The interest of the world press over the best basketball league of Europe is rising. Thanks to our marketing team of Infront Turkey, Infront global communication team and TBF colleagues. Avrupanın en iyi basketbol ligi seçilen Basketbol Süper Ligine dünya basınının ilgisi hergeçen gün artıyor. Infront Türkiye pazarlama ekibine, Infront Global iletişim ekibimize ve TBF ekibimize sonsuz teşekkürler.

1. Splintered by rivalries that have stewed for generations, Turkey’s Spor Toto Basketball League is a fiercely
competitive world where emotions run high and team allegiances are for life. Now, a new central marketing
strategy implemented by Infront Sports & Media is turning sporting tribalism into collective profits.
By Michael Long
Hoops fix
90 | www.sportspromedia.com
FEATURE | BASKETBALL

2. T
hey say there is nothing quite like
the atmosphere at a Turkish soccer
match. Except, of course, there
is. No matter the sport, no matter
the team, Turkish fans are notoriously
loud and the atmosphere at domestic
basketball games is often no less intense.
After soccer, basketball is the second
most popular sport in Turkey and the
Spor Toto Basketball League is a domestic
powerhouse. Now in its 50th season, the
country’s top-level national championship
is a prominent battleground for long-
established rivalries, often fractured along
social or political fault lines. Fixtures are
ercely contested in packed sweatbox
arenas, attended by some of the noisiest
and most fanatical supporters around.
Team loyalties are both powerful and
enduring, and the pro le of the top players
and coaches is such that they are among
the best-known celebrities in Turkish sport.
Such ardent support, combined with
Turkey’s multi-sports club culture and
a tradition of modest ticket prices, has
meant that lling arenas has rarely been
an issue for the Turkish Basketball
Federation (TBF), which organises the
domestic league. The challenge instead
has been in capitalising on that following
by creating a professional platform that is
an attractive sponsorship proposition for
commercial partners.
To overcome that challenge, the TBF
enlisted the services of Infront Sports
& Media two years ago, the Swiss-based
international marketing agency coming
on board as the exclusive global media
and marketing partner of Turkey’s top
domestic league as part of a long-term
strategic alliance.
“Let me talk about basketball history in
Turkey a little bit,” says Harun Erdenay, a
former player who now serves as president
of the TBF. “It was not one of the best
leagues in Europe for a certain time, in the
early 2000s. In the late 2000s, our league
started developing very much. The teams’
budgets increased as more sponsors joined
into basketball. So in 2013 we started
seeking a strong marketing company that
can further boost this development. In
order to make basketball bigger in Turkey,
not only on the marketing side but also
with fans, in terms of TV coverage,
advertising and promotion – literally to
improve in every section – we decided to
sign with Infront.”
For Infront, partnering with the
TBF aligned with its own ambitions of
expanding into new geographies outside
of its core markets in continental Europe.
With its Chinese business, also anchored
around domestic basketball, by then
well established, the agency was already
in the midst of implementing a global
growth strategy when the TBF came
knocking. It had spent much of 2013
setting up Infront Pan-Asia in Singapore
and forming a 50:50 joint venture,
AspireInfront LLC, with Aspire Katara
Investment (AKI) in Qatar.
“Infront is always looking for new
business opportunities and market
potential, especially in emerging countries,”
explains Ender Uslu, who was installed as
managing director of the newly formed
Infront Turkey subsidiary shortly after the
TBF partnership was signed in November
2013. “Turkey has a predominantly
youthful population of 78 million and
people are really crazy about sports: 85
per cent of the population is claiming
to follow sport, so it’s a huge number.
Geographically the location also creates a
bridge between Europe, Middle East and
Asia. This was all taken into consideration,
when the Infront Group chose Turkey as a
strategic growth market.
“It was, of course, key to evaluate the
sports market, detect the right areas for
investment and nd the right partners.
After football, basketball is the second
most watched sport in Turkey. Interest is
very high: 48 per cent of the population is
watching basketball and it has big potential
to grow further, especially with the recent
international successes. Once we chose
basketball as a strategic focus, we de ned
our approach together with the TBF
board. Our long-term vision is actually
becoming the best league in Europe.”
Achieving that ambition seemed
some way off when Infront partnered
the TBF. At that time, says Uslu, the
league lacked the commercial framework
to fully capitalise on its undoubted
popularity, with the TBF offering “a very
limited commercial proposition for their
sponsors” due to “unstandardised court
layouts” and limited media exposure.
“Only pay-TV was broadcasting
the league,” he recalls, speaking to
SportsPro a fortnight before the start
of the competition’s 50th anniversary
season in mid-October. “There was no
broadcasting abroad and the production
quality could have been much better.
Teams were marketing all the commercial
inventory on their own without any
standardisation. As a result, TBF had
only one sponsor, which was the title.”
On taking up its mandate, Infront
set about investing in the creation of
a consistent look and feel across the
entire season, which consists of up to
265 games taking place over a nine-
month period from October to June.
Ahead of the 2014/15 campaign, Infront
commissioned the London-based creative
agency Designwerk to devise a new brand
identity for the league, with a redesigned
court layout and the introduction of
LED advertising boards intended to
give sponsors greater visual impact. “A
strong sports brand makes it much more
attractive to invest in,” notes Uslu. “When
you apply this to an emerging market, you
can generate immediate results.”
Infront’s top-to-tail commercial
overhaul of the league – the rst
centralised marketing strategy of its kind
to be implemented in Turkish sport – has
indeed paid almost instant dividends.
Marketed by the agency’s international
sales network, six of the seven available
main sponsorship packages this season
have been sold to multinational brands
including Sony Mobile, ING Bank,
LeasePlan, Metlife and Vivident. The
newest addition to the portfolio is Spor
Toto, Turkey’s largest sports betting
company, which came on board as the
league’s title sponsor ahead of the new
season, penning a one-year deal having
originally signed up for June’s Finals
series between P nar Kar yaka and
Anadolu Efes.
"In Turkey, if there
is a strong title
partner, the league
itself is perceived as
a strong asset. People
start to trust that
organisation"
SportsPro Magazine | 91

3. “We have conducted some surveys
with our stakeholders and it comes out
that in Turkey, if there is a strong title
partner, the league itself is perceived as
a strong asset,” Uslu says in reference to
the latter deal. “People start to trust that
organisation. People think that if a brand
invests in a sports organisation then that
sports organisation is valuable.”
Alongside procuring fresh sponsorship,
Infront has also instigated a new media
strategy for the league, moving away
from a subscription model to enhance
the value for sponsors by ensuring games
are split domestically across both pay and
free-to-air television. This season cable
operator Digiturk’s LigTV and free-to-
air channel NTV Spor are combining to
show a minimum of ve games per week,
with both broadcasters having invested in
improving production quality through the
use of 14 HD cameras at each game, while
the league’s digital platforms have also been
revamped to re ect the new positioning.
Outside of Turkey, meanwhile,
broadcasters in a record 13 European
countries will show Turkish basketball
action this season and Uslu is con dent
that Infront will broaden the league’s
international footprint further in years
to come. “It will increase every season,”
he insists. “I think we have a globally
competitive and known league which has
the potential to be internationalised.”
Infront, of course, has history when
it comes to this kind of commercial
revamp. In recent years the agency has
developed a tried and tested formula
for optimising the commercialisation
of sports properties, rolling out similar
central marketing concepts in German
soccer’s DFB Cup and ski jumping’s Four
Hills Tournament. But perhaps the best
blueprint for its Turkish assignment is
found in China.
Infront entered the Chinese market
in 2005 on the back of a long-term
strategic partnership with the Chinese
Basketball Association (CBA) that saw it
become the exclusive marketing partner
of the Chinese national basketball teams
and the CBA Professional League.
That partnership is often held up, both
internally and externally, as something of
a sports marketing success story, resulting
in record levels of television coverage and
sponsorship for the CBA’s key properties
whilst helping to turn China into an
important growth engine for the entire
Infront group.
Barely two years in, Uslu says the
Turkish venture is already “on the right
track” to emulate Infront’s success in
China. And with eight full-time staff
working out of its new of ce in Istanbul
– a local hub established speci cally to
service the TBF partnership – the agency
is now eyeing further opportunities to
branch out into other areas.
“Our main focus is on basketball now
but in the mid-term we want to expand
and de ne other sports to invest in,” says
Uslu, who points to volleyball as another
burgeoning domestic sport in Turkey.
“We are seeking new opportunities in
line with this strategy. I think we are
acknowledged in the market for bringing
a lot of international sports marketing
experience based on the global track
record of the Infront group.
“I think the government’s interest [in
growing the sports sector] is very high,”
he continues. “Their aim is to bring the
Olympic Games to Istanbul in order to
foster socio-cultural development in the
country. It might be a challenge in the
short term because of current political,
economic and security issues, but in the
mid term, it’s possible. And it’s obvious
that government investment in sport
will uplift the Turkish sports industry, so
there will be many, many opportunities
for Infront and other organisations
in sport. We at Infront want to add
something to the positive development
of Turkish sport and further accelerate
it, by bringing in our expertise from a
variety of sports and contributing our
global knowhow in Turkey.”
A further bene t of Infront’s
centralised approach, says Uslu, is
increased nancial solidity throughout the
league. By providing the 16 participating
teams with an undisclosed yearly
guarantee plus a cut of any revenues
should commercial income exceed a
certain level, the agency is helping to
stabilise budgets and foster increased
competition both on and off the court.
That effort to level the playing eld has,
however, brought challenges of its own.
Like other national basketball
championships in Europe, the Turkish
league comprises representatives from
multi-sports clubs that have grown
powerful and established strong
followings over the years, largely on the
back of the domestic and international
success of their soccer sides. The
‘big three’ Istanbul-based clubs of
Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray and Be ikta are
the best-known cases, the trio regularly
clashing in local derbies that are as
well attended and bitterly disputed in
basketball as they are in soccer. “These
kinds of clubs that have a multi-sport
focus, when they become successful in
football, they have more income and
also invest more money into basketball,”
explains Erdenay. “There is a balance.
I played in these clubs. If the football
goes well, when they play well in the Uefa
Ender Uslu, managing director at Infront Turkey
Former player and TBF president Harun Erdenay
92 | www.sportspromedia.com
FEATURE | BASKETBALL

4. Champions League, a bigger share of
the generated income goes also to the
basketball division of the club.”
Other clubs like Anadolu Efes –
Turkey’s most successful basketball team
with 13 national titles – Türk Telekom
and Banvit bene t from having corporate
ownerships with deep pockets of their
own. For each of these wealthier clubs,
relinquishing certain marketing rights in
favour of Infront’s new centralised model
understandably carried less appeal.
“Of course it took some time but we
explained to them the value of this new
structure for all teams and for the league,”
says Uslu, who points to P nar Kar yaka’s
unexpected title last season – their rst
in 28 years – as a sign that competition
within the league is thriving. “We had a
mutual agreement for the good of the
league,” he adds. “We split the league
sponsors from the team sponsors, so
the league sponsors will have exclusivity
within each other and the team sponsors
will have exclusivity within each other.
We are managing the league and the team
sponsors as separate assets so that the
clubs keep some autonomy.”
With the teams now on board, Uslu
is adamant that greater competition
in the league will create a virtuous
cycle of success, raising the pro le of
Turkish basketball both domestically
and internationally and, in turn, bringing
more brands into the sport. This year
a record ten of the league’s 16 teams
will compete in European competition,
putting Turkey alongside Spain, widely
considered to have the strongest
domestic basketball league in Europe, in
terms of continental representation.
“European cups are an investment,
but at the same time very important
for the teams and the fans,” Uslu notes.
“The clubs’ international participation
and the glory they can gain will have a
positive impact on Turkish basketball and
its followership. In order to compete in
European cups, a team needs to have a
competitive domestic league, and on the
other hand, success in the European cups
increases the level of competition in the
domestic league.”
Away from the court, too, Turkey’s
in uence in basketball has never been
stronger, with Turkish entities now
prominent players in the sport outside
of their domestic market. Turkish
Airlines, for example, title sponsors the
Euroleague, ‘the Uefa Champions League
of basketball’, while home appliances
brand Beko is currently the presenting
sponsor of the Eurobasket international
tournament organised by Fiba, the
global governing body. Others, like Efes
Pilsener, Do u Group, Detur and the
Turkish tourism ministry, also maintain
ties with the sport at the continental level.
“It shows the good spirit of business
in Turkey because those big companies
can afford to invest in sport and they
are willing to,” says Erdenay. “Also it’s
a government policy to invest in sport
because they believe that if the young
generation grows up with sport, we
are going to be a healthier nation. The
government’s politics and also the big
companies’ support help to drive the
development of the sports sector.”
Such strong private and public sector
support underlines the appetite that exists
for basketball in Turkey. And with the
country now able to boast a professional
league that has a commercial framework to
rival any in Europe, Infront and the TBF
have their sights set rmly on usurping
Spain as the continent’s number one.
With ten teams from Turkey’s Spor Toto Basketball League competing in European competition this season, the country’s status in the sport is growing
SportsPro Magazine | 93