You have a partnership with the ASO (Amaury Sport Organisation, the organiser of Le Tour de France) and are a title sponsor of Team Dimension Data. Why did you take on the title sponsorship?
What we’re doing with the team actually has very similar marketing principles to what we’re doing more widely with ASO in digitising Le Tour de France. The first reason was a pure brand objective. One of our macromarketing objectives at Dimension Data is to significantly increase brand awareness. We only have a B2B audience, and unlike many companies in the technology industry who also have a consumer arm, we don’t have a ‘legacy’ consumer brand (like Microsoft or IBM, for example). Our brand tends to be one of the quieter, less recognised brands, and one of the challenges we have in the tech sector at the moment is that there’s an incredible number of companies and propositions.
But the marketing story with the team is actually two-fold – the more purposeful reason for this sponsorship, and where it’s making the most impact for us, is the way the team reflects the values of us and our company. As well as having the same South African geographic heritage as us, the team also rides for a charity called Qhubeka, with the wider purpose of encouraging the sport of cycling across the African continent.
Why did you choose to be involved with cycling in particular?
We looked at all different kinds of sport and art, and our decision came down to three things. Firstly, cycling was one of the sports that was yet to digitise. We weren’t just looking to put our brand on a sport or art, but we were really wanted to bring value to a sporting event (or a sport itself). Many sports have already done this well (Formula One, for example), and we thought there was so much value we could bring to revolutionise the viewing experience of the race.
Secondly, we looked at our demographic. If you look at technology buyers, they’re not just people with IT in their job title: they’re HR leaders, brand leaders, retail leaders etc. We looked at the demographics of those people and performance cycling was the fastest-growing sport for senior professionals over the age of 30.
Thirdly, it was also a relatively inexpensive sport to get involved with. The cost of entry into sports like F1 is extraordinarily high – and cycling was relatively inexpensive.
"The ASO were effectively a client of ours, and about 18 months ago they asked us to help them digitise Le Tour de France. They realised fans of the sport watching at home are looking for an enhanced experience, and they needed to bring more data into the race and into the sport"
What have you been doing to activate the partnerships?
We’re doing this in two main ways – the first is around content, which is a huge focus. Le Tour gives us the most compelling content, whether it’s the technology story, the human story or the recruitment side. Also, it’s the most wonderful way to engage with clients, prospects and employees. This year we’ve created what we’re calling a ‘client experience centre’. Last year we found that although we had the opportunity to bring our clients and our partners to the race, being on the road following the cycling, often for up to eight hours a day, is pretty fast and furious, so it didn’t give us that gentle environment to have the conversation.
The centre gives clients the opportunity to drop by, understand the business objectives of the ASO, why they had to digitise and also to see how that’s happened. It’s really helping us have that conversation and bring the case study to life.
We’ve been facing similar challenges as those do while in the race – because the race moves, we have to move with it. We’ve had to have a very creative approach to how we do that. It couldn’t just be a room in a hotel, it’s actually on the back of a truck, so it moves regularly across France. We’ve got all the technology inside and clients can go there and spend some time with us, and then to go on to the race.
How are you dealing with the content challenge?
It’s a huge undertaking, and we have three main content work streams around Le Tour de France. For the ASO, we’re visualising data and running the @letourdata feed. We’re also providing the data and insights the broadcasters need for TV coverage, websites and social media feeds. We have a team on the ground that is doing running this and travelling with Le Tour every day.
We’re also creating marketing content. A few of us are here collecting photos, soundbites or video clips every day, which are processed by our content team in South Africa or the US, depending on the time zone. A lot of content and frameworks were also created before the event.
The third type of content that we’re busy collecting is the human stories. People are fascinated by the behind-the-scenes story of what it’s like to work at Le Tour de France, and although some of that is very raw content, it’s actually content that people are engaging with.
"We're a South Africa-headquartered company and they’re an African cycling team, so a natural relationship developed. We’re also working with the team to test the next generation of data capture and data visualisation in a race environment"
How are you planning to measure ROI?
We’re focused on two main measures with this programme. One is reach, as we’re looking to invest heavily in brand at the moment as effectively as we can. We’re looking at spikes in reach of the brand, by looking at things like spikes in organic searches for our website. We’ve already seen a significant spike this year; last year we saw a 3000 per cent increase during the period of Le Tour de France.
But obviously in B2B, volume is not really what we look for, so we look for numbers of those who engage in our proposition content, rather than just really exciting content about Le Tour. However, our job is then to nurture that interest and turn them into qualified opportunities. While reach is key for us, we’re also carrying a significant net new pipeline metric, which is a defined target for the investment we make here into net new pipeline that we create in the next six months.
What unexpected challenges have you faced?
You can never predict what’s going to happen. The wind we encountered at the top of Mont Ventoux last week had a knock-on effect on how the race was organised that day. Our technical team, who collects the data, is usually based at the finish line of each stage, but because the finish line was changed, the technical zone also had to change. It had to be split that day, and half of the technical trucks were at the bottom of the mountain and the other half were halfway up.
Our guys on the ground, who would normally physically connect all of these trucks together, had to very quickly create a new technical environment. They virtualised the trucks and put it all into the cloud, which enabled all the different technical people to pull down that the data wherever they were. We had no idea it was going to happen and hadn’t planned for it, but it’s actually created the most incredible story for us.
