FIDE's Marketing Committee 2017

After the post about FIDE's Ethics Commission 2017, there is one more topic I'd like to address: FIDE's Marketing Committee (soon to be a commission?). Going back to my post about Spectating the 87th FIDE Congress (December 2016), we find the first report of the group in the minutes of the 87th FIDE Congress; General Assembly; Baku, Azerbaijan; September 2016:-

9.6. Marketing Committee • Annex 72 is Minutes from the Marketing Working Session. It was proposed to establish a new membership for Marketing Committee. It consists of the following: Chairman: Martin Huba, Secretary: Kraytem Ezzat [...] The General Assembly approved the new membership of Marketing Committee.

Like many marketing materials, Annex 72 is high-level and vague, e.g.

The need to define a strategy in communication and especially in social media was agreed by Messrs. Freeman, Borg and all the participants and some concrete proposals are expected to be submitted to the FIDE management in the next future.

Fast forward a year to Spectating the 88th FIDE Congress (November 2017). Here in the minutes of the 88th FIDE Congress; Executive Board [EB] meeting; Goynuk, Antalya, Turkey; October 2017, we find a discussion of the group's funding:-

Mr. Herbert thanked the Treasurer for raising the budgets of Commissions. He asked [whether] the budget for Marketing Committee exists or not.

Prof. Siegel replied that there was a meeting with Mr. Huba who said he has some projects and he needs money for them. So he provided a list of expenses and there is a monthly salary of 3,000 euro and an annual travel of 24,000 euro. This is unacceptable as he was reluctant with other Commissions, in particular in a Commission which just starts. Mr. Huba said he cannot do anything if he does not get anything. The money proposed by the Treasurer, was 10,000 euro. We cannot give a salary of 3,000 euro to the Chairman of a new Commission which did not produce anything.

Mr. Borg said in Baku we did not have a quorum to establish the Commission. It is not intended to bring sponsorship, as there is a different mechanism for this. In this case the brief of this Committee to try to understand what is the vision of FIDE. It has an advisory role. He said no money for Marketing is not correct. I would agree with 10,000 euro to be included. He said he would speak to Mr. Huba.

Later in the minutes is a brief mention of the group's input to the EB:-

4.20. Marketing Committee. • Annex 38 is Committee’s Minutes. Executive Board noted.

The first two pages of Annex 38 offer a number of bullets:-

The following suggested areas of FIDE intervention were identified:
1) Information Gathering
2) Mission and Vision defining
3) Mission and Vision sharing and elaborating
4) Branding
5) Seeking of alternative sources of funding
6) Increasing membership base of FIDE

For example, that last bullet says, 'Present number of about 130,000 FIDE rated players could be raised easily to few millions but there is a need of a sensitive and focused negotiations with individual federations'. The rest of the annex is a marketing presentation titled 'Chess Means Smart' with 16 slides of photos under headings like 'Chess Is History' and 'Chess Is Culture'. The following section has 16 pages titled 'FIDE Situational Evaluation', where the first slide serves as a table of contents. I've copied it here.

The presentation is an extract from a larger 85 page document which is available online:-

FIDE Situational Evaluation
https://www.chess.sk/files/subory/1490214562FIDESituationalevaluation.pdf

The rest of the EB annex is a series of sales pitches for European organizations followed by three actions 'FIDE Marketing : Urgent Areas'

1) Serious regular analytical work [e.g. indicators]
2) Permanent Youtube channel, Facebook, Twitter, photo & results site, press kits.
3) Marketing Planning [e.g. goals, projects]

The current membership of the group is on the FIDE Directory: Marketing Committee (fide.com).