Playing an iffy numbers game over world cup
Nelson Tasman Tourism chief executive Lynda Keene has stated that it is ‘‘absolutely crazy’’ to question the Nelson City Council’s $1 million ‘‘investment’’ in the Cricket World Cup ( Nelson Mail, March 10). Speaking as an absolutely crazy person, who has good company in the form of University of Waikato tourism professor Chris Ryan, I can say that over the past few weeks I have seen some outrageous claims made concerning the WCC.
One Nelson councillor, who shall remain nameless, gleefully told me that the West IndiesIreland match was watched by a billion people around the world. The source of this information? The International Cricket Council.
For this claim to be true, over 50 per cent of the population (men, women, children) of the cricket world would have had to watch a match that less than 5 per cent of the Nelson region’s population were prepared to attend in person. The claim of a billion viewers simply isn’t credible, but it is easy to see how such a view can gain traction.
In its media releases, the ICC has made statements such as ‘‘engaging one-fifth of the world’s population’’ and ‘‘will reach 2.5 billion viewers globally’’. Normally, one would think words such as ‘‘engage’’ or ‘‘reach’’ would imply some sort of actual interaction via radio or TV, but in the ICC world of PR spin, these words simply mean that TV or radio waves have passed over the heads of this many people. The ICC media staff have shown that they can spin every bit as well as Daniel Vettori can.
We have seen numerous claims that Nelson will gain a long-term legacy from the ‘‘millions’’ of people who have viewed the Nelson matches; that we will experience a tourist boom because of the games, and that the profile we have gained ‘‘can’t be bought’’. None of these claims are backed up by any real evidence or quantitative data. On what factual basis are these claims being made?
Marketing 101 would tell you that after spending $1m on a marketing campaign, the logical next step would be to conduct unbiased surveys of segments of your target audience to ascertain how many actually tuned in to your message, what recall they have, and whether they have plans to visit Nelson as a result of the exposure.
Instead of blowing smoke making all sorts of claims about future benefits, the council should emulate private-sector best practice and spend a modest sum to carry out some quantitative post-campaign market research. We would then have hard data which would be helpful in determining the likely efficacy of future marketingbased event expenditure.
Some of the things that make me dubious about the claims of lasting benefits and millions of viewers are the low level of attention the Nelson games have had on social media (eg YouTube), and TV viewing figures from Britain. Out of a
The ICC media staff
have shownthat they can spin every bit as well as Daniel
Vettori can.
population of 64 million, the West Indies-Ireland match had 96,000 viewers on Sky Sports 2. The UAE-Zimbabwe match didn’t feature on the ratings radar. In the same week, Call the Midwife on BBC1 had 10.7 million viewers (source: BARB).
There is one further piece of information that would help to shed light on how much exposure Nelson has gained from the world cup matches. If you Google ‘‘Nelson’’, ‘‘Nelson NZ’’, ‘‘Nelson Tourism’’ or anything similar, the top search result is invariably the Nelson Tasman Tourism site, nelsonnz.com.
If indeed millions of viewers around the world watched the Nelson matches and were awestruck by the sight of our beaches, mountains and rivers, you would expect to see a sudden and pronounced increase in visits to the nelsonnz website immediately following the matches. Conversely, if there was little or no impact on site viewing numbers, it would be prima facie evidence that the matches had little impact and/or were not viewed by a large audience.
I have asked Nelson Tasman Tourism for website visitor numbers pre- and post- the world cup matches, but I have yet to get a response.
Given that Nelson Mayor Rachel Reese has stated that the council is going to look for more high-profile (and presumably high-cost) events to hold here, surely the council should be adopting private-sector best practice methods to evaluate the effectiveness of such marketing expenditure.
Proceeding on the basis on blind faith is foolhardy, especially when you are dealing with counterparties (international corporate sports bodies) that have shown themselves to be very adept at hyping up the supposed benefits of such events in order to maximise sponsorship and advertising revenue.
And yes, there is a possibility I may end up eating my words once we have some hard data in.