With the news Celtic’s Head of Marketing and Multimedia Kerry Keenan has left her role with the club, it will be interesting to see the approach Celtic take now when it comes to communicating with the support across the club website and social media.
It should be noted by the Celtic support the excellent contribution that Kerry has made behind the scenes at Celtic over the past decade and she lists many of these achievements put together with the Celtic media and marketing team with her at the helm. Here’s Kerry’s farewell message to the job at Celtic, but she’ll still be there at the games next season cheering on the team. Kerry is one of our own.
“After 9 seasons, 600 or so matchday days, many many summers spent in sunny Austria and more pressers, hashtags, broadcasts, events, Christmas films and campaigns than I can even remember my amazing time at Celtic Football Club has come to an end.
“It has been a joy and a privilege and I would like to thank my excellent boss Adrian Filby for the opportunity and support through all the years. Also to Peter Lawwell for giving me the chance and to both of them for believing in me and pushing me forward and also my mentors Eric, Murdoch, Lena and Michael Nicholson for their guidance too.
“None of it would have been possible without the support of so many people across the club, the football community and my family too. Its not always easy being a woman in football with small kids but it is always worth it.
“I would also like to thank everyone that has supported me especially my amazing team who are the best in the business led by Fiona Smith, Craig Johnston, Gerry McCulloch Paul, Chris & Peter.
“Some of what we have achieved will live with me forever. Billy McNeill famously said there is a fairytale about this club and for almost a decade I got to live that dream. Thank You.”
Kerry Keenan, the now former Head of Marketing & Multimedia at Celtic Football Club, on Instagram.
Celtic do appear to leave communication to the minimum unless they are trying to sell merchandise or season tickets, yet gathering interest and hits should be like shooting fish in a barrel for a club with a worldwide support in the millions – and access to their club’s own TV and YouTube channels to boot.
During the season there is huge interest in the football side of things. You get the interviews with the manager, the press conferences – much more engaging under Ange Postecoglou it must be said – and the odd bit of B-Team and Women’s football, but much of it lacks any real depth and comes across in the main as formulaic and lacking in substance.
I often wonder if the club truly realise the level of interest in every facet of Celtic, we as supporters have. There is an appetite out there for content for every age group representing the football club but there is also a genuine interest in every level of the club alongside that.
Take the appointment of the CEO Michael Nicholson. Have we heard a dicky bird from his as to what his vision for the club is?
Bar an announcement on the website it’s been radio silence from Celtic’s new CEO and there are plenty of us who would like to hear what he has to say, what his views are on Celtic, his own story supporting the club, his journey to his new job, the challenges he faces and has already faced.
And there is an interesting story there. Bringing it into the public domain and putting a back-story to a job title will engage the support and create content for their platforms. And if they want to sell, sell, sell, they have more subscribers to Celtic TV, to YouTube, to the club’s social media platforms, and a bigger audience to target – and one who doesn’t feel like they are only spoken to when someone wants to raid their bank account. We heard more from Dom McKay in the five minutes he was with the club than we have so far from Michael Nicholson. It would be good if that was to change.
The same goes for the appointment of Mark Lawwell. So far most of us know his dad more than we do Celtic’s head of scouting and recruitment. Yet this is a man who has worked closely with a manager who is revolutionising our football team, has worked within the City Group, across the revolutionised world of football analytics and player scouting, and has left a club at the forefront of all of that to join Celtic.
It wouldn’t take much to pop a twenty-minute appointment in his diary every month to get to know the guy, and let us all look through the window of what a man like that did with his working day prior to joining the club and what he feels he can now bring to Celtic from his experiences.
Even if Lawwell doesn’t wish to communicate on a regular basis, front up initially and then pass the baton on to the likes of Jay Lefevre, apparently the head of scouting operations – and someone we hear is doing some fantastic work behind the scenes – or Antoine Ortega the first team data analyst who joined the club from Benfica. Again, someone who we hear has arrived at Celtic and made a big impression.
Nick Hammond was the last guy to fill a similar role to Lawell at Celtic, and after he left the club few of us even knew what his voice sounded like, never mind his thoughts on Celtic. Surely that’s not going to be the case again with Mark Lawwell?
There are many areas of Celtic we as fans would love to hear more about. The Women’s team is just on the back of a domestic cup double and we get bits and pieces from players and Fran Alonso, but what about the story behind the team?
Fran Alonso is a head coach rather than a manager. To me that is normally a role for someone who operates under a Director of Football, or a similar role, with the head coach in charge of the players alone.
That’s not the case at Celtic, so when it comes to planning the route through the ever-increasing interest and growth in Women’s football, who makes the decisions on mapping out the future for Celtic FC women?
We know Chris Duffy Company Secretary and Head of Legal is now on the SWPL Board, ahead of big changes in the league structure for Scottish women’s football from next season. And through Celtic fan media some of us have heard he’s the man on the board who is most passionate about the future of Fran Alonso’s side. But we don’t really know what role he fulfils, if any, other than sitting as Celtic’s representative on the new SWPL board.
As a fan media site who covers the Celtic women’s team on a regular basis, we’d love to know what role if any he plays, what ideas he has to encourage more fan engagement with the team, what are the plans regarding a permanent home for Celtic to play out of, how are decisions reached on player targets, budgets and more?
Many of us would love to know what the two-, three- and five-year plans are for Fran Alonso’s side, the younger talent coming through in women’s football and what Celtic’s aspiration and ambitions are to build on the success Fran Alonso and his players have brought to a professional Celtic women’s team.
Did the tabloids even cover the Women’s Scottish Cup Final on Sunday?
Then there is the sports science side of things. As fans we know we were behind the curve on that, yet we’ve appointed Anton McElhone as a Head of Sports science – and that indicates further modernisation.
Yet bar the recovery benefits of turmeric we hear second hand in the mainstream press – usually from the guy selling the turmeric supplements – there is nothing coming out the club as to what changes McElhone has tried to implement, what he brings from previous roles to his new position at Celtic.
That’s all something a lot of Celtic supporters would be interested in and would love to hear from the man charged with implementing the changes required to facilitate the manager’s high intensity demands made on his players.
Celtic have made improvements in the last 12 months, there is more of a presence on social media and much of it under the watch of the departing Kerry Keenan has been cleverly done and often amusing to boot, but there is much more that can be achieved.
There are several Celtic fan media sites with more traffic than Celtic’s own website and all of that is done by engaging the Celtic support in subject matters that interest them. Now there are subjects that the official media can’t or won’t tackle that the fan media will, and the club recognise the value of getting certain messages out via the Celtic fan media when required. Indeed it was the Celtic fan media that led the fight against the Null & Void campaign that would have stopped our ninth consecutive title a few seasons back.
The club itself should be able to blow all of us out the water with the people they can access to be put in front of the camera and tell their story. And you know what, if they are brave enough, why not approach some of these fan media sites and we can do the interviewing. We can get their stories out there if the club don’t have the time or the staff to facilitate that.
The engagement between the club and fan media has worked so far, but perhaps there is scope to develop that still further. But in truth it shouldn’t be needed.
Celtic themselves have the capability and capacity to improve the levels of content and in turn the communication with the Celtic support. You only need to look to the likes of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United as examples of where such communication far exceeds what Celtic achieve. And when it comes to a supporter base, we can match those clubs and more.
A stronger Celtic media working with a stronger Celtic fan media decreases the requirement for the unsatisfactory relationship with the mainstream media to continue. Celtic should assess that and recognise the increasing collective power of the fan media – all with Celtic’s best interests at heart and the steadily decreasing influence of the mainstream media who so far have maintained their privileged access despite 90% of what the previously brought to the table going up in smoke as the circulations go through the floor.
This week The Celtic Star ignored the BBC poll which was eventually won by The Lisbon Lions because we believe that the less we engage with a biased Ibrox leaning publicly funded broadcaster, who once gave Jim Traynor a platform and now it’s the turn of the loathsome Tom English, the better.
Perhaps when Celtic get around to appointing a new Head of Marketing and Multimedia we can open up the channels of communication between the club and the support and let us have a look through the window at Celtic, because there is plenty as Celtic supporters, we’d all be interested in hearing about and the benefits to Celtic in doing so are clear for all to see.
And a year two development of the fan media can be of considerable benefit to Celtic, building on the fine contribution to this project made by outgoing Head of Marketing and Multimedia Kerry Keenan.
Niall J
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The poll you mentioned was on the main BBC sports site & had nothing to do with BBC Scotland who, incidentally, also ignored it.
What a great informative article.I hope you post it to every one of the power brokers at Celtic including our biggest shareholder DD,
I have am an investor and season ticket holder at Celtic Park and read hours of news about my beloved team nearly every day yet I can honestly say that I wasn’t even aware of some of the names mentioned in the article let alone that they were employed by Celtic!
Surely in this age of mass communication that can’t be right.
I probably knew more of the happenings at Celtic in the Kelly/White era than I do today and they wouldn’t tell their confessor some of the shenanigans they were up to!