Welcome to the segment influence marketing in sports. This will be the agenda. I'll talk about, explaining, what is influence in sports. I'll talk about the various trends in sports influence marketing. I'll give you some key examples and I'll finally finish it off with the so-called four M's of Influence Marketing. So, let's get started. Okay, so what is influence marketing. I like to think of it as being two step marketing. We commonly say, that the shortest distance between two points is a line, maybe not so. Why? Because in marketing, there is this so-called wall of distrust. And what that means is, that if you are a consumer, you don't always trust what you hear on television or what you see in the print. Because you know that they want to sell you something. And that is where influence actually can have a better effect, even though it is in a roundabout way. So if you have an influencer, it could be a celebrity, but here we are talking about athletes. A famous one, who you idolized, well through him, if he endorses something you can trust him. So whereas, we had this wall of distrust in the case of the influencer, you have this flow of trust that is very different from the other route. So, here are some trends that influence marketing in sports. Not surprisingly, a lot of it is done online, given the power of online media. You also have therefore, direct access by these athletes to their fans. Their scores of fans and I'll give you a great, good example later on, so they don't have to go through regular media channels. There are metrics which allow sponsors to gauge, to measure how engaging these social messages from these athletes are. Sometimes, if you haven't sponsored key events, like the World cup or the Super Bowl. This allows you to piggyback and create a new network, which takes advantage of these big events where these athletes are playing. And finally, a key benefit stemming from sports influence is, that you can have more options to monetize. Not only the teams, but especially your clients. Okay, one key example and that would be CR7 and if you are a football fan or soccer fan as North Americans would call it. CR7 stands for Christiano Ronaldo and he of course, wears number 7. He currently plays for Real Madrid and he's scoring a lot of goals. He formerly played with Manchester United. He endorses many brands, including Nike and Herbal Life. And from a influence marketing standpoint, most importantly, he has millions, tens of millions. More than 30 million followers on Instagram and especially on Twitter and this is many times over that of most brands. And that's what makes him so valuable and it's not just him. So even though, Cristiano had the highest value per Tweet when he endorses a brand. But, you have other athletes like Lebron James, and Neymar, and Wayne Rooney and so on. Who are equally very valuable to endorsing companies. Surprisingly not on the list is. Okay so finally, in terms of the implications of influence marketing. Companies have to think about how to use it and you can use it through this very useful framework. There's a very good book by Graham, where he talks about the four M's of influence. Which stands for make, manage, monitor, and measure. So first, you have to make contact, make that connection between the athlete and the consumer. You have to choose wisely, of course but once that's made, well then, you have to manage it. And you manage it through the use of big data analytics to see what are the critical stages in the so-called consumer journey. Then you have to monitor and you have to monitor your key relationships with opinion leaders. So in that respect, it's almost like a three step communication. You first have to establish contact with your opinion leaders. Who then have themselves, nowadays through a social media, maybe tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. So you want to make sure that these people in the middle are having a good relationship with you, the athlete or the team. And finally we have to measure. At the end of the day, it has to make sense, it has to be monetized. So it has to be related to sales or metrics that are closely related to sales, such as purchase intentions. So, let me wrap up by giving you the takeaways. And as I emphasized at the outset, influence marketing is about two step communication and sports is like that too. It's establishing, not in one step, but in this two, or even three step way that's influenced where consumers will trust you. Among the major trend in influence marketing was the importance of social media. We saw in the list of athletes that it's not just about sporting performance. And that is why perhaps, some noteworthy athlete, like Messi, was not found, at least on that list. And finally, we found a very useful framework to manage influence marketing, and that was the so-called 4M's approach.