Why The Rwanda, Arsenal FC is a Good Deal In All Senses

By Muhereza Kyamutetera

In real life life, every consumption decision starts with AWARENESS- if I don’t know you, you simply do not exist and I therefore can’t make an informed decision to consume you or not.

Therefore communication, in the life of every brand is as important as the creation/manufacturing of that brand. For countries, investing in brand building is as important as building roads, power dams especially if you export services such as tourism.

To measure Return on Investment in advertising or how efficient is a particular expenditure on advertising, we adopt a Cost per a Thousand (CPM) model, which looks at how much you have spent, the number of people you expect to reach (also known as impressions) and then multiply that by 1,000. That tells you if actually you are making a wise investment or not.

For starters the English Premiership is one of the most watched leagues with broadcast rights in over 156 countries and 202 territories with global weekly audiences of 4.2 billion eyeballs/viewers.

Arsenal, being one of the top flight clubs attracts huge audiences estimated at an average 1.2 million viewers in the UK alone on match-day. The Arsenal Shirt with almost 1 million replica original jerseys sold annually (this excludes almost a similar number fakes) is seen more than 35 million times a day globally according to Club estimates.

This is driven largely by a global fan audience in excess of 100 million. Arsenal is also has a heavy online presence of 5.5 million website visitors per month, 13.8m twitter fans, 38m followers on Facebook, 11m on Instagram, 4.4m on G+ and 830k on YouTube.

This is before adding the combined online followers of the individual Arsenal players and coaches which is in excess of 10m.

Now for all the doubting Thomases, we can do the maths, Rwanda will be spending annually some $13.3 million for the shirt deal.

Is this a good deal or not?

Secondly there will be an even bigger question of CONVERSION at the end for the 3 years. How well did Rwanda convert this awareness into actual tourist arrivals? Even more importantly, did the deal attract the right size of wallets?

Now back home, before we crucify the team running UTB, we need to ask, for the money we allocated them, how did they spend it and what value have we gotten? The million dollar question is, do they even know?