Bayern Munich's Digital 4.0 project could revolutionise how clubs engage with fans
Bayern Munich have revealed plans to completely overhaul their digital channels in a move that will see them cut out all intermediary digital agencies in favour of running the club’s digital platforms from within the Allianz Arena.
The ambitious project, dubbed ‘Digital 4.0’, is designed to give the Bundesliga champions greater control and flexibility of what content they produce as well as enabling them to control how fans around the world consume it.
As part of the project all of the club’s current digital media channels will be completely overhauled in order to rebuild from the ground-up its core server infrastructure, which will see them cut ties with their intermediary digital agencies.
The project will begin this summer and according to director of IT and new media at Bayern Munich, Stefan Mennerich, is exactly what is needed if the club is to compete with its biggest European rivals.
“The football business, via digitalisation, is an international competition and if we want to be able to compete against the big English and the big French and Spanish and Italian clubs, we have to be successful abroad as well,” he said.
Mennerich maintained that the transformation would allow them to portray the club’s origin and communications in a more effective and accurate way.
“We see that the fans in China and the United States, that they love these Bavarian roots and we want to bring our history and our background to the fans in China and the United States. We want to contextualize the content, that means want to be able to bring another content to a mobile phone user in Japan in the morning than to a desktop user in the evening in Brazil, and we want to be able to bring the content in the way that people expect it.”
While Mennerich was reserved in revealing the details of the project, he was open in emphasising a focus on video.
“People expect video content, be it on social media or on website or on mobile site, it has to be video, and we will educate or video teams and our editorial teams in order to be able to create the videos people expect.
The level of work necessary to deliver the ambitious Digital 4.0 project will likely mean the club will have to build a large and diverse team working around the clock, in order to reach the Bayern Munich fans throughout the world.