Interview with Richard Pepper, Head of Digital at Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C.
The recent model of clubs relying on Video rights, Player trade and Ticketing has taken a serious hit in the current world. Clubs have been obliged to look beyond those traditional sources of income and digital transformation has become key for football clubs, as it allows them to grow at a fast pace in certain areas and it opens the door to new revenue streams. Digital covers a wide range of activities, from engaging with fans to improving internal process or enhancing sports performances. So what does digital transformation mean for football clubs?
In this second article of our series “Digital Transformation in Football Clubs”, we asked a few questions to Richard Pepper, Head of Digital at Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. Back in Premier League in 2018-2019, the club resulted in a seventh-place finish and earned a place in the Europa League, their first European campaign since 1980–81. The club is also super active in the gaming industry with its own esport team - Wolves Esports.
WOLVES DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
Digital transformation has become very important for football clubs over the past years. How did you handle it at Wolverhampton FC? What was the trigger and what were the first steps of doing so?
I came into the business around three years or so ago at a point in which the club had already identified that transformation was needed and had begun to put this into action. Our ownership group is based in China and are very forward thinking when it comes to digital. My remit is to move our owned digital platforms forward. Anything from websites, to app, to creating new digital experiences at the stadium.
Talking about the strategy behind things you’ve done so far, what areas did you want to tackle first for the club? What were your priorities?
The first thing we looked to tackle was ensuring we had the best possible infrastructure in place to allow us to build strong platforms and experiences. Data and CRM was key - I was lucky in that we already had a great vendor in place for that and it was a case of refining the strategy around that side of the business. My first project at the club was launching a single sign-on product for supporters which improved their experience as well as giving the business a single view of our data across all platforms. This has been the base that we’ve built the rest of our digital experiences upon.
I assume you had to invest in order to make it possible, the questions are more where and how did you invest?
As well as the extra time we invested in getting data and CRM right, we also invested in a new e-commerce platform and mobile app which have both proven hugely successful from an experience and commercial perspective.
In terms of structure and organisation, did you make some significant changes to make it happen?
Not huge changes - I was hired as the club’s first Head of Digital and we also created roles for data and CRM which as mentioned is a big focus for the club to help us make smarter decisions going forward.
WOLVES SPECIFIC PROJECTS
We saw that you have worked a lot around advertisement & sponsoring, can you tell us more about what you’ve done so far in these areas?
As with most clubs we’ve had to pivot a lot of our sponsorship and partnership activations from the physical in stadia inventory to digital inventory over the past 18 months due to COVID. Luckily we had a huge amount of interesting online inventory we could use including augmented reality features, games and extremely strong written and video content.
Furthermore we have looked for gaps in the market where we could try something innovative and came up with an idea to launch our own self-serve ads platform. Working alongside developers from our ownership group we quickly launched this platform earlier this year and have had a huge amount of interest.
Your self-serve advertising portal enables every people/company to use your brand and your facilities to promote their business. Why did you decide to launch such a project? What was the reason behind it?
We’ve done extremely well with larger sponsorship deals over the past few years but where we’ve struggled to directly commercialise is our digital inventory and advertising space. The values are too low for our commercial team to spend a huge amount of time to sell this so we often ended up with empty advertising space or looking to use a google ads etc who then take a large cut of revenues and set selling values for you.
We came to the conclusion that to make the most of those advertising areas we should try to take control of this ourselves. Clearly self-serve advertising platforms for social channels is a huge business and most organisations on the planet have used them at some point. It therefore made sense to us to try to recreate these and remove the middle man, allowing us to list any inventory we wish to, and be in full control of selling price and the approval process. We launched in March this year and have seen really promising results so far.
You are also very active in the gaming area: you created Wolves esports with teams in FIFA, Rocket League etc. You also partnered with Epic Games early 2021, Was it part of your digital strategy or was it completely disconnected from that?
This is a part of our global growth strategy, we’re looking at areas we can grow our following whether that be through traditional football marketing or by pivoting to other areas that make sense. Esports seemed to be an obvious choice with a link to football through FIFA but then this opening up other esports such as Rocket League. This opens up further commercial opportunities with brands who might not be quite as interested in traditional sports marketing and gives us a chance to grow to an audience who may not be sports fans. Anything we can do to grow the audience benefits the club overall and gives us a few more strings to our bow if we are competing with other clubs for partners etc.
Do you have any new exciting projects you’re working on to empower your digital presence in the coming months/years?
We’ve got a long term roadmap that we’re working towards that hopefully mirrors our growth on the pitch. This includes major updates and upgrades to our digital platforms as well as some projects to open up new digital revenue streams. The overall aim is to make the club as competitive off of the pitch as it can be to help it become more competitive on it.
Finally, what pieces of advice would you like to give for football clubs or any digital manager who wants to start their digital transformation journey?
I think it’s critical to know where you want your platforms to be in 3-5 years and ensuring that you build your infrastructure with that in mind. Once you have the correct building blocks in place it makes those later developments so much easier. I’d also recommend really doing your homework on all potential suppliers - we’ve built a network of vendors who all regularly work together for ourselves and other organisations so any developments which require them to work together are generally really smooth.