AFL Women’s Football Event: Comprehensive Analysis - Humor Advertising Essay.

Introduction to the 2017 AFL Women’s football event

Question:

Discuss About The Humor Advertising Comprehensive Analysis?

The 2017 AFL Women’s football event was the commencement of season’s top notch women’s Australian football competition. The eight teams that competed in the league were all associated with existing AFL clubs. The games kick started from Friday, 3 February, the season ended with the grand final being played on Saturday, 25^th March (AFL Women's., 2018). The entire fixture was put on display on Friday 9 December 2016. The first match was played between Carlton and Collingwood, they featured in the first match of the league which was scheduled to be played at Olympic Park Oval which was also Collingwood’s home ground, but was moved to Ikon Park which had higher capacity in January 2017. These integrated technique or approaches helped in maintaining and generating follower’s involvement for making the campaign adequately strong in terms of strength and ability.

This approach helps in achieving their goal of attracting the potential followers of the AFL women’s football tournament. The media campaign could have benefitted from higher specialization between various social media platform and usages (Gill, 2017). This could marketing each page easier to understand and lowering existing spams for the followers and pages of the pages. Several comments and more than thousand likes would come on each posts of the AFL tournament. Furthermore, the viewership of the event’s broadcast would number to 15 million and more at times.

The online media campaign organized by AFL was designed to inspire and regulate fan involvement with the league held in Australia. To attain this objective, the campaign was administered across the triple major and principal online social media platforms namely face book, Instagram and Twitter (Littleton, 2016). The campaign showcased and featured posts all over the major social networking sites, the posts included match updates, scores, standings, player interviews, team showcases, funny clips, articles relevant to the AFL, while Instagram’s major focus was on showcasing the spectacular event.

The posts included fan interaction, followers and most of the prominent jury of the league is found on Twitter. ‘Re-tweeting’ posts made about the event are the primary means of showcasing the posts and articles about the event (Giulianotti, 2002). It helps in providing a sense of interaction between the communities and also encourages participation from the fans.

Sharing live updates from the tournament is also a productive mode of engaging audience consciousness and involvement. Followers are likely to stay more engrossed and entertained in the event when they can view and observe the event happenings from anywhere in the world. Fans and followers are more likely to watch the events from anywhere in the world from any device which also encourages fan participation as they don’t need to be psychology active in the place of the event taking place as it is not possible for everyone to go to the stadium to watch their favorites players or cheer for their respective teams (Weinberger & Gulas, 2006). This principle is ascertained in AFL’s online media campaign as Instagram, Twitter and Face book social pages all showcases the live updates. AFL’s Instagram page always shared images and clips of the live tournament to showcase the event for its online fans. Showcasing of the major competition itself is featured on the AFL Face book and Twitter handles during the event, whereas Instagram only posted this kind of stuff.

AFL’s approach to the online media campaign

Platforms like Twitter and Face book, live action sharing on these platforms to drive encouragement from the masses primarily takes another form: standings of the teams, scores and highlight clips from the game (Filo, Lock & Karg, 2015). Score and match fixtures and current standing scan help the followers to feel that they are up to date with the match and competition.  It also helps them in maintaining a track of the live tournament’s progress thereby assisting the loyal event followers to preserve their active interest in the tournament. Sports highlight clips which are shared on the twitter and Face book handles of the event help drive engagement of the masses and followers as the event is easily available to be witnessed by anyone and everyone where ever they are.

The online sports campaign could be ascertained and viewed as fairly successful for achieving its goal of maintaining and developing the involvement of the fan with the AFL women football league’s followers and fan (Kunkel, Funk & Lock, 2017). In twitter and face book, the tournament post were displayed to have thousands of viewers and users.  The posts on the two different media vary according to the level of interaction. Some posts about the tournament only attract hundreds of likes while the other post can reach to more than thousands of likes (as shown in figure). Moreover, the number of management for the tournament posts also varies. Furthermore, on instagram, the videos and images of the AFL football event also consistently was able to gain thousands of likes. Moreover, such posts work to attract consumer involvement by covering the various aspects of the tournament coverage.

Besides these posts receiving high levels of attention from their fan’s viewing, liking as well as sharing, AFL also involve with its  online community participants. They form a significant share of the campaign. Especially in Twitter, the tweets by followers, fans and important community participants can be re-tweeted that would affirm its engagement and input. This fostering of a harmonious relationship between the fans and clubs could help in shifting the role of fan and followers into more of a supportive role (Elliott & Drummond, 2015).  This helps the followers in identifying the league more adequately and thus creating strong level of loyalty or solidarity among its followers. Hence, this approach makes the followers more likely to involve and engage with AFL football league.

Use of social media platforms to attract followers and maintain their involvement

The online campaign has proved to be triumphant in its ultimate objective of attracting the community’s attention or interest for the tournament’s live broadcast. The statistics of AFL tournament just after the event revealed that the events live stream crossed over 15 million views and at times would reach to 1 lacks concurrent viewers (Vann Woodford & Bruns, 2015).

In the current scenario, there are various major strengths related to the campaign that is ascertained through the outline of the campaign strategy.  The key element among these are prominent community members, involvement of fans, use of humor and moreover, the showcasing of the AFL event through video and images of the tournament, highlight clips of the match and placement or score updates posts (Duncan, 2017).

The humorous posts related to the tournaments are the major strength of the sports campaign in various ways. As per the outlining off the campaign strategy, it is ascertained that humor is advantageous in promoting positive options about the organization and very effective in gaining attention of the followers, especially the young followers (Hutchins, 2014). This encourages more people to follow AFL women football tournament more closely by engaging with its events and community. Moreover, the humorous posts can be easily shared among their friends and would result in gaining more exposure by being introduced to more individuals, who might be interested in viewing the event or participating in the social media community.

Moreover, the interaction between AFL women football team and community members through Twitter assists greatly in driving their fan following. Community engagement and involvement in discussions encourages more followers and fans to greatly interact with each other and others related to the event (Woodford, Prowd & Bruns, 2017). The frequency of the event updates about the tournament via Face book and Twitter is known as its strength, as they can continue to maintain their engagement with their followers by reminding them about the upcoming events more often. It provides the fan with live updates so that those interested can evaluate the unfolding of the events.

On the other hand, the major weakness related to this media campaign is receiving notifications for various posts every single day from the AFL women football’s page could be quiet irritating and can lead its followers away from involving with the event or community. The type of posts made in financial book and Twitter is different, which prevents it from presenting a clear image of what the function exactly wants to showcase in the campaign and thereby reducing the potential annoying spam for its followers (Chang, Yu & Lu, 2015).

Strengths and weaknesses of the online media campaign

Moreover, the other potential weaknesses of the online sport campaign is that it frequent updating the scores about the tournament and displaying highlights makes the followers less inclined to view the events or involve in its social community page. The followers opt for saving their time simply by checking the match highlights, score updates and standing updates (Felix, Rauschnabel & Hinsch, 2017). However, this limitation or drawback is negligible as compared to the strength of the campaigns posts as it has ability to create high interest regarding community interaction, involvement and viewership.

Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be concluded that AFL women football has maintained and developed a very perfect and effective online media campaign by involvement of community interaction and viewership for the football tournaments. Application of various media such as Face book, instagram and Twitter between January to March various kind of posts were made. This involved the promotion of discussion and interaction between the AFL team leaders with community members.

Tactics were used as a vital part of the campaign strategy that included in motivating the prominent community members and fans to discuss the events by sharing events updates and live actions. Overall, this approach helped in encouraging fan participation, promoting positive perceptions regarding the football league or tournament and maintaining follower’s interest among the tournament’s potential target audiences consisting of young adults. The campaign proved to be a huge success in overall attracting significant liking, discussion, sharing and gaining viewership for the event.

References:

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Littleton, T 2016, ‘Social Sports: Four Ways Sports Can Engage and Entertain on Social Media’, Huffington Post, 23 June, viewed 20th October, 2016, <huffingtonpost.co.uk/tamara-littleton/social-sports-four-ways-s_b_10627276.html>.

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