An integrated marketing communications campaign for NCAA on AKTV

• Main Authors: Barra, Jamila Kendra, Bagsic, Claude Marie, Cammayo, Bianca., Ty, Wendeline
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Marketing
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/18212
• Institution: De La Salle University

For the past decade, the National Collegiate Athletic Association also known as the NCAA has been living in the realm of its home, ABS-CBN's Studio 23. Shelled as the bastard son of sports by the network, it has not grown and lived up to its own identity. Regaining strength and perspective, the NCAA finally found its new home in the sports arm of TV5--AKTV on IBC13, after ending a fruitful and illustrious partnership with the Lopez-owned network. With the opportunity to have a new broadcast partner, NCAA on AKTV has found its spotlight - a big step to challenge its potential to recreate and eventually reinvent its brand personality. With its highly-anticipated and followed basketball games, NCAA basketball is a continuous trend in conversations and touch points among sports enthusiasts, a reason why it is the only sport in the NCAA being televised. However, the interest of the viewers have eventually declined as other factors such as loyalty to teams and school spirit have likewise overtaken their love for the realness, rawness, and manifested passion in the game. The anticipation in the basketball games of the NCAA must have rooted from its brand equity, which in the light of the group's primary and secondary data collected, has been redeemed for a purpose. It has been discovered that the strength of the league lies in the kind of skill and passion of the players and the game play itself. This kind of skill and passion qualified and quantified accordingly, builds a different kind of drama in the NCAA, which sets it apart from other basketball leagues. The strategic route to bring back the love for the game through its drama is to tap the general target market ages 16-35 year-old male and female socio-economic class C and D, who are working and non-working sports enthusiasts. They are psychographically and technographically differentiated by their affinity to basketball and how they are connected to the drama of a basketball game. To develop an effective and creative integrated marketing communications campaign, the group has decided to conduct the strategy progressively by phase from the pilot season to the finale, and to consecutively launch, sustain, and culminate the key message. It is crucial to the market that there is an emerging need in today's generation to realize how basketball affects them emotionally and that it is about time to create a demand to incept the reality of the emotion in the sport. This idea therefore brings upon the campaigns communication objective, which is to intensify awareness and develop interest by delivering basketball as a true sports drama. Invested in the physical game of basketball, the market will definitely realize that the NCAA basketball is a teleserye in its purest form. A television series will make the audience experience and witness the thrill of success and the agonizing defeat, unfolding the true drama of an NCAA basketball game. In order to further differentiate from the competitor, NCAA should reflect its real and passionate personality with an emotional, driven, and gritty tone and mood of communication. The competitor has overcome communication efforts due to established brand image of the schools that comprise it. Therefore, this integrated marketing communications campaign is driven to optimize television commercials given the fact that the NCAA is right-tracked on AKTV. To effectively communicate to the target market, the campaign is housing several digital, mobile, and Internet advertising including brand activation for market engagement and support. The campaign will cover an entire basketball season of the NCAA with an estimated Php16 million budget. The media mix shows all the vectors and channels that will be maximized to achieve marketing and communication objectives. A comprehensive media schedule illustrates the media and production costs to keep the campaign in line with its objective and its budget.