Our “Duke Blue Planet” website for the Duke Men’s Basketball Program was profiled in a feature article, “It’s their world: Duke basketball launches own Web site to help control message” in the January edition of the Team Marketing Report.

It’s their world: Duke basketball launches own Web site to help control message”
If there is one thing Duke University’s men’s basketball program doesn’t need, it’s more publicity. In some ways the team gets too much as it is.

But here comes Duke Blue Planet, an official Web site for a team that already stands out from the rest of the Duke athletic department.

This bold move actually stemmed from the team getting too much exposure, as Dave Bradley, the team’s recruiting communications coordinator, explained.

“This idea gained momentum during the 2006-07 season,” said Bradley, who is the defacto webmaster of the site. “It wasn’t our best year, we went 22-11, and that’s when the negative articles from the press really hit a high. We had a young team and people were going after us, and our players were taking shots. It was tough to see. We decided as a staff, and maybe Coach (Mike Krzyzewski)  initiated the conversation, we needed to see what we can do to support the players a little more, get the word out, show another side of them. After the season, we took a step back and went from there.”

While the main purpose of the site is to draw attention to the team and help land those McDonald’s All-Americans, another reason, as Bradley explained, was to show the human side of Duke, which too often gets mistaken for an ESPN-sanctioned professional team.

A main draw on the site is a collection of homemade videos starring the players, and in most cases, taped by the players.

“These are just college kids trying to win games and be normal kids,” Bradley said. “That was lost. We’re covered in extremes, but having our own site gives us a platform, it gives us a voice.”

That voice, presumably, won’t sound like Dick Vitale.

The brains behind this site is the team from UnCommon Thinking, a Chicago-based design and branding firm that has created the online homes for Tiger Woods, John Wooden and Pete Sampras. While doing research for the project, the group came to the realization that most athletic departments don’t put enough emphasis on big-name programs, content with fitting the teams into the cookie-cutter Web sites put together by CSTV or JumpTV. The latter designed GoDuke.com, where the men’s team still has a presence.

“The big thing was we wanted this site to represent the quality of the program,” said Bob McKamey, the concept director at UnCommon Thinking. “Most sites want to be professional, but they’re bland in a way. Notre Dame football’s site doesn’t match the impression you have in your mind of that program. But when people go to the site we’ve built for Duke, we want it to match up with Christian Laettner in the Final Four, Coach K and Duke basketball as a brand.”

Few college programs have standalone, sanctioned sites like this, but several high-profile coaches have personalized Web sites to help pitch recruits. Maryland’s women’s basketball program (see TMR, December 2008) has its own microsite that also focuses on recruits.

Duke Blue Planet has an embedded video open, and eschews the often-cumbersome Flash splash page. Bob said the idea was to make a site that people won’t mind coming back to on a regular basis. With that in mind, Bradley produces regular updates about current and former Duke players.  Bradley also puts together the Blue Planet magazine, a full-color glossy that is mailed out to the Duke basketball “family.” The magazine was started in the ’90s by former player and assistant Quin Snyder as a newsletter, and the Web site is a natural evolution of it.

“We use it to draw a few groups, but recruits are an important one for us,” said Bradley, whose main job is organizing the marketing of the program to recruits. “In designing the site, we feel it is geared more toward savvy young adults than your older Duke fan. And the response has been great. I’ve gotten e-mails from fans, former players, recruits’ parents, and good feedback from recruits.”

There are no sponsors on the site. Bradley said that idea was quickly shot down.

“We talked about it briefly, but quickly decided, we didn’t want to take a chance that people would think, ‘Oh, this is Duke trying to make money,'” Bradley said. “We wanted this to be a way to reach out to our fans and recruits, not make money. Maybe down the road, there’s potential for maybe a donor who might like what we’re doing and maybe help cover the cost. We think former players might want to help, so that might be the direction we look to.”

The cost was mostly the upfront fee to UnCommon Thinking, since the site is hosted on the university server.  Bradley is a full-time employee of the athletic department and the players, of course, work for free.

About Team Marketing Report
Founded in 1988, Team Marketing Report is the leading publisher of sports marketing and sponsorship information used daily by executives from collegiate and professional sports properties, sponsor companies, marketing agencies and media partners. For More Info: www.TeamMarketing.com