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Brave new digital world to better market NHL

Restructured website to be launched as league reaches out to U.S. fans

Kevin McGran
Sports Reporter

Some might say John Collins has the toughest job in pro sports. The former NFL marketing guru must find ways to sell hockey ... to Americans. It's a tough sell.

The lockout decimated fan interest. TV ratings are abysmal. Yet somehow, the NHL's salary cap ? which is tied directly to revenue ? continues to increase. It's expected to hit $55 million (U.S.) next season, up from $50.3 million this year.

The lofty Canadian dollar is surely a contributor. But the NHL also believes it's doing other things right. One spot where they believe themselves to be a hit is the Internet.

From NHL.com, to a hockey channel on YouTube, to presences on social networks like myspace.com, the NHL is riding new media.

This week, the league will announce the debut of the "Playoff Channel," a dedicated broadband channel available free to visitors to NHL.com and a boon to puckheads with a high-speed connection.

It's a part of a total relaunch of NHL.com, coming in September, with seven dedicated channels, including one where the user can look up every goal and every save in a game, or an individual player's shots and goals through the season.

"It's the way fans want to experience media these days," says Collins, the NHL's senior executive vice-president of business and media. "You can't take it for granted that they want to sit down in front of their television set at 1 o'clock on a Saturday and watch a game. That's not happening quite as much any more."

Bud Light, Cisco and Dodge have signed on as sponsors as the league reaches into fans' wallets by touching them directly through their home computers, a strategy devised partly out of necessity. TV audiences are fragmenting and newspapers ? especially in the U.S. ? have cut back coverage.

"We can no longer depend upon traditional media to do the job for us," says Collins, also the former president of the Cleveland Browns.

Detlev Zwick, associate professor of sports marketing at York University, believes the strategy is more about reaching deeper into the wallets of its existing fans, rather than finding the wallets of new ones. But he also believes the nature of being a fan is changing, with few actually able to afford tickets to see the game live, so the NHL is correct to change with them.

"The NHL is in big trouble in terms of television appeal in the U.S. It's a very difficult product to sell," says Zwick. "For the NHL to say we've got to create experiences for existing fan bases, I think it's really essential."

The digital strategy reaches out to a web-savvy younger audience, while creating revenue streams that didn't exist before.

"We know we have 53 million fans in North America who love hockey ... and want to be able to get to the content, especially for their favourite teams, and find out what happened last night," says Andre Mika, the NHL's vice-president of broadband and new media production.

"Having a dissociated television presence, we don't have the saturation from a network deal here in the States, we really feel like digital is the way to build (an audience)."