Talking Point

Kevin Sheedy shines as Eddie McGuire fades to grey

By Michael Grealy

You can tell a lot about a sporting club from the way it markets itself for new members. Take the Magpies of the AFL, Collingwood Football Club, 120 years old this year.

It brags that it’s the biggest and most famous sporting club in Australia. It’s won 15 premierships. It’s contested 43 grand finals, more than any other club. It’s also lost 26 grand finals (two draws), more than any other club.

Its club song ends embarrassingly with Oh, The Premiership’s A Cakewalk For The Good Old Collingwood. It’s said that Collingwood supporters believe the last words of Advance Australia Fair are Carn the Pies. 

But all this, like pointing out its premiership droughts from 1958 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010 is nitpicking. Where Collingwood excels is rabid cradle to grave supporters, a record membership base of almost 73,000 and a financially astute club management led by Eddie McGuire that, like AC/DC, is strongly Back in (the) Black.

For 2012, it introduced a clever piece of membership marketing that draws on Collingwood’s reputation as the club other clubs love to hate. “It’s Us Against Them. Now is the time to decide. Are you with us?” the ad asks as new coach Nathan Buckley, ‘side by side’ with his players, faces the opposition hordes like William Wallace and his army in Braveheart.

Collingwood’s masterful ad has fine heritage. The voice-over is by Jack Thompson (They hate the sight of black and white that fills the battleground; and they hate our army chanting its intimidating sound).

 

Our Jack starred as coach Laurie Holden in the classic 1980 movie The Club, the Bruce Beresford/David Williamson homage to Collingwood and football club intrigues everywhere.

Marketing the Australian Football League’s newest team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants, has been a different kettle of fish. There is no tradition. No century of history. An untried team of teenagers based in rugby league heartland.

A confusing name: try GWS and you’ll get Melbourne insurance brokers or a Sydney recruitment company. Or worse. At least, there’s nothing to match the scores of tasteless jokes about Collingwood supporters. Yet.

The marketing saviour for this multi-million dollar AFL investment is one man. Kevin Sheedy. The former plumber, Richmond champion and Essendon super-coach over three decades, he is the voice, the face, the historian, the sage and the stuntman of this new club.

He’s brought his media smarts, his guile and tricks, his play-acting with Eddie McGuire, and above all, his deserved reputation as an innovator of the game and a leader in recruiting indigenous players, to Sydney. GWS membership is 7755. The membership drive features coach Sheedy as much as his largely unknown players.

Sure, the billboards feature rugby league import Israel Folau but, in Western Sydney, he’s hardly a giant alongside Nathan Hindmarsh.

It’s been Kevin Sheedy on the front cover of glossy mags, Sheedy in front of the 80-year-old Harbour Bridge, Sheedy the newspaper columnist and TV guest. And it will be Sheedy who commands the headlines until tomorrow night when they play the club song, described by one wag as backing music for a dancing Boris Yeltsin. 

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That’s when the youngsters of GWS hit the turf at Sydney Olympic Park against  the ‘Moneyball’ team of the AFL, the mighty Sydney Swans*, with the AFL hoping for a crowd of 40,000. That’s when the nation’s top draft picks play their historic first game and maybe then the GWS marketing can move from the coach to the players’ achievements.

*The writer is a Swans member.

 

Another own goal by the sport that never learns

By Craig Regan

We all have our sporting biases so let’s not pretend otherwise. As hard as it is to be objective when supporting your own team or code, it’s even more difficult to find anything good to say about the people running soccer in Australia.

The feet of Australian soccer are riddled with self-inflicted bullet wounds. It’s a sport that’s massively popular at junior levels but shuffles one step backwards every time it takes a pace forward.

Sacking the Clive Palmer-owned Gold Coast United team four rounds out from the finals is a big step. It puts a bunch of players out of work and creates a hole in the competition draw. But it’s more momentous when the axed club’s owner has immensely deep pockets and a legal team that’s busier than a one-armed bricklayer on a time-based performance bonus.

The public media war between Palmer and Frank Lowy hasn’t been pretty, but that’s the stuff of dreams for journalists charged with filling the back pages. Coach sackings, threats and protests. Chequebooks at 20 paces. This story’s had it all with more to come.

There’s a funny thing about court cases. They go on for ages and take up massive amounts of print space and airtime. A legal stoush will be the story that keeps on giving.

You have to wonder about the Football Federation of Australia. Palmer’s experience in owning and operating a soccer team was zilch. So why go into business with him, just a season after an equally ill-considered North Queensland franchise folded its tent?

Gold Coast United has been pulling an average home crowd of 2500. Clive Palmer was on AM this morning saying that this was a good result in proportion to the local population.  

Excuse me? I’ve been to funerals of immensely unpopular people that have pulled more heads.

It was great to see the Socceroos punch above their weight in the World Cup, especially as the professional commitments of leading professional players almost always mean lead-up games are marked by their unavailability.

By the way...there’s something about calling a sporting match a “friendly” that rubs me the wrong way, but I digress...

You don’t need a long memory to recall the ill-fated, taxpayer-backed campaign to win Australia the rights to host the World Cup in 2022. That amateurish bid cost $45m. We scored one first round vote from a possible 22. That well-known soccer heavyweight Qatar won.

There’s always the 2030 event - we’re not eligible to run for 2026 - by which time Frank Lowy will be 100-years-old. At the present rate he will have survived another 50 PR disasters by then.

 

Laotian tourism deaths an exercise in poor issues management

By Stephanie Furler

There has been a torrent of media articles following the recent deaths of Australians in Laos and the near death of another. Much of this negative publicity calls for fresh regulations in the local tourism industry and prosecutions of people breaking the already existing (and fairly lenient) rules.

In case you missed it, the deaths have stemmed from “tubing”. This involves sitting in tyre tubes while floating down the Mekong River and stopping along the way to drink (excessively) at makeshift bars.

It all sounds fine - until ridiculously cheap and sometimes free home-brewed whisky is mixed into the equation. 

It’s then that backpackers start jumping from rickety two-storey towers and swinging from ropes into shallow, rocky water below.

   

So what can we take from these deaths from a PR perspective?

Tourism is Laos’ fastest-growing industry but there has been no public comment from the Lao National Tourism Administration, addressing the fatalities or the international backlash. 

Granted, it is a very strict Communist country and its values and way of life are different, but if this situation was applied to a business or government organisation in the Western World, the time to go public would have been a month ago. 

In some situations a “no-comment” policy works – but this isn’t one of them.

Businesses need to constantly assess their position when an issue becomes a public concern. Timely and appropriate comments can reassure the public and ensure that someone else doesn’t fill a news vacuum.

It is unlikely that any of the regulations being called for in Laos will be implemented, so it’s important for the Tourism Administration to work with international government agencies and media to educate tourists about the dangers of tubing.

The need for personal responsibility is a something that many journalists fail to mention in their stories and is a key message that the Tourism Administration should be pushing.

The only information on the Administration’s site that remotely resembles a warning about excessive behaviour (after much searching) is in comic form.

No mention of tubing. 

It is important that organisations tailor messages to their key audiences and clearly in this case, the message needs to be louder, broader and maybe delivered with less levity.

A carefree, unregulated holiday destination is an appealing prospect for many Australians, but if the negative publicity continues, tourists may be deterred from visiting Laos.

Stronger messages, better issues management and awareness campaigns are essential to keep this industry thriving.  

 

K-Fed media express leaves the station

By Craig Regan

Excuse the cynicism. I'm sure his pain was real, but this afternoon's story about K-Fed going into an Australian hospital with chest pains while filming a celebrity weight loss program for the Nine Network is going to have a predictable media life cycle.

It’s going to run like this:

1. Headlines in every newspaper overnight - and the Twittersphere goes into meltdown;
2. Breathless updates ensue from breakfast TV celebrity commentators who have little or nothing in the way of facts;
3. Live crosses from Mount Druitt Hospital are not out of the question and probably mandatory;
4. Breakfast and morning radio hosts slam the story as a publicity stunt;
5. Kyle Sandilands declares K Fed to be a "fat shit";
6. All-day promos for a night time current affairs (term used loosely) interview from the hospital bedside – on Nine of course;
7. Spoiler story runs on Seven because they don’t have the interview;
8. TV nightly news stories run on almost every channel – especially on TEN where they have to fill an hour. ABC ignores it;
9. The story turns into fodder for next week’s Gruen Transfer;
10. Spin cycle starts again.