Background
X Athletic are a fictional Football League team who have been looking at developing a more enhanced digital strategy for several years now.
The challenge
After looking at analytics of how many of their fans are using mobile devices to access their website, X Athletic decided they wanted to develop their digital strategy to reach out to their fans using mobile devices. Taking this into account, they’ve already pushed forward with developing a mobile responsive website and are now, in light of figures about the increasing use of the app store as a method of content discovery, are looking to establish a presence there.
They would be primarily looking for a way of disseminating match program material via an app, preferably with something that would sit well across both smartphone and tablet devices as, although most users at the stadium have some kind of tablet device, many still bring smartphones to browse the web and apps during the pre-game and half-time periods. These match-programs could be purchased individually, as 70% of all fans attend games on an ad hoc basis, or alternatively via a subscription model.
Additional, generally accessible print-material would also be digitized moving forward, such as the club’s monthly magazine and perhaps other, at-present archived, historical material moving forward. For this reason they are particularly concerned about being able to make the user experience as intuitive as possible, with clear HTML welcome and navigation pages, complete with buttons corresponding to the various categories.
Alongside this, they would like to be able to use the app to create a log-in portal whereby season-ticket holders could be assigned login details that would give them access to not only the match programs for free, but also season-ticket member-specific material, tentatively being called their “Platinum Membership” by X Athletic’s marketing team.
X Athletic understandably have an interest in being able to embed various kinds of rich-media content. Match programs will come complete with video versions of manager and play interviews, and the monthly magazine is planned to contain special video features about aspects of the club. HTML5 content is also planned, but this is more of a long-term goal.
The solution
X Athletic found YUDU’s app solution to be ideal. The simplicity of publishing using the YUDU Publisher system meant they didn’t have to encumber their existing, small backroom marketing staff with extensive training of any kind. Further to this, the work on the HTML categories/navigation and welcome pages was done by YUDU’s creative team (working around a brief they themselves created), negating the need for any significant work on their end.
They were also particularly attracted by the subscriber management options offered. Their existing list of season ticket holders could be easily imported as an excel workbook into a specifically created subscriber group granting unlimited access to all publications on the edition. This allows season ticket holder’s instant, privileged access to the monthly magazine and match program publications released so far this season. Non-season ticket holders could access match programs either via single purchases within the app or by a subscription portal on X Athletic’s website, which plugged into a separate subscriber group on the YUDU Publisher system via an API. This automated the process of transferring subscribers over. All of this was naturally supported by a straightforward log-in portal within the app.
X Athletic’s designers were also very comfortable with using the overlay tools to embed rich media content. They were familiar with how to create overlays as a result of using standard design packages like InDesign, so this greatly assisted their acclimatization.
They are also tentatively planning to broaden the scope of what their app provides moving forward. It already has an archive section within the categories navigation page that will, hopefully, correspond to historically important match-programs. Special editions with large amounts of HD video are also planned for release to season ticket holders, such as their “100 greatest X Athletic Goals” publication.
Finally, they also plan to release an embedded form in each match-day program that allows season-ticket holders to send over requests, via a callback script, to their nearest stadium café to reserve any food and drink at half-time.