II MEMOS Convention - Day 2

The II MEMOS Convention is having its last day of work at Cascais, raising questions on what should be the future of the Olympic sport and opening doors to possible solutions for it.

Marisol Casado, president of the International Triathlon Union (ITU), was the first keynote speaker of the day, at this event that brings together current and former students of MEMOS, the executive master of sports management sponsored by Olympic Solidarity, involving 16 universities. A reflection about the protected role of the international federations, was done at her presentation "Defining our future".

Three key players are involved in the system - Governments, Sports, Business - and, accordingly to Marisol Casado, "the future of International Federations" are "to care for and reinforce the rules of the game, coordinate the global calendar, qualify world champions and train coaches and judges."

This statement by the ITU President is linked to an issue expressed at the MEMOS Convention: "International Federations have been outgrown in the organization of events by private organizations and in risk of losing the power to qualify the world champions."

Marisol Casado argues that there is the need to International Federations and National Federations to reach consensus, because the "business is coming. International Federations have developed a more business-minded mentality," she argued, adding," Organizations that govern should be proactive in risk-taking and not non-reactive. "

The strategy suggested by the international Triathlon leader to become International Federations more developed commercially is by creating "new competition formats", at least in a differentiated way, producing "ready-to-share video content; work with digital partners, including social networks, to better understand consumer behaviour; and depend less on the traditional television revenues."

Marisol Casado emphasized the need to explore new communication platforms, because "digital transformation" means "speed".

The ITU President gave a recommendation at the MEMOS Convention, which consists on the uniformalization of the designation of International Federations, which should always be preceded by the word WORLD followed by the name of the sport. She gave examples of federations that have already adopted this measure: World Sailing (Sail), World Archery (Archery), etc.

The five rings of marketing

Jochen Färber, head of the Olympic Channel in Lausanne, was the second keynote speaker of the day at the Estoril Congress Center, delivering a presentation named "The five rings of marketing". He started by quoting Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee: "For the survival of sport we need to have diversity on the televisions." This was the basic idea for the creation of the Olympic Channel and originated the best response for the mediatic agenda dominated by football.

The Olympic Channel was created in 2015, after being approved in 2014, as part of Agenda 2020. It is a digital multi-platform that gives information for all sports, with the millennial audience under the spotlight, according to Jochen Färber.

Currently, the Olympic Channel is developed by 100 employees, divided between Madrid, where the production unit operates, and Lausanne, where it is based the administrative and marketing unites. It has already broadcasted 1650 live events, with 82% of accesses made through social networks and 39% of the audience accessed it using mobile devices.

"What we want is to promote sport in general," he clarified, not just the Olympic sports, giving the example of the broadcast of 2017 World Games in Wroclaw, Poland by this online channel.

In the near future, the challenges of the Olympic Channel are to gain "more interactivity" and explore eSports and E-Commerce.

Organized by the National Olympic Committee of Portugal in collaboration with the MEMOS Association, the II MEMOS Convention had tje support of the Cascais Municipality and Toyota.

The event brought together around 200 participants from all over the world.

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