How Borussia plays off the boards to the world

Let’s get philosophical for a brief moment. Not pseudo-football philosophical in the sense “after the game is before the game” and “we’re just taking each match as it comes”, but really properly philosophical, like Plato, the ancient Greek. It already dawned on him in ancient times that possibly nothing is what it seems. That was 400 years before the birth of Christ, that is, roughly 2300 years before the founding of BVB and approximately 2400 years before digitalisation led to us not really knowing anymore what is unreal and what is real. Meaning genuine, if we disregard the love felt towards Borussia for a minute.
It happened on 26 August 2018 in the Signal Iduna Park. Nobody noticed it, and that was exactly how it had been planned. It went off perfectly, and has been going on at every single BVB home game since!

Matchday 1 in the Bundesliga, a beautiful late summer’s evening with Borussia Dortmund set to play RB Leipzig. The traditional club won the match 4-1 to go top of the table! The Black and Yellows had still been on tour in the USA a month beforehand. They had visited Chicago, Charlotte and Pittsburgh, and had played against Manchester City, Liverpool FC and Benfica Lisbon. They had been enthusiastically received by the soccer fans in the United States, and now, on the first day of the new season, BVB was expressing its gratitude to its American supporters for the overwhelming welcome they had received wherever they went. The club did so with a message on its advertising hoardings in the stadium. Honestly? – you say! I didn’t see that at all! And you’re right. You weren’t able to, nor should you have been. That’s because the message, which made for an overwhelming response incidentally, was only ever intended for the USA, and was only visible on US television sets.

This is made possible by virtual billboards, which were developed by the technology service provider Supponor. BVB and its marketing partner Lagardère Sports have had the high-tech process certified by the German Football League (Deutsche Fußball-Liga [DFL]). Borussia Dortmund is the first and only Bundesliga club to have used the tool since the beginning of the current season, home game by home game. “The feedback has been remarkably positive. Not only have we had absolutely no complaints, the response has been positive without exception”, said Carsten Cramer, who is responsible for marketing on BVB’s executive board.

In the meantime, the financial expectations placed by BVB and Lagardère on the four-way split signal have been met. It is able to service Europe/Africa, North and South America, South Asia (including China, India and Korea) as well as Japan and South-East Asia (including Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam) with different advertising messages at the same time. The kicker: the virtual billboards facilitate a multiplication of the advertising space in the stadium without the need to add even one additional square centimetre to the hoardings. It allows BVB to generate additional revenues in the millions, since “the trend is clearly towards tailor-made advertising that is oriented to the markets in individual countries, that is, the target groups and their consumer behaviour”, states Christian Kothe, head of sales at Lagardère Sports. Marketing experts are able to respond to this trend using the virtual billboards.

Advantage number 1: “Our longstanding partners such as Evonik and Wilo, who sell their products worldwide, now have the opportunity to address their customers in their native tongues”, explains Carsten Cramer. Advantage number 2, adds Kothe: “We are able to win new international partners who do not offer their products in Germany, but who have a sports-minded target group and who want to take advantage of the reach of BVB broadcasts in their target countries.”

As a result, virtual reality also has its charm for the traditionalists among the supporters for whom “internationalisation” and “monetisation” are terms conjured up in footballing hell. This is because the fans do not notice at all that the marketing process is being optimised further. Unlike in many other stadia, they are not also confronted with advertising messages in Chinese, Russian or Arabic in the Signal Iduna Park that leave them completely at a loss.

It happened on 10 November 2018 – and once again, nobody noticed. Borussia Dortmund received FC Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga for a top of the table clash between the domestic industry leaders. The match was broadcast in more than 200 FIFA member states, and in China of course. The 11 November is known as “Singles’ Day” there, also referred to as “Double Eleven”, a day on which online businesses tempt people with huge discounts. It is comparable with “Black Friday” in the USA or “Cyber Monday”, only Chinese, of course, which means bigger. The shopping platform Alibaba alone took almost $31 billion on “Singles’ Day”. On the evening before the 11.11, the virtual advertising billboards in the Signal Iduna Park suddenly came under the influence of the marketing departments of Tchibo, the drugstore chain Rossmann and the Flensburg pharmaceutical concern Queisser, which is entering into the Chinese market with its product “Double Heart”. Not one of these three companies advertises in Germany in the world of football, but the reach of the top match between BVB and Bayern was the perfect way to access customers in Asia. Queisser was particularly satisfied with sales of “Double Heart” on “Singles’ Day”.

A further example of the new opportunities that the virtual billboards offer: in Germany, the traditional Dortmund-based beer brand “Brinkhoff’s No. 1” belongs to BVB’s circle of ‘Champion Partners’. However, Brinkhoff’s sales strategy is clearly regionally oriented, and you are unable to purchase the beer in the USA. You can buy DAB though, which, like Brinkhoff’s, belongs to the Radeberger group. As a result, the brand advertised on the virtual billboards using the traditional Dortmund duo: DAB and BVB! This was not a problem for Brinkoff’s, as a conflict of interests could be ruled out.

Behind all this is a monstrously complex and technical process which is also incredibly expensive. The development alone took a number of years and devoured an inordinate sum of money. Finally, the tool must be able to function equally well in the pouring rain, in heavy snowfall, under perfectly balanced floodlights and glistening sunshine. Even when in use, the technology is anything but cheap because satellite capacity must be booked in order to be able to send the different signals on their journey around the world. However, it is worth the effort. Mid-range to high seven-digit figures are already giving great satisfaction at BVB and Lagardère. The marketer is the key to success as part of this process. “Without the global sales structures, we wouldn’t be able to market the billboards at all”, says Carsten Cramer. “It’s not the case that the CEO of a Thai brewery is sitting in his office and thinking: ah, I’ll give Borussia a call and rent a couple of metres of hoarding.” Cramer also makes clear that this technology’s potential is limited to a few clubs in the Bundesliga, namely, BVB and Bayern, and then the list already begins to dwindle…

Notwithstanding all the seemingly unlimited possibilities that digitalisation offers today and will offer in future, the BVB director is still of the opinion that everything has its limit. Although he does assume that much more advertising space will be digitally and, as a result, centrally and interconnectedly managed in future, he excludes the possibility of “more, more, and even more”. “We won’t be putting on a flashing and flickering advertisement show like in Las Vegas. That wouldn’t be Borussia Dortmund anymore. We must be very sensitive about achieving the right balance.”

Text: Frank Fligge
Photographs: Alexandre Simoes, Lagardére Sports