Discussion: Orienteering on TV via EBU

A lot of posts in different threads (thanks Jagge) about how should be done and which part of orienteering is interesting for TV. Everyone knows somethnig and that is good. I was searching for some answers too but I found that people don't know much about facts which are important for TV if we want to make a business out of orienteering.

In meantime I went through the IOF Sponsor guide where is also one part about TV rights. OK, it is a start but what now?

What are the main questions and what we should know, what IOF and what federations can do? What is our position right now, who work on this issues in general and give advices?

I read (on p.7) that TVsignal from WC races in CZE next week will be also offered through EBU to other countries. What kind of approach is the best to inform our national and commercial TV stations that it is worth to check the race and think about. Our o community is small but our hiking and mountaineering is one of the largest sport groups in the country and many of them are potential viewers so probably we can make some shortcuts.

Can we get a recommendatory letter from IOF or CZE Producer of Czech Television Sports Programmes? We probably can only sent the letter but with letter from CZE colleagues we could have better chances to convince them as colleagues letters are always nice to read. What we can really do on voluntary base without investing to much time? If we will just wait TV stations will not do nothing because we are not Olympic sport!

Just got done running my course at the Boulder Dash and am back in the hotel doing some work.

On the TV, TWC is droning on. It is showing something like the "Tough Mudders."

Frankly, I find the depiction somewhat lame. But, it still is on a recognized network. The key is that it is a professionally produced and edited segment.

BTW, the race is something like 10 miles and they are four hours into it. There are throngs of people walking all over the course. It is "grueling", "excruciating", etc.

Maybe the best way to get orienteering on TV is just to get some orienteers to show up and kick ass and get interviewed. After thanking God, etc., we can put in a plug for the Highlander or something.

Clem, the tough mudders are anything but. They are 5 km races over gentle terrain (mostly because it's tough-muddingly-hard to get permits for 20,000 people for any kind of interesting terrain—the EIR would run in the millions).

True. Well, in any case they are on TV, have sponsors, run around a ski resort, have enthusiastic participants, but I suspect, not too many excellent athletes.

@J-man
Did you mean something like this

Fisherman's Friend StrongmanRun
http://www.strongmanrun.ch/tag/daniel-hubmann/ - Hubmann brothers
http://www.fishermansfriend.de/strongmanrun_eng/ - Lakannen

Are you saying that we need a few "steplechase" sections onto orienteering course to have more chances to get on TV and get sufficient number of average Joe viewers?

No, I am not suggesting we need to A) modify orienteering. I wasn't suggesting B) that I would find live TV coverage of orienteering the most desirable end. However, some influencers are suggesting B and therefore A, which may be logically valid, but B is not the summum bonum.

Just thinking out loud...

Orienteering has actually all the ingredients that many of the shows go for:
- runners all muddied up
- scratches, bruises, bumps to talk about
- grunts when running
- I am sure there is some swearing going on

Maybe if all this can somehow be recorded, I mean the grunts and swearing, images of the bloodied knees, etc, maybe there is a chance of getting on TV. Maybe some of these kind of pictures have to be supplied to TV show managers...
because I think the look of a orienteer with map and compass, portrayed as having to be very good at thinking doesn't do it...

Flip side if it gets too bad: O gets qualified as more dangerous than your average football game, and mothers won't sign the permission slip for the kids to go on an O-field trip ;)

Maybe I haven’t said exactly but I wanted to raise just one question. And that is publicity. It is great to have orienteering on TV but I would say it is a huge consumption of time, money and too expensive for most of organizers if they don’t have enough people to work on marketing and PR related issues also after the WOC/WC.

I don’t know in which way TV exposure helps IOF to generate income in today WOC concept. Should I assume that WOC2011 sponsors decided to fund WOC (and IOF 60K EUR organising rights) because they wanted/get international TV exposure or they did it because of totally different reasons? Which sponsors, funds we would lose without TV?

@Kofols
I cannot answer your question from the point of view of WOC 2011, but I can try to do it for the two last World Cup finals, for which I was media director.
My impression is that if TV exposure is not crucial for sponsors, visual exposure is. If you cannot guaranty to your sponsor that their logo will appear on TV, but you are in position to insure them that the event will be covered in all major newspapers with images, this is already a pretty good start. For the PFS 2011 we got a press folder of 190 pages - that's almost 190 pages of "free" advertisement for the main sponsor, since nearly every article is accompanied by a photo... Not a bad deal.

I do not think that you can assume that the sponsors were solely interested in international TV exposure. In fact, it is difficult for me to believe that sponsors are really interested in international exposure. The reason is simple: most of the time, the sponsors of WOC/World Cup events are before all regional or national. Of course, it cannot harm them if some Finnish or Hungarian runners find the drink at the finish very tasty and decide to buy some during their next holidays, but the sponsors' first objective is to get exposure on the regional or national scene (think about banks, insurances, or a local food brand), because that's just where they make the most money with. It is truely very rare in orienteering to get a sponsor with a strong international profile.

This is not to say that (national/regional) TV exposure is not highly desirable in terms of sponsoring. In fact, any second you get on TV is worth gold, for this is an extremely strong argument to convince future sponsors. But since 1) the TV channels that are very attractive for sponsors (large national channels) are often totally unpredictable 2) your are likely to have to provide them with TV coverage yourself, which indeed is a burden to your budget; it is worth remembering that other visual exposure can also get attractive. Our event got 1 minute 23 seconds on national TV, but it was still considered as a big mediatic success because of these 190 pages in newspapers!

In this day and age, is focusing on TV what we want? Everything is moving to online content and personalized web channels. Instead of trying to find a way to get into the slowly declining TV market, perhaps it's better to figure out how to smartly present our content on the web and into the eyes of viewers there.

Pink Socks has a point.

Lucy, I totally agree. Publicity is not just TV but TV is probably the only media which is able to attract international sponsors. I would like to say that I very much admire WOC/WC organizers enthusiasm and their will and commitment to fulfill all the IOF requirements from IOF guiding documents (Guidance Notes for WOC Applicants, WOC Guidelines and the Sponsor Guide). But I think that on international level IOF should be responsible or help to multiply this news around the world, to maintain contacts and distribute news to major sport and news agencies, to make arrangements with TV broadcasters, etc.

I am not saying that it is easy to do or that I understand media but these are my observations. To ask you: What kind of help/service you as a media/sponsor director of WC race expect to get from IOF?

TV production
National public TV stations (at least in EU) also produce sport program on their expenses. Traditionally this means that sports which are among the most popular in the country will get this service for free or with very small co-financing. Federations mostly provide only information how to do it and connect sport experts with TV crew (organising people, IT experts, commentators, etc). If I understand correctly today WOC/WC organizers pay a lot of money to get this service from professional TV stations. I don’t know what kinds of costs private/Web TV stations are prepared to cover but I just don’t get it why we are paying expensive production if we can’t air our sport on national sport channels. I agree that moving whole thing on web would be the most cost/benefit solution and making low budget production (maybe only GPS, audio and a two/three cameras in start/finish) would be good enough for our world o community. But what is good enough for o community it is not good enough if we want to attract international sponsors. What kind of sponsors we can get with moving everything on web? It is strange situation in my opinion. EBU serves as an exchange channel for EU production but even public TV station would rather pay the broadcasting rights for Premiership league instead of using free sport program. It is the viewers issue - in our country a large cycling group has been making a big pressure on sport editors in last few years to put TdF (Tour the France) on the program. They succeed. In our case orienteering has no chance to get on TV even for free unless we become a much larger sport group as we are today. If public TV station has 10 sports on menu with almost no sponsors’ interest they will chose (if they must) sports which have:
a) domestic elite sportsmen
b) regular news about the sport in the media / journalists must be familiar with the sport
c) easy and low production costs
d) large public interest
e) olympic sport

So what IOF is doing is just one part of the TV game. How these questions look in SUI or in Scandinavia? Are you large enough?

Sponsors
In this context I see your comparison of newspapers and TV publicity – you probably made a very good choice and get as much publicity as you can get for your budget. You have two types of international sponsors. Event sponsors who want to build their image/product brand within specific sport and its values or sponsors who are exclusively interested in viewers’ numbers.

In fact, it is difficult for me to believe that sponsors are really interested in international exposure.

Yes, if we want to attract multinational companies, otherwise I just don’t know why we want to continue with this idea to become a TV sport. I think that IOF is "still" interested to get first type of sponsors (multinational companies) and TV stations in most cases sell the sport products to the second type of sponsors (national/regional). IOF has tried to get int. sponsors for many years and failed. Should they step down and give a try to another team/new generation or they think:"if we couldn’t sell the sport for many years nobody can do it. We tried all and the only path is changing the WOC." In this context I see the IOF Council proposal why IOF want to change the WOC formats. It is their way how to get to the sponsorship money. With selling TV rights to the TV stations, because they probably have been “promised” to IOF that they are able to sell the “new product”. That is how I see these issues. I think that one of the reasons why IOF is focused on TV stations is probably the infrastructure. IOF don’t have people, budget or marketing/PR tools like TV stations. If their instructions are based on media analysis of what TV viewers’ want why IOF don’t insist on signing the agreement with interested TV stations? TV stations probably have been already analyzed which segment of population would watch this product and how big and important this segment could be.

What IOF really did in these years is that they developed technical side (arena, etc). but marketing/PR is still on very low level (we got new IOF page last year, sponsor guide this year, one IOF sponsor; Kemira). We don’t have media/marketing commission or experts within the IOF. If we look into other sports we need to build also a strong marketing and PR team if we really want to become attractive for sponsors and TV. We must be able to produce, duplicate and multiply any kind of o news and sell much more targeted news to different media and run marketing actions than today. Look Greenpeace; their guerrilla tactic is what we need, with only orienteering news about how someone train hard, how hard terrain was and how hard the course was we are doing the same as other 50 sports which are already in the mainstream media. Can we produce also the yellow news; are media interested in our yellow news?

Publicity
IOF produces Ozine and news. Also federations produce their own magazines. This publicity is more or less intended within our o communities. If we want to sell the sport we need constant promotion and regular short orienteering news in media outside our community. 190 pages is probably extremely achievement for WC race but what also counts for image of the sport are regular news in different sport newspapers, sports web portals, magazines, etc through the whole year. For our country I could say that orienteering is not part of sport news but rather part of outdoor leisure activity news, mainly as a hobby activity in the nature. Maybe a few news and that is it. I wrote this just to give you a sense how big the hole is between a major o countries and the rest of o countries when IOF is talking about “orienteering as a truly global sport”.

We will never have enough traditional journalists who will be interested in our sport. I think we must face it that and we must start to think how to produce global orienteering news and then sell it mainly by ourselves.

What kind of status has orienteering compare to other sports in SUI mainstream sport media? Did they write about Niggli move to Tisaren? What kinds of orienteering news are interesting for SUI media? Do federation produce news for media or journalists?

How one WOC week publicity can raise the profile of orienteering if we don’t have enough people, resources to work on developing the sport after the WOC. What should be the IOF tasks in these relations? How much publicity organizers of WOC2005 got and how much and what kind of publicity they can get now? Can we get a lesson from Japan?

Thanks Kofols for this very interesting discussion!
You probably pinpointed the key of the problem by mentioning the so-called "global" aspect of orienteering. You told it, and I fully agree: orienteering is not a global sport. Far from it! Even inside of the very small Swiss territory, one finds two totally different worlds. On one hand (German speaking part), orienteering is very well developped, everybody knows what this sport is and the medias are interested. On the other hand (French speaking part), orienteering is very poorly known, the clubs are small and rare and very logically, the medias barely communicate about our sport.

To me there are two ways of thinking:
1) Enuntiate goals and guidelines on the basis of the situation encountered in highly developped orienteering countries and regions;
2) Take the diversity of developments into account and move towards a more regionalized conception of the needs and objectives for a higher mediatization of orienteering.

If one takes 1) as a basis, then one is almost certain to fail in less developped countries. You cannot come to Lausanne and propose to the (French speaking) Swiss national TV to buy out the TV rights of WOC 2012, while they have never broadcasted any orienteering race live before and only told about the WC final for 1 minute 20 seconds! That would be absurd here, but maybe it is a step that could be achieved soon in Sweden, Finland or Norway.

I simply think that it is too early to develop any global media plan. Maybe I am wrong there. But when I see the specificities of every region, the differences in development, I cannot imagine any unified guideline to work efficiently yet. In every country, in every region, you need to communicate differently because the realities are so far away from each other. Take the PFS 2010 in Geneva, for example: we had to axe our communication mostly on the event organized for school pupils in order to get the World Cup Final to be mentioned in newspapers. For Geneva, local school pupils running with a map were much more interesting than any World Champion sprinting in the city center. This year the event was just 120km away, and the situation was totally different: we oriented our communication on Rollier and Lauenstein, who are both coming from that region, and forgot about the school pupils. Everybody knows them, so it was easy to get through them to the actual topic. But you've got to know the region quite well to be sensitive to such subtil differences and avoid catastrophic communication plans...

So what can IOF do? First, not to impose irrealistic goals that would be more likely to extinguish the efforts undertaken in less developed countries than to support them. Secondly, focus on the basis: how can we bring orienteering to the people in order to make it more broadly know? There are brilliant ideas in every country. In SUI, one of the most brilliant projects was/is certainly SCOOL, which was developed for schools. It got an enormous success and each year, dozens and dozens of thousands of pupils get initiated to orienteering. Those pupils grow up and form the public which watches TV, reads newspapers and knows what orienteering is. So each year that public is growing too. I would expect IOF to put such successful projects in common, exchange them between countries so that everybody can benefit from them and doesn't need to re-invent what just got invented by their neighbours.
In short, I would expect IOF to provide support at the bottom of the pyramide first. If you want to pretend orienteering is global, make it global first and provide the tools for it. But it makes no sense to attempt to build the roof of the house before the walls are standing. If orienteering is not anchored in the country, then there is no way it will get into the medias and global actions will not help much on the long-term.

I probably repeat myself, but you need to have reached a certain level of popularity until "global" news get taken over by medias. As said, in SUI one part of the country reached that level, the other not. The Swiss federation provides the information agencies with news, and those get diffused in Swiss-german medias. But in the French speaking part, the news have mostly to get "tailored" (local pupils, local runners, local organising club) first in order to have a chance to be published, exception made of medals at WOC. When orienteering will have reached that level of development in the French speaking part, then we can expect to be able to communicate "globally" over the whole country, and there such strategies might work. Not before, I fear.

And to answer your question, the Swiss medias didn't mention Niggli's move to Tisaren, but they all wrote about her twins ;-) That day I typed "Niggli Zwillinge" in google and was so amazed by the result that it lead me to consider it as the most successful orienteering news of the year..........

This is how orienteering should be shown on TV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm-05gyP63g (the runner starts at about 56 seconds). It's from the recent 25manna relay in Stockholm. Imagine all of the top runners at WOC wearing headcams! I just don't know how to arrange wireless live broadcasting from all headcams...

wireless not needed if
http://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/me...

Hi, Lucy
Your information and thoughts are very realistic. I must agree on all what you are saying. Maybe we could chat a little bit more, here or elsewhere. What I would still like to know if you know is how much cost your TV production, who pays and did you get media report feedback about how many viewers watched WC race and in which countries and such information. Media world, users’ needs and interest are changing very fast and that is way I think that we (IOF) must be more aggressive if we want to become a more global TV sport.

This is one example about what I have in mind about marketing actions and guerrilla tactics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gv_Yr-S_s
How about calendar with naked elite orienteers? How much publicity and income that could bring? :)

I simply think that it is too early to develop any global media plan.
I see this as a need to be developed step by step. Maybe we would not be able to push any news from WOC/WC races to our media in first year but with tailored information which include also our runners we could have a line or two. We had a lot of sport information in our media which are simply not our traditional sports and very few people practiced it. But for media is very simple to use agency news to fill at least their web/newspapers and regular content on the topics is much appreciated. Maybe not as a traditional race report with picture and results in the start but I am sure that with different news we could attract also media in less developed countries. As you said news about "Niggli Zwillinge" is probably one of this kind that could be suitable also for our media. I don’t know why this should be less important news as any other similar news. It is more yellow than sport news but it is something that professional sportsman must know how to live with.

Secondly, in general we are guessing too much about what is our present media position. I think that someone like you as a media director of a WOC/WC race should know how look also orienteering media map at least in Europe in all details. Look at WOC2008 report. It is more or less technical report. “Through the EBU network it was offered to TV stations from abroad - stations in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland utilised this.115 media representatives registered in the Media Centre, 67 of those from abroad. All in all, 19 countries were represented, as follows: Australia (1), Belarus (1), Canada (1), China (1), Czech Republic (48), Denmark (3), Estonia (2), Finland (14), Germany (2), Hungary (1), Italy (2), Latvia (3), Norway (7), Poland (1), Russia (1), Spain (2), Sweden (7), Switzerland (16) and United Kingdom (2).”

And that is almost all. If you look for numbers which media, how many articles, TV minutes, viewers, etc you won’t find anything. We can’t understand our goals if we don’t know what happen in the last 10 years in this area. What we have been really achieved in the last ten years? Is somewhere any media analysis for WOCs/WCs? IOF should gather this information from TV stations, media reporters or hire media agency to make a feedback media report and that could be a basis to see the media situation, setting strategy, work plan and goals. If media persons who work on this area in federations don’t know this than it is hard to understand how IOF will do the right move. Is this strictly confidential information or the numbers are not in IOF favour. Do you must report to IOF and to what extent about your media results?

In short, I would expect IOF to provide support at the bottom of the pyramide first.
Agree, do we need to ask IOF what are their tasks and budget for this? What you see as a first step?

Orienteering marketing actions
O communities probably already run several marketing actions but are not very well known. Maybe we should highlight the best ones in the past and the present ones. As most of o countries don’t have budget to run proper marketing actions we must be even more creative and think how to transform idea to product and then use it for promotion of orienteering. Some ideas could be only locally accepted but some of them could become more global. One of the hacks is how to use technology in the most efficient way and how to motivate people with different interest to act and work together to reach the common goal.

It is worth to look at this one Project:Orienteering in [your country]!

One of IOF's actions in which I had high hopes was this one. It would be nice to know what the problems behind the projects are.
http://orienteering.org/foot-orienteering/maps/

Back to the original problem. Very straight forward thoughts!
TV production vs IOF (Sponsors/TV Rights)

“
I simply don’t like the IOF as a governing body of “our” sport, their lack of their own work is striking, they basically do live only from the fees they charge the World Cup/World Champs organizers, and believe me, they are sky high!!!
”
What to say. Maybe that volunteer orienteers love the orienteering more than IOF officials and so it is normal that hobby orienteers are crazy enough to organize IOF elite events and IOF officials are smart enough to produce a “good guidelines” how to collect fees out of these events.

Do they simply just want to be important and treated like a gentlemen’s? Like their colleague officials in some other bigger sport organizations are! It shouldn’t be that way but we are living in a world where organizers have almost no word about how IOF sanction fees policy should look like, how money should be spent and what kind of services IOF should be able to deliver for that fee. Guidelines are just a one way ticket!

I think it is a time that also organizers tell what they want from IOF and not just what IOF wants from organizers? It must be clear where money comes in. Could we afford to have officials without showing almost any operational results on the field of (media - marketing - sponsors - TV rights)?

New WOC formats – Please show us media/marketing reports and contracts or you should stop dreaming!

A lot of emotion, indeed straightforward but that doesn't make things correct.

their lack of their own work is striking

IOF has four full-time employees, two at decent level and two administrative/support. It is indeed correct that most of the event licensing fees go straight into the employee compensation.

Within the past 10 years, the IOF's main achievements are arena production and ISSOM. Does anyone think the sport would be better without these? I would guess not. Then, the sentiment must be that these achievements aren't worth the money that has been paid.

It shouldn’t be that way but we are living in a world where organizers have almost no word about how IOF sanction fees policy should look like, how money should be spent and what kind of services IOF should be able to deliver for that fee.

As is the case with most products, the customer has the option of not purchasing the product. Of course this isn't exactly free-market dynamics here at work, but I believe there is clear evidence of demand (for the rights to put on the WOC) somewhat exceeding the supply of WOCs. At some point in the late 2000s there were three bids for a WOC, and there usually (but not always) are multiple bids. Given this, I'd say the fees are lower than what the free market would dictate, not higher. Expanding on the quoted thought further, I think that with a public organization like the IOF the customer has a lot more power and "word about how... fees policy should look like", than the customer would in a free market.

Think of say an iPhone. Does Apple have elected customer representatives that regularly meet to set the pricing for its products? No. It throws them out there at the prices that the company thinks they will sell, and they sell. If the IOF sells its WOCs successfully, there's no point in complaining about the fees.

I think it is a time that also organizers tell what they want from IOF

I believe that if a party organizing a WOC would come to IOF with requests in excess of the standard operating agreement, and with an offer of additional funds to the IOF to make this request happen, and the amount were reasonable—and not a request for more free work from IOF Commission members, most of whom are unpaid volunteers—the IOF would gladly accept the offer and set upon making it happen.

Tundra makes a lot of good points, but if all the IOF can claim as victories over the past 10 years is arenas and ISSOM, I'm not sure that it is a raging success. Arenas are good, but sort of obvious, and ISSOM? I think that is a wash, personally.

A lot of things that are obvious require an immense dedication of time and resources. It isn't that difficult to promote your events, for example.

T/D: I'm not seeing the situation in some points as exactly as you are and I don’t see this debate as criticizing volunteer officials for their hard work. If IOF wants to say that we can reach the goal (orienteering on TV) with this governing model than I am sceptical. What we should do is not just a question what organizers are capable to do.

1. Comparison with Apple is not good. IOF is not a private company and it doesn’t sell the products but sells only the rights of our common products. Without organizers IOF can’t sells any products at all. IOF market should shift from federations to media (TV) because media should be their market. Federations are here only to organize/deliver this product to the media/customers.
2. In a free market also private management companies would have a chance to buy the rights of WOC. (e.g. PWT).
3. In the case of CZE WC races (Robert’s thoughts) I would say that he described the "burn-out" affect. It is not good that we lose good organizers because we don’t have interest to find/think about other possible governing and operational models for IOF elite events.
4. We have in most cases volunteer organizers and volunteer officials. Both sides get cover their costs (accommodation, travel, food) and both sides are working on their maximum. Do they have bad communications or organizers “word” doesn’t count as much as it should count in the decision making process? To get equal word/influence from officials and organizers on the IOF fees policy I would say that General Assembly should be in charge on this matter instead of IOF Council.
5. IOF fees are each year higher. Is any agreement for what kind of an investments we need higher fees or we need higher fees only to cover higher operational costs? It would be nice to have IOF Balance sheet and P&L explanation.

It isn't that difficult to promote your events, for example.

So you admit that IOF don't have a product as Apple do because if they have it they would also promote it. I am just saying that they are expecting too much from organizers with these guidelines.