Most of this is true.

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16779547[/url


Whatever next.........?

Well, that will be when the RFL agree the new Championship sponsorship deal with ' Tony's fish and chip shop ' for free pudding, chips, and gravy delivered to Red Hall every friday lunchtime

So that will explain why adverts for shows, tv programmes, concerts, football games etc, all dont have a date of the game or time on them.....oh hang on..they do.

Am I mistaken, but dont some of them mention friday nights on SKY? , this is after all primarily an advertising campaign for SL on SKY

They certainly do.

Well there's your answer then



I wonder what we'll get from Premier Sports?

A guy doing community service carrying a sandwich board with The Championship's latest fayre written in chalk (two colours i'm led to believe). In Devon.

Cracking deal, I didn't expect two, I see you lot have battered Widnes today

It's actually quite impressive what they've got lined up, but for all the bilge offered up it would be funny to see your posts come true.

That's to promote events to SKY viewers. The purpose of using Stobart trucks is to promote Super League to people who see the advert and then might decide to go and see a game.

Nah, watch on SKY

And then go.

Well ultimatley yes, but the vagueness of it would suggest initially it being a TV based idea, hence why some of them have " Friday night on SKY " on them

I've seen Aldi, Lidl and Netto trucks on the motorways but I've got no inclination to shop at any of them. OTOH, if I see an Aldi, Lidl or Netto truck with a Sky Sports label and offer code for half price subscription to Sky Sports for six months, I may take notice.

Just because you haven't doesn't mean that nobody hasn't.

The power of subliminal advertising

It gets everywhere.

14 SL clubs when questioned said 207 extra punters each game prefer Sky Sports and their armchair to any other form of viewing the game



It's a crap sponsorship deal la and you know it is, so quit attempting to polish a turd.

Its all about building brand awareness, which can then be translated into the potential of larger sponsorship income for the game as a whole.

If plastering lorries with advertising didnt work then companies wouldnt waste their precious profits on having custom paint jobs for their lorry trailers









Its rather typical of RL fans to rubbish a form of marketing that is used successfully throughout the world and which people see every day of their lives.

Pfft! What do you, Coca Cola and Nestle know about advertising? Nowhere near as much as Starbug, littlerich and Keith, I guarantee.

Sorry you're losing me, I've suggested it could be a better deal than taking the cash that was on offer

I think a few people are missing the point. Nobody is saying it is a bad idea to have trucks with SL teams/logos/adverts on them. It's a great idea. Wonderful. More power to their elbow.

The issue is whether 200 trucks with a logo is worth £750,000, which is what the RFL apparently turned down from Betfair. If you'd told me that the whole fleet of 2000 trucks were going to rebrand, then I'd probably agree that there's a case to be made. But Stobart have got large TV exposure, national newspaper references and access to the 100,000 or so regular paying fans who watch games live, and the total cost to them is to repaint 200 trucks. That seems like a phenomenally good deal for them. But the purpose of sponsorship is that the sponsor gets the exposure by stumping up some decent readies which the sport in question can then spend. Here, we get nothing to spend, a really quite minimal amount of free advertising on 5% of Stobart's fleet of trucks, and bugger-all else.

Doing a bit of maths, and assuming that average entry charges are £20 (which might be a bit steep in places), then each club would on average need to attract an additional 2678 paying spectators to make up for the cash they lost by not taking up Betfair. That's 206 extra people at every game on average - on top of any increase they may have received from their existing marketing efforts. I'd love to think that every club in SL is going to add 206 extra people. I think the chance of it happening are slightly lower than my chances of beating Usain Bolt in the Olympic 100m final this summer.

Which means that we have taken a net loss on this deal.

The only possible saving grace to this would be if the RFL started announcing additional sponsors contributing cold hard cash in addition to the Stobart trucks. If they do that, and Betfair were unwilling to let them, then the balance sheet starts to level up. But at present, this remains at best a fantastically optimistic shot-in-the-dark for the RFL, and at worse the sort of shafting by the Stobart negotiators which will have them wetting themselves in transport cafe's up and down the land.

But this deal isnt about fans through turnstiles but subscriptions and advertising revenues to SKY that will ultimatly lead to a better SKY deal, the RFL have taken a risk, it could be a massive success , or a huge failure, nobody will know for a few years , I'd guess it will fall somewhere in between , but what is certain, the cash the clubs would have recieved wouldn't have been spent on marketing

I thought the sl club voted for this not the rfl?