthly? if so, sounds like a good deal?

a bloke came around to my flat a few weeks ago from the rspca - he was v good at not letting you get rid of him, despite the fact my dinner was going cold on the table, firstworldproblems etc.

anyway i asked him did he have a leaflet to try and head him off at the pass, i think i had cooked a nice piece of hake, but there was no leaflet, and he kept at me about whether i had pets as a kid, and next thing i'm there saying how i buried my goldfish in the garden when i was six and wrote its name on the brick in magic marker, and so on.

and all the time i'm trying to think how can i get him to the point and get rid of him, so in the end i went for a bit of good old relativism and i was like:

"i mean, i hear what you're saying, but my feeling would be that there are a huge amount of worthy causes in this country and it's not possible to contribute to them all," delighted with how reasonable this sounded.

and straight away he just replied "which ones do you contribute to?"

and i instantly replied "none".

and i swear i have never laughed so hard in my life - he was laughing too, even as he went on to talk about dying dogs etc. i had to put my head between my knees i was laughing so hard, the wild laughter of a movie maniac villain, mixed with normal mirth.

in the end i practically suggested going for a beer. good luck to him.

thread delivers

man i can't understand the person that doesn't smoothly respond with a lie to that question, maybe it's my skewed upbringing, but i'd have reeled ten charities, and better charities, off to him so slickly that he'd have ended up embarrassed to have been trying to hit me up for more.

but the guys on the street, soon as i see em i'm working on what devastating line i'll have ready if they ask me a stupid leading question.

i tend to sputter "look i'm just not interested" at that point, already feel like i've been dragged too far into the huckster jive when it's obvious i don't wanna play

man i can't understand the person that doesn't smoothly respond with a lie to that question, maybe it's my skewed upbringing, but i'd have reeled ten charities, and better charities, off to him so slickly that he'd have ended up embarrassed to have been trying to hit me up for more.

i could come up with a lie easily, no prob at all, but i (a) sometimes don't want to defend a lie and (b) i like bluntly revealing the truth sometimes.

yeah if they start with 'do you have a minute' or similar and leave you alone, good luck to em, they're evil self-delusional people kidding themselves they're doing a more worthy job than someone working honestly at a nuclear plant or w/e, but at least they observe the accepted norms of human interactional behaviour and don't embarrass anyone involved more than the gig calls for.

really, it's the gig that's the problem. but we're waay off topic here now. football sponsorship. what it do, what it do? why would you ever pay for it? whyyyyyyy

xp a good lie defends itself for the necessary duration.

but yes if the truth is hard enough i can get behind a little keaning up of the sitch

These ppl are good practice for lying in other areas of life I think, attendant guilt is not a problem so you can really get your eye in and find out what might work / what you're comfortable with.

attendant guilt is when you pretend not to have any change in american bathrooms

Btw someone on the street wouldn't even get eye contact with me. It's v v rare for anyone whatsoever to call at my door like this so I prob had my guard down.

anyhoo to come back to where we were - football clubs not really being baddies here in protecting their legal obligations to paying sponsors?

i mean fuck sponsorship and filthy lucre in general obv but if Stonewall wanted an effective anti-homophobia campaign they shd have thought about whose coat-tails they were riding, imo

cos y'know damn well this is the kind of thing marketing brains come up with to stealth spam their products in the teeth of rival marketing brains

which makes me think maybe the key players in PR shd all align themselves to a hooligan firm and sort this out proper old school, like

agree with that to an extent, but in an uncharacteristic burst of decency i'm leaning towards 'you'da thunk that they might have handwaved such concerns for the sake of a high-level one-off campaign for a good cause'

I have no bother at all getting rid of people, somehow I seem to naturally back them into a space where they've nowhere to go. No idea how I'm afraid. Cold callers are hanging up on me within thirty seconds; I thank them a lot and I don't want to waste their time, and off they go. Even Jehovah's Witnesses don't hang around ("Have you ever thought about X?" "Yes!").

Those street students are more difficult, but I worked out a technique - I get so I'm passing at a slight incline, then with two paces between us I suddenly lurch in their direction. They naturally take a pace back, then when they've recovered I've got half-a-yard and I've lost them.

lovely move by klata there, he's left him standing

old-manned him

dad used to invite the jhvhs in and discuss the shite out of them

they called to me a year or two back, there was a 12.30 kick off, i said sorry lads there's a match started and i got a v smug 'i think this is a little more important than that don't you' and i went to flat-eyed radge and a blunt 'no' immediately, and that worked too

i used to chat to JWs but i realized they weren't "interested" in what i had to say except as they'd learned to refute it, and i didn't really want to convert them to a life of sin cos i'd probably feel bad, so i quit the whole exercize and now i politely tell them and the Mormons that we'll agree to disagree and goodbye now

that reminds me of another stray train of thought about people who really wanna talk about issues but don't really wanna think about their own thoughts or change their mind or anything, jeez i shd get my own thread

i once had a super narky chugger man give it the "oh look at you in your smart clothes while the world starves", v unsavoury quarrel

i thought i looked pukka in that orphan-skin suit as well

was he dressed in cardboard or

i had a massive argument with anti-fur people outside a vintage shop before. i tore the guy to shreds, he was left with nothing. they were basically abusing anyone shopping there because it sold second-hand fur.

back on topic tho, isn't paddy power a pretty good partner for this campaign? i mean given their influence in the circles of bantz?

Nah. They're a brand for whom foreigners marry donkeys or are otherwise backwards, chavs should be tranquilized, and the Irish are uncivilized (like an Irish kid beating up other Irish kids at a British school or something). Their marketing is in the Ryanair O'Leary school of envelope-pushing, and they shouldn't really be let near a campaign like this. Football vs. Homophobia probably otm.

My bad. I knew they'd done controversial ads but didn't realise they'd been so offensive, my only connection with them now is via Twitter (others RTing, I don't follow them) where it seems to just be football gags.

fvh definitely otm, totally self-serving and patronising if not even broadly counter-productive campaign

It's interesting that pp take this "tolerant" tack. They also sponsor an amputees' football tournament, and seeing as they, iirc, have an ad where blind ppl playing football is mined for comedy, they prob sponsor that in some form too.

it's like carbon-offsetting but for bantz

footbal schmarming

Joey Barton is an odd choice to front this new Paddy Power promotion anti-homophobia campaign, given his previous for calling a fellow professional a ladyboy and asking if he was "pre op or post op"

I was watching Barton being interviewed by Clare Balding the other night. She read out his rap sheet to him, except she did that thing where football offences are treated as equivalent to irl ones, so you had 'arguing with referee' being accorded equal weight to 'stubbing cigar out in guy's eye, detaching his retina'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_fq6TEij0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E94_sxPbTps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn-MxQJ3Aj4

ALL the Management and staff at Imagine Cruising are very excited to be all aboard with Swindon Town Football Club for the new season.

We feel the momentum is really starting to build and as the new Mainline Sponsors we really cannot wait until the big Kick-Off. We have already been busy in the build up to the season opener and over the past couple of weeks had the pleasure to spend some time with Nathan and Louis Thompson, as they swapped the grass of football pitches to the decks of a cruise ship.

The time spent with them both was fun and we hope our sponsorship will continue to be fun, interactive and rewarding. Following our time on the ship, we are challenging you as fans to come on board and to enter our joint competition. You could win a signed ball which will be personally presented by Nathan and Louis as well as two VIP tickets for a selected 2014/15 home league fixture.

All we ask is that you log on via YouTube each day to watch Nathan and Louis. The clips will hopefully capture your imagination. You will very much see the fun side of football before the action starts and it gets serious!

So, do not forget to follow the YouTube clips each day. Start day one by clicking on the below link. Please be patient and enjoy the build-up to further instruction on how to enter from both players on Friday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INuXgTILnBc

O__O

"we're into Progressive Insurance stoppage time"

fuck off

https://twitter.com/paddypower/status/571976724424085504

do you think they've hired the Islams and disableds for the day?