Building a brand that brings the dynamism and excitement of sports alive

A world leader

TLA Worldwide have grown to become one of the world's leading sports marketing agencies. Representing talented individuals from Olympians Sir Chris Hoy and Rebecca Adlington to leading NFL stars Jameis Winston and Dion Dawkins alongside Australian AFL Talent including Taylor Walker, TLA are responsible for some of the globes greatest sporting individuals, brands and events.

TLA's consultancy and management teams have created impressive spectacles at the Australian Grand Prix, new sports propositions for football exposure at the MCG in Melbourne including both heavyweights of Brazil and Argentina, as well as staging major one-off events such as Wayne Gretzky's Ice Hockey Classic. TLA count global players such as Adidas, Toyota and Formula One as clients and continue to grow with their reach in the market.

This growth has required a brand presence that, under our guardianship for over five years, has evolved and now encompasses a single, global digital presence, an integrated approach to investor and stakeholder reporting and the ongoing innovation of digital products that will help both TLA's internal team and also their clients in continuing to grow.

Here's how we've worked together.

Brand building

From the outset of working with TLA our work has seen activity across the following areas:

• Establishing a brand vision: defining a direction of travel and identifying key areas of focus

• Engaging with investors and stakeholders on a global scale, across both physical and digital corporate reporting

• Establishing a logic to a global brand presence enabling regional reference with a view to global integration

• The cultivation and growth of a single brand alongside a period of business acquisition

• Creating a core brand guidelines directive with a foundation of brand templates and assets

In producing a range of brand outputs including corporate reporting we have established an ownable style and creative direction that resonates with TLA's core values. Our reporting, including both physical reports and digital companions have provided profiling opportunities for talent as well as highlighting other areas of focus from a stakeholder's perspective.

Our approach to corporate reporting

As an integrated agency, we believe strongly in providing accessibility to all stakeholders. Naturally this means an increasing digital presence, coordinated to AIM Rule 26 compliance, but it also means that tangible, physical communications should not be ignored.

Our work across the corporate reporting landscape within other sectors corroborates this. In our opinion a physical report continues to maintain a role within the Boardroom and within reach of investors. Our team ensure that from a messaging and brand consistency perspective, digital and physical outputs compliment one another and take advantage of the unique benefits that each platform provides, designing for purpose. This could mean encouraging the use of interactive charting within the digital report – allowing investors to truly interrogate data year-on-year, or it could mean the addition of a data narrative to reporting figures.

A core, global website

TLA (The Legacy Agency) maintained a US-led digital presence when our relationship began. With business acquisition and growth however it became clear that a single, revised site presence was required that would aptly showcase everything that TLA represented on a global scale. With their expanded brand reach, we helped their team identify their key offerings, and in-turn design and build a site that would respond to their needs, and their clients' needs.

Our iterative process:

As an agency, our digital workflow follows a modular, content-first approach where we:

1. Iterate through an idea and discovery phase of work, identifying user and client needs alongside business objectives

2. Establish a core specification (often formed in a shareable Google Doc) that aids direction of the project

3. Map content and user requirements to core site functionality, plotting site structure and needs

4. Quickly iterate through idea generation, formalised in wireframe and prototype form for feedback and testing

5. Encourage early technical engagement with our clients, ensuring quick and confident understanding to both underpinning technology decisions but also future client input (CMS learning in this instance)

6. Design in a modular and responsive manner with flexibility and repurposing in mind, all aligned to a brand vision

7. Utilising Trello we establish a test and review routine, with all parties feeding into this process with commentary

8. Integrate data-led metrics that link back to the brief and the business objectives - often including event-based analytics, KPI recording and other forms of effectiveness review

9. Support the complete launch and deployment process, and if requested, continue this relationship with an ongoing SLA where we maintain hosting and infrastructure management and monitoring.

Cultivating a digital vision for TLA

In the design and development of the TLA website, our team:

• Crafted a site structure that represented TLA's core business verticals of Talent, Consultancy, Events and Merchandise

• Produced a digital platform that could be easily updated by their internal team, showcasing the great work that TLA have undertaken and providing a profile for each of their talent

• Established a clear, AIM Rule 26 compliant, investor section within the site, integrating with the digital reporting approach that we had also put in place

• Provided geo-location functionality where regional content across the core service areas was segmented for ease of use

• Integrated a regionalised brand social presence that span site-wide

• Helped cultivate a news area within the site that encouraged active content creation, highlighting recent work by TLA that was easily accessible.

Results

Our work with TLA over the years has seen:

• A brand vision develop that has supported an organisation which in 2015 saw its revenue grow to £44.4 million

• The formation of a brand guidelines approach alongside business acquisition, which now forms a boilerplate to ongoing creative work and new projects

• The creation of a single digital site presence that attracts ~10k visitors per month

• Engagement with stakeholders in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia with an integrated approach to corporate reporting

• Innovation with digital products assisting business objectives.

‘Studiomade worked seamlessly as part of our team throughout this rebrand process.’ Dwight Mighty, COO.