The managing director of the UK freesheet Sport magazine has warned that there must be limits on what the media offers to the sponsors of sports stars for interview access.
Gaining access to stars by granting their commercial partners promotions around the published content has helped Sport build an impressive list of interviewees. In a recent issue it spoke to Eric Cantona, Tim Henman, and Chris Hoy, among others.
The freesheet has led the way in exploiting these routes of access, but its managing director Greg Miall says it has strict rules protecting its editorial quality. He warns that these rules are being disregarded by other publications at the peril of the industry.
“If people don’t realize that there are rules, and agree to everything PR agencies ask, then you will get price inflation - the price being the amount of branding that appears in and around the article,” he said.
Miall says that other publications, under pressure to get the same level of access to stars as Sport, are making wrong assumptions about how much the freesheet will offer to sponsors and PR agencies.
“I get calls offering interviews with sportspeople, if we put them on the front cover. Well, no, that’s not the way it works.
“We’ll do it in certain circumstances. But if you want to be on the front cover of Sport, you have to be recognisable walking down the street in the UK. There are only about 75 sports stars that have that status. Chris Hoy, right now, would maybe make the front cover - maybe. But once Beijing has finished, and in a month’s time? Probably not.
“I saw an interview recently in a Sunday newspaper with an England cricketer that plugged a car manufacturer within the body of the interview, and I was appalled. We would not do that.”
Miall warns that the industry does not want to get itself into a situation where PR agencies will be playing newspapers and magazines off against each other for what they can offer sponsors to get access to their stars.
He acknowledges that these commercial routes of access are an increasingly important aspect of the sports media industry, and that Sport has worked them to its advantage.
“If you want an interview with Wayne Rooney you can go to a press conference, and be there with all the other newspapers and magazines, or you can go to his sponsors - EA, Coke, Nike - and do it through a brand, on their time.
“We work closely with the brands - it’s a bit quid pro quo. But the brands never proscribe what is said, and we can get interesting, balanced articles. We are a magazine, not a newspaper, so we are not looking for news, or to get an angle.
“The danger is that everyone starts offering everything, and too much is given away.”
Brands pay for mentions at the end of interviews with their sponsored sports stars. Miall says that advertising in the freesheet is a vehicle for sports sponsors to notify their specific target audience – sports fans – of their association with sport.
“Marketers say that for every pound spent on sponsorship, you should spend another pound letting people know you are a sponsor. Say if you are Magners, and you want people to know that you sponsor the London Wasps, we can say, ‘you can have a full page ad, in an issue with a special feature on rugby, right beside a big picture of Paul Sackey’.”
Critics of the freesheet magazine model claim that advertisers do not get the same value as in paid-for publications, as issues are often thrust in readers’ hands outside train stations and swiftly thrown away.
However Miall is adamant that Sport is far ahead of freesheets such as the The London Paper and London Lite in terms of editorial quality, and that it enjoys a readership which spends time with it – 24 per cent read “almost every page, or every page” according to a YouGov poll.
“For £30,000 to £40,000 you can get a tight little [brand] association. It is an incredibly cost-effective way of getting your brand linked to sport.”
In the first half of 2008, Sport’s ABC readership was 315,406.
