Juanjo Marquez - Time for action

Spanish basketball players Juan Carlos Navarro, Pau Gasol, Jose Manuel Calderon and Ricky Rubio during the 2011 Eurobasket championships.

Media Action Sports’ new relationship with the Spanish Basketball Federation represents a huge opportunity, as founder Juanjo Marquez explains.

By his own admission, Juanjo Marquez says Media Action Sports, the sports marketing and media distribution agency he founded in 2001, has adopted “quite a low profile” during its first decade. The Spaniard – a former professional basketball player turned sports executive – is the managing director of a company that is primarily in the business of globalising products and increasing the value of properties via the international distribution of media rights. It works and has worked on projects as diverse as the King’s Cup, Spain’s historic invitational clay court tennis tournament, and the launch of the PokerStars brand in Spain. Other clients include Premier League team Bolton Wanderers, several Spanish soccer teams and a Brazilian action sports network.

“Really, we are a small agency,” Marquez says, “but we try to move quite quickly and to work with clients exclusively. We try to focus to help brands to get their content worldwide and utilise and maximise their assets either nationally or internationally, and help content owners and rights holders and federations to activate their assets – or to analyse their current situation and try to see what they can do internationally in terms of sponsorship, not only looking at local companies. We work a little bit like their international agency to help them see what they can do outside of their usual spectrum of activities.”

“We want to open the eyes of the international market of how big – if someone wanted to invest in basketball, or if someone wants to invest in Spain – the federation is as a property.”

Juanjo Marquez

Since February, Media Action Sports has represented the national and international media rights of the Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB), as well as developing its international sponsorship portfolio. It is the first time that an international agency – though based in Spain, Media Action Sports’ focus goes far beyond the borders of its own country – has handled the Spanish federation’s rights, and comes at a time when it is gearing up to host the 2014 basketball world championship. The opportunities for both federation and agency are clear.

The federation’s properties include two divisions of Spanish basketball, the men’s second division and the top female league, as well as rights to international games played in Spain. Notably, that includes an annual tour – the only one of its kind organised by an international federation – that next summer will feature Australia, China, France, Brazil, Argentina and the US playing Spain in various cities across the country. Typically, these tours act as a precursor to the big international tournament that year, typically an Olympics or a world or European championship. “It’s a big important property,” Marquez adds. “They needed to activate that, make something of it internationally, but also they needed to renew their national deal that was coming to an end with La Sexta. We are actually in the middle of the bidding process with national networks bidding for that property.”

Media Action Sports’ task is undoubtedly aided by the fact that this is very much a golden age for the Spanish national team. In the last ten years they have been world champions, twice European champions and have won Olympic silver.

 “When you become world champions, doing a lot with that property internationally was one of our suggestions, also utilising new media rights not only in Spain but internationally – therefore bringing more return on investment for the current sponsors. It’s a proper project for them – they agreed that we were the right partner. We had not only the knowhow and the experts in house but also the passion for the sport. It’s a fantastic property. We already have offers, people contacting us. It’s quite an easy job in a way because we’re activating something that hasn’t been activated before.

“We want to open the eyes of the international market of how big – if someone wanted to invest in basketball, or if someone wants to invest in Spain – the federation is as a property.”

Although Marquez describes the agency as “small”, it is currently seeking to recruit a specialist in new media to join the team and focus 100 per cent on digital distribution – “an area where we need to get placement and to monetise that distribution, by selling rights or by putting exclusive content attached to sponsors into international platforms.”

Despite the expansion, Marquez insists that Media Action Sports’ position as a smaller agency also has its advantages. “It means you can focus 100 per cent on your three or four major projects and services. Clients see us as specialists; we will focus and basically brief them and integrate within their structure every day to maximize the commercial value.”

This case study will appear in the November 2011 edition of SportsPro. To subscribe to the magazine, click here.

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