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SPORTS MARKETING Future Of Sports Marketing In Kenya? It’s The Numbers Stupid! By Richard Wanjohi R iddle me this – it belongs to you, but others use it more than you do? back down even after the affected firms threatened quitting the country, it says a lot about a sector. progressively, the proposition to air or associate with your sport becomes a labour of love. In the last one week, how many times have you bet on your favourite team’s result? Of course if you are from a certain North London team, the odds are almost always stacked against your bet. How many of these teams in the different football leagues do you know by heart by now? Work with me still, look at the major media outlets. Their main driver for growth in audiences is the use of sports. At a local level, I can count about 4 media houses with sports-specific content. While we are not yet at the level of our brothers down South to develop conglomerates housing sports media properties, it’s not too far before a media complex comes up. To bring this closer home we saw what happened to Kenya’s rugby 7s in the past 12 months. It tugged my heart to read a Tweet about a Kenyan rugby fan some weekend to the effect that “I used to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to watch Shujaa play … these days I barely know when or who they are playing”. There are many fans who can identify with this statement. Mid-this year, as I was shuttling in town via Uber from one side of town to the other, I accidentally opened the glove compartment, which had the drivers ‘betting book’. While it may have been common parlance to shrug it off, what surprised me most was the amount of detail jotted for each league, team as well as their playing times. Who are the top 10 media spends in the last 12 months? How many of these firms would you name top of your head? For the government to introduce a tax and not With the closure of the regional offices of one of Africa’s biggest sports media properties, it may have signaled the dearth that was to come for sports in the co