TORONTO -- A long-standing criticism of Rogers Communications Inc.'s ownership of the Toronto Blue Jays is that the company hasn't done enough to leverage the baseball club across its various businesses, and Keith Pelley is intent on changing that.
The new head of Rogers Media, the division responsible for the Blue Jays, describes making better use of the team through all the assets at his disposal as "a focal point" of his strategy.
During an interview last month, Pelley's predecessor Tony Viner acknowledged that it took Rogers a long time to figure out how to best integrate the club, and felt it had just turned the corner in that regard.
- The Blue Jays $79 million payroll included $10 million to B.J. Ryan and $6 million to Roy Halladay.
- Jays will be front and centre through a host of Rogers products in the coming months.
- Extra revenue will be put back into the Jays' roster.
Pelley, who took over Sept. 13 after leaving the Olympic broadcasting consortium, hit the ground running and sounds ready to push things forward.
"It's a very, very diverse portfolio and integrating those different brands and those different divisions and utilizing the assets everyone brings to the table is going to be a focal point," he said in an interview this week.
"How does that affect the Blue Jays? On a go forward basis, I'm very confident that the Blue Jays marketing plan we'll launch sometime in January will have significantly more presence in the marketplace through the Rogers brand than ever before."
The corporate talk may not mean much to fans desperate for the Blue Jays to make their first trip to the post-season since 1993, but it should.
On one level, it reaffirms Rogers' commitment to the team, something that was put into question after Ted Rogers' death in December 2008 and by the cost-cutting that followed in 2009.
Perhaps more importantly, it also means the company believes it can make money in a variety of different ways with the Blue Jays. The more revenue they generate, the more resources general manager Alex Anthopoulos will be able to pour back into the club.
The Jays' payroll was about US$63 million in 2010 (not counting the $10 million paid to B.J. Ryan and $6 million sent to the Phillies as part of the Roy Halladay deal). Pelley said the payroll will rise next season largely because of the 15 arbitration-eligible players on the roster.
Still, there is more money available provided a sensible opportunity presents itself.
"There comes some times when all of a sudden a free agent comes up that you're actually looking for and it might not make the most sense from a pure profit-and-loss perspective in the short term, but it makes more sense in the long term," said Pelley. "Those are the type of decisions that we will have significant dialogue (about), and that will be a decision that Rogers will make."
Pelley is full of praise for Anthopoulos and team president and CEO Paul Beeston, who has dramatically tightened up the business side of the Blue Jays since taking over from Paul Godfrey after the 2008 season.
No longer are fiscal losses brushed off as "little more than an expensive marketing campaign," as an insider once put it, pointing out that often money was simply being taken out of one Rogers pocket and placed into another. Now there is more emphasis on making sure everyone's pocket gets stuffed.
"Full integration is something that is very critical to us but very, very tough to measure," said Pelley. "My impression of the Blue Jays as far as it being a different business, yes it is, however it still needs to be run like a business.
"All aspects and all facets of it needs to be run with the same due diligence as you would with any other business, with solid business discipline in every aspect."
Pelley's view on sports and media solidified during his time as head of the Olympic broadcasting consortium, which presented the Vancouver Games through a variety of different media platforms to Canadian audiences.
Rapid technological change has transformed the media world from his days as president of TSN and later president of the Toronto Argonauts from 2004-07, providing ways to "communicate and articulate your message to the fans which didn't exist even as little as six, seven years ago."
That's why he believes continued ownership of the Blue Jays makes strong business sense for Rogers over the long term.
"We're in a media world of content and we certainly have a significant advantage if we own the Blue Jays," he said. "The industry has changed, the whole environment has changed now with multiple platforms and it is no longer about just linear programming, i.e. television.
"It is about mobile, it is about digital, there are iPad apps, mobile apps, online content. We're in the very good position where we have a relationship with content, customers and channels."
That's why people can expect the Blue Jays to be front and centre through a host of Rogers products in the coming months. The company has finally decided to use all its tools to push the club in ways it hasn't before.
"One of the areas will be on Sportsnet.ca, where we will have a far larger Toronto Blue Jays presence," said Pelley. "The Jays also have 81 dates for us to communicate some of our other brands. So not only will we utilize everything from The Shopping Channel, the FAN 590, Sportsnet to even some of our publication divisions to grow and build the Blue Jays brand, vice versa, the Blue Jays will be utilized as a great resource to build the brands.
"It comes down to complete integration across all our platforms and all our different brands."
Entertainment Plaza - TV, Movies, Sports, Music
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99
Babe Of The Month
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99/babeofthemonth.html
Hunk Of The Month
http://members.shaw.ca/almosthuman99/babeofthemonthman.html
No comments:
Post a Comment