What Is the Nfl Media Group's General Strategic Direction

Fundamentals of Marketing Management

1.- What is the NFL Media Group's general strategic direction?

With a fan base of 181 million in the US, the National Football League (NFL) has a clear branding strategy based on a message that is intense, meaningful and unifying. This message is based on its core values: excellence, community, teamwork, innovation and tradition.

The NFL receives over $4 billion annually from major media television and cable partners CBS, FOX, NBC and ESPN. This media licensing agreement represents its main source of annual income (which is about $8 billion). The NFL executives have set an ambitious target of $25 billion in revenues by 2027, which requires them to expand their sources of income by 1 billion each year. To help reach this target, the NFL's senior vice president of media strategy, Brian Rolapp, has really begun to focus on how quickly the world’s media has evolved into wireless data. With this in mind, Rolapp and his team assessed the pros and cons of two major issues:

1. Identifying the right partner for the wireless project, whether it be a “strategic partner” (such as ESPN) or carriers such as Sprint (with whom the NFL already has an ongoing deal), and,

2. Once the partner is targeted they should decide between an exclusive or non-exclusive deal.

The existing deal with Sprint involves several services to Sprint's customers, which include video highlights, live games and streaming of NFL cable channels, as well as the NFL RedZone which brings the end-consumer a product accessible at anytime and anyplace.

2.- What are the advantages & disadvantages of both exclusive and non-exclusive partnerships on the digital space?

Exclusive:

We must first highlight that an exclusive agreement is, most of the time, a secure way of establishing a steady source of income. Generally it should be preceded by a bid amongst the top interested parties so the licensor, the NFL in this particular case, may choose the one...