Amar Singh: Lessons on Sports Marketing, Branding, and Beer (Full Transcript)

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Ronen Ainbinder 0:36

We have a man joining us now that is potentially more passionate about soccer and beer than anyone else out there. He's a former head of content at West Ham United and chief of content at Squawka.

He then worked with Budweiser as the head of Football Content & Strategy — where he led the content operations from Budweiser's sponsorships of the Premier League and LaLiga. He now works as a brand manager for Belgian company Anheuser-Busch, one of the most relevant beer-producing brands globally. Our guest is an expert in marketing, branding, product, and, most importantly, beer. Ladies and gentlemen, Amar Singh!

Amar Singh 1:18

Thanks for having me, Ronen. How are you doing?

Ronen Ainbinder 1:20

I'm doing all right. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. And this is the second time we are recording this because we had some technical issues. But you're more than welcome that to be here a second time. Amar, It's great to have you. And I want to start by talking about sports marketing. We talked about it a little bit, but we also talked about the fan's behavior, what makes it unique. So tell us about your perspective. All around the idea of sports marketing, what makes you unique, the fan the type of consumer? What's your take about it?

Amar Singh 1:53

Yeah, I think sports marketing is unlike any other type of marketing. And I think it's because of the relationship between the fan and whatever entity they support the player, club, franchise like in the US. It is sacred there. And I think that's a rich territory for a brand to be allowed into and invited into. So I guess you have to kind of tread carefully with that relationship. Still, at the same time, I think sport creates emotions, like other industries don't do. I can think of music and other forms of arts and culture that certainly evoke emotion in people. But for me, sport, there is no drama like sport, you don't get the epic stories in other forms of life like you to get in the sport. And I think for a brand like Budweiser, which has its belief in freedom, ambition to pursue your goals, opportunity, taking your shot of greatness, and all of these great values in our history and our legacy. I think that goes hand in hand with the sport, which is why you will see Budweiser has such a deep and rich history with the sport. So for me, sports is a passion. It's an obsession. I love the sport. I love playing it. I love watching it. I've always loved it. So working in sport is an absolute pleasure.

Ronen Ainbinder 3:15

Amar, I love that Amar, And I wonder what's How are the different kinds of brands and different roles depending on the brands you've worked on? You worked at Squawka, worked at West Ham, you were at Budweiser. So, of course, I guess that their marketing approach and how they manage the different marketing roles are different in terms of what they want to achieve. Can you just give us an overview of how different it is in each of the brands?

Amar Singh 3:41

Yeah, I mean, three very different roles for me. But lots of transferable skills that I've been able to bring to those roles certainly help develop those roles. the scorecard was less of a marketing role, much more of a journalistic content leadership role. I managed a content team across different verticals video, audio because we launched a podcast, the Sqwakataka, editorial, and social media. Squawker has made some amazing impact in football, social media. That was an interesting challenge, for there was marketing involved, I'd say, creating an impact scorecard because football content is covered by so many organizations that you have to work hard to stand out. You need smart ideas to stand out. So one of the things I've developed at Squawka was a campaign called 23 under 23. Where we took the 23 best footballers in the world under the age of 23 and identified who we thought would be the next Ballon d'Or winner after Messi and Ronaldo, who we thought could be the next generation of great football talent. And we ended up getting access and interviewing some great football talent. Paul Pogba was top of the list. He was at Juventus at the time, and he topped our list terms of play. potential. And we were using data and metrics to inform it and make data and metrics around football accessible for people. We had access to Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling, Dele Alli. So that was a great experience for score cone. And it gave us a foothold in the industry and gave us access to talent as well. If you want to give an award to a footballer, they tend to one of the things I've learned: they tend to take the time for you if you're ready to give them an award. So that was squawker. And that was a great experience. West Ham United, incredible club with a rich history and very deep history. In the east of London, it was all about the comms objectives, I think, for Westham, and they just moved from their historical home, Upton Park or the bowling ground, whichever you prefer, to the London Stadium. It is a fantastic Stadium with a huge capacity, which allowed the club to move up onto another level in revenue and commercial footing. But a lot of fans were aggrieved that the club had moved from its traditional Heartland. But it was very different in terms of the environment. So helping fans get accustomed to the new environment, the new stadium, the new home, and making the most of the club's excitement, because at West Ham United moving stadium meant that they could spend more money. They were breaking their transfer, record every window while I was there. So we had some great and exciting transfer announcements to make. And that was the most fun I had at Western was working on those transfer announcements, sometimes in the early hours of the morning, and announcing these exciting players and feeding off the fans' excitement. For example, when we signed Chicharito. And when we signed Chicharito, it was massive excitement. And we developed a Spanish content strategy. We had a Spanish section of the site, we hired a Spanish journalist, a good friend of mine, who I've worked with before. And we were developed Spanish social media accounts as well. And from that, we were able to add half a million fans, purely on the strength of having one footballer join the club. And the great thing, the great challenge was not just saying, Hey, Chicharito now plays for Western come and follow us. But it was also Hey, now you're following us, let's teach you a little bit about the club as well. This is the song that the fans were seeing. This is the history of the club. So we made a whole load of content around the club's history in Spanish, just to help educate the fans about who the team they now support. So hopefully, there's a legacy there. And there are lots of West Ham fans in Guadalajara and places like that, you know. And then, when I joined Budweiser in 2019, again, the objective is very, very different. It was Budweiser, a huge global organization with an unbelievable reputation for some of the best marketing and advertising campaigns in living memory. I feel like I'm working on World Class marketing organization, developing my skills as a marketeer, working with some incredibly talented people working with great partners. For me, that has been about making the most out of the Premier League partnership and La Liga partnerships. because traditionally, brands will spend a lot of money on partnerships. But what they're not always that good at is leveraging those partnerships, making use of those assets, and sweating those partnerships to create engagement to grow their audience and grow their communities. Through the work I set up and through the work that I've done with my colleagues, we've now got 200,000 super-engaged football fans following us on social media around the bud football brand, which is great. And they're passionate; they're highly engaged. They're the most engaged audience we have across all the Budweiser social platforms. And it's because we've given them good authentic content as well. So it's been three very different roles over the last four years. But lots with lots of different objectives. I'd say there have been lots of transferable skills and learnings along the way, which I've been able to take to each role as well.

Ronen Ainbinder 9:27

That's fascinating am I remember reading on Twitter and every everywhere else online about all this hate to David Moyes, the trainer, the coach of West Ham because he wasn't playing Chicharito enough, according to Mexican fan, so probably that backfired a little bit, but

Amar Singh 9:46

I think his coaching style as he and he's come back to West Ham, and he's having a successful season at West Ham David Moyes. Still, I think we've Chico. He's a throwback to old-fashioned goalscorer, and in a way, David Moyes not like a lot of not dislike a lot of modern coaches in that they like to have a target man up front and hold up striker upfront. That second striker or that goal poacher role has been phased out a little bit from football, I think. So I think that was something that he had to contend with when he was at West-Ham.

Ronen Ainbinder 10:18

How do you guys think about it in terms of a marketing perspective? How can you take that story of like, he's not playing him now? And how he's like, keeping him in the bench, maybe? And how can you Is there any way that you can like, think about turning it into your advantage and creating, I don't know if even like memes or content that would kind of like, make fun of it, but at the same time, create engagement and bring more fans to interact with each other?

Amar Singh 10:42

Yeah, when you work at a football club, and you work on the content side, you have to be aware of the sentiment around the team, the mood of the team, and the mood of the individual players. So when a player is playing, and they're scoring, and they're informed, that's the time to make great content with them. And when they're not. And if they're out of the team, then you have to respect that maybe that's not the time where they want to be answering fans' questions or doing some silly thing on Instagram, you know. So we used to pick and choose our moments. At the same time, some players are keen to show that they're working hard and training hard. And they're doing everything professionally to do to get back into the team. You learn to read these things, learn to pick up the cues, and learn to develop a rapport with the squad and the players, and you learn to speak to the ones that are ready to talk and tell you their life story. Remember, we did a piece on mental health with Ryan Fredericks and Andre Yarmolenko, who had had injury problems. And they just opened their heart out about their injury problems. And it was a nice piece because they were just speaking straight from the heart about how being injured for a long amount of time can impact your mental health and how you need to rely on friends and family and people close to you. So that was a very interesting learning for me that sometimes when a player is not happy and has something they want to get off their chest, you can be a conduit for that.

Ronen Ainbinder 12:10

Wow, that's fascinating, Amar! Thank you for sharing that. And I want to switch over a little bit to talk about big events because I feel like everyone saw the Anheuser Busch commercial at the Super Bowl. I know that big brands such as Budweiser invest a lot of money in these kinds of events because of the exposure. So I want to know what kind of like, how do you think about it strategically, looking at big events going forward? What's the idea? What's the objective? Tell us about it?

Amar Singh 12:40

Yeah, Super Bowl is the Olympics for advertisers, isn't it? And it's a time when and the US is fantastic. I like watching the game. And I like watching the ads just as much because every big brand pulls out their best ideas. Most celebrities and some of the greatest, most memorable ads have been aired at the Superbowl. Even the Budweiser famous what's up a campaign, what's up an ad, which came out around 2000 2001 that a Superbowl ad aired the first Superbowl. So, you know we have a deep tradition there. And we always make sure that we're visible and not just Budweiser but other ABI brands as well, such as Stella Artois. So yeah, we have a big legacy. They're a big tradition of advertising. However, I'd say that big. There is a cultural shift where we're moving away from thinking like advertisers and thinking more like publishers, content creators—thinking more about how we can entertain people. You see the rise of ad blockers and gated platforms with no advertising, such as Netflix. So in that climate, how do you get your brand message across, you have to move into content, and you have to create meaningful content that people want to engage in. And that's the approach that we've taken with bad football. For example, we've got over 120k followers on Instagram, and that is through providing content; it's not just slamming the brand in people's faces, but giving utility to sports fans showing the kings of football through a bad way that was a prison. And yeah, when we can talk about the product, as well we do so.

And another great example is, and we would have probably done this year if it wasn't for the pandemic, but last year in Miami, where we took over a hotel on Miami Beach for the weekend. We flew in creators from all over the world. We had over 200 of them, all from different passion points, musicians, other sportspeople. We had footballers like David Villa, and Adebayo Akinfenwa was there we have Gareth Southgate, the England manager. We just brought together all these very interesting people from different cultures and to see A DJ from China, discussing things with a fashion designer from South Africa, talking to skateboarders from the US and just bringing together all these very interesting people. And our objective was to create a great cultural moment around the Budweiser hotel, take all these people to the Super Bowl as well, and make the most of this. But we also wanted to, and we also had some hard KPIs; we wanted to get 1 billion impressions, which we did. And we did that by bringing in these creators and news influencers. And they were sharing this amazing moment this weekend with their community of fans. It became a much better way of spending money than simply spending millions of media dollars and putting loads of money behind powering an advert, making people watch an advert that they might not want to watch. And this became, this was a very interesting model for us. And I think we'll be looking to do this, again, around some of the big experiential and big events that we have access to through our partnerships.

Ronen Ainbinder 16:01

Next time you create this event on Miami Beach and close this hotel for all these influencers, make sure you invite the host of the halftime snacks podcast, and I will be happy to create a podcast with you guys over there. And go to the Superbowl.

Amar Singh 16:19

we'll be in LA next year because that's where the Superbowl is next year. So we'll have to set up a little studio for you. Absolutely. And then we could do a podcast from there.

Ronen Ainbinder 16:28

Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I want to ask you a little bit about the lessons you've learned throughout your career around content distribution. For instance, what are some of the best strategies to share content? What's kind of the best approach to building an audience? Or what works better between paid and organic monetization strategies? Can you share with us your ideas on what you learned that works and what doesn't?

Amar Singh 16:56

I'd say, number one, planning plan to the nth degree. Social platforms are simple, but they're also complex. And making something come to life on social takes a lot of planning, refinement, and iteration. So that is something that I would recommend that you do. And I've learned that you can't plan too much over the last couple of years when it comes to bringing something to life on social media response. If you're growing that community on social media, you need to remember that it's a fun platform, engage, share talkback, the clue is in the name is social media. And I think many brands make the mistake of being a little one way with their communication on social media and only share things and never engage properly. So I think to be ready to engage, be ready to show up in other people's feeds, have a voice and a tone of voice in social media. Number three, test and learn. That's the digital beauty. Try different captions, try different headings, length of content platforms we like to test and learn a lot. We do a lot of A-B testing, where we will have the same piece of content but two different creative executions around it. And we will test and learn to see which one is getting more traction.

Don't be obsessed with vanity metrics. Number four like impressions or total followers; those are vanity metrics. I'd say it's better to have a smaller, super engaged, and authentic community of followers than like a load of bots, giving you an overinflated, following an ego. Like I think, Ronen, with your podcast, you've got a highly engaged community of people that follow you and your newsletter, and they're genuinely interested in what you've got to say. And I think that's valuable. And number five, this is an important one, belief in youth learn from youth trust their perceptions, I think the moment you start acting like, you know it all, you've been there. More than some of the young talent coming through, you're dead digital. You're dead in the water. There is so much that you can learn from the young talent coming through from people who are consuming content, the generation of people who've only ever known digital. I'm learning from my younger colleagues as much as they're learning from me. And I think that's the way you've got to think of it.

Ronen Ainbinder 19:05

Those are great, great, amazing lessons. I wonder if you have some brand, or is there any brand that you think is doing a very good job online? By the way, they're managing their content, distributing their ideas, and creating authentic things, which creates this sense of this notion of an idea or purpose behind their content, and they're doing it's so weird that you admire them?

Amar Singh 19:36

I think an example of the brand. I'll give you two one's a football one, and one is a non-football one. The non-football one, I'd say, Burger King, has an incredible presence online. They have a very clear brief, and I'm not sure if it's still their brief, but their brief for a very long time was very simple troll McDonald's. And that's what they did. They would show up; they weren't trying to Be the straight-laced brand; they were being the Joker, they were the troll, and they were having a lot of fun with it. But I think over the last couple of years, they've done some brave campaigns as well, from giving up their feed to other restaurants and organizations during the pandemic that needed the promotion, which they did very recently to. Last year, the campaign they did with the multi Whopper, which was very brave, showing their their their hero product, their most popular product and iconic product, the Whopper, but showing it decayed. And I think that was a brave campaign, but it stood out the idea of showing that it was made with ingredients that did decay and was fresh. And they did an incredible campaign with Stevenage FC, the lowest football club in the English League; everything goes to football.

Even when I say I'm not talking about football, I eventually get end up with football. But they did a fantastic campaign with Stevenage FC, where they sponsored their kit. They then created the Stevenage FC challenge on FIFA, where they invited people to use the Stevenage kit to make Stevenage great on FIFA. And so they ended up having this incredible campaign where people were playing with Stevenage FC with Burger King on the front of their shirt. And they were signing Messi and Ronaldo and Solara and the best footballers in the world. And that become became a huge thing on FIFA. And they were rewarding people for doing that with free burgers on social genius idea clever, and in a way that was like a Trojan horse into inflating their advertising within FIFA, which is such a popular game. So Burger King is a brand to admire. And I think they've got their marketing strategy bang on. And then the other one for me, which is in football, is AS Roma; I would say, as a football club over the last five to 10 years, they've led the way digitally. I love what they do. To take, for example, first of all, they were very creative with their transfer announcements before anyone else was they made an epic moment out of transfer announcements. And then they went a bit meta and ironic with it, which was fun too. And then they stopped and said, You know what, our transfer announcements are getting so much traffic, let's use it for a positive cause. And then, they started to advertise missing children and raise awareness around missing children. So when they announced the signing of a new player, you would see a picture of the player having their medical or signing the contract. And next to it, you would say you'd see a picture of a missing child anywhere in the world. And actually, that's helped some of these children be found and be recovered. Because the club used this platform for something positive, I always admire when organizations can do something positive with the audience and their reach. And I think what Roma did was a great example of that.

Ronen Ainbinder 22:56

Coming back to the Burger King one, I remember that they have between Wendy's and Burger Kings' accounts. On Twitter, they were trolling each other. And it was so funny that they were driving so much engagement. And even though their competition, they were driving so much engagement because everyone laughed and shared and commented around it. So it was a whole hype. And so I guess it's also a lesson on how understanding if you can create engagement, if it's even going against competition or even collaborating with we don't even know if they talked when they said they were like, oh, let's do this, you know? So I think that's interesting. That's an interesting side of how marketers could think about engagement in terms of like, what kind of create controversy or what is funny, or how like memes gets spread out so easily. Have you like there's these value in all these like types of content that marketers should take advantage of if they're not, because, for example, Elan Musk is like sharing three or five memes every week. And how many retweets he has, they're, like, more, he's most popular tweets. I guess a brand, and having a public image of a brand, is just trying to figure out what works in terms of engagement as long as you connect with a purpose and something bigger than yourself or bigger than your brand. It's very positive.

Amar Singh 24:31

Yeah, I think very rarely can you go wrong if you find an authentic purpose and a purpose that you have a right to play in? And you use your platform for that. For example, when the lockdown began in the UK, we launched this last year, we launched "Saved a Pub Life." And we decided to work with all these businesses, pubs, restaurants, bars they take our products, now they have to close their doors. How can we help them? So we launched this scheme called Safe pub life, which was, if you purchased a voucher for your friend or your family to use at the pub, when the pub reopens, we will match that donation, we will match it with a donation. If I were to give you a 50-pound voucher to spend at your favorite pub or restaurant, a bi would match it with 50, another 50 pounds, so you'd have 100 pounds, and that would go to the pub at the time when they need it now, and then that would also make sure that you would be coming back to them when they reopen. So that was great. And that was an authentic, purpose-driven campaign where we felt we had the right to play in, and we felt that we had the right where we could make a difference. And I think if you do that very that it's very rare that you can go wrong. And I think I've seen some great examples of that, and, and purpose-driven campaigns, I feel like going to be important this year, across different brands, whether we're talking about things like diversity and inclusion. And issues like Black Lives Matter, for example, or whether we're talking about some of the economic challenges we see through COVID. Whether we're talking about the first responders and the health service, I think there are many issues where brands can make a difference. And I think if you go into it in the right way, with the right intentions, and don't see it as a badging exercise, then the kudos will come for you as a brand as well. And I think that for me is an opportunity for not just for us, but for all brands.

Ronen Ainbinder 26:36

Amar. That's a great lesson! I hope that the marketers and the people who are listening here can think about how they can match their brands to a purpose and create some content or try to help the co itself in some way by leveraging their platforms to create an impact in society. That's very powerful. And thank you so much for sharing that. And my last question for you, Amar is a bit more personal, it's a bit more to get to know you, it's a bit more to understand what you like, how do you think about things? And that that question is, if there's anything that you do differently than anyone else, it can either be on marketing or outside in your personal life that you do differently than others? And Why that? Why is it that you do it differently? Why is it that you believe in it? And why do you think it's important,

Amar Singh 27:28

tell you a couple of things that I kind of swear by, and maybe I've learned a lot about in the last year. Number one, I would say it's important for me to have some solitude in my day. I would say this is a daily habit where I need to go out for a run, or long, very long walk, go into nature and just find a little piece. I live in an area where there are some very nice fields and hills and valleys near me, which I'm very fortunate to have. So I tried to make the most of that. And because we're in this situation where we're on zoom calls and skypes all day in Google Hangouts all day, speaking into our computers, it's very important to just distance yourself from that if you can. I think a lot of people are doing it now. I wouldn't say that's particularly unusual. But I would say, that's what's kept me sane over the last few months, certainly. And then number two, I'd say, is a mindset. And I think, maybe a lot of people, I mean, it surprises me sometimes that they don't think this way. But I try not to pigeonhole myself. My job right now is as the senior brand manager for Budweiser and Bud Light. It is a marketeers job. I've worked in marketing. I've worked as a journalist previously; I've worked for newspapers for ten years. I've worked in sport in marketing and journalism over the last ten years. And I just try not to pigeonhole myself; I feel I'm a part content creator, I'm certainly a marketer, I certainly still have journalistic qualities to what I do. Storytelling, whatever it is, there are so many labels we give ourselves; I try not to let the current job I'm doing define me. And I tried to have a growth mindset and be ready to take on the next challenge. And I find that if I'm doing the same thing for too long, I get restless. And I feel like what I enjoy is the challenge and feel like I'm growing, feeling like I'm a little out of my comfort zone. So I would always recommend that you challenge yourself, you push yourself, and you don't limit yourself and say, This is what I do. And this is what I'm going to do.

Ronen Ainbinder 29:31

It's very powerful. Man, I want to thank you so much for coming to the halftime snacks twice because we had an issue for us, and now we're here again, but I want to thank you for your time. I appreciate your insights, your lessons, and everything you mentioned around your career, your experience, and what you know about marketing. I think it's very, very valuable for now. Thank you for taking the time to come to the Hampton snacks.