Just a few years ago, standard, and often rigid, sponsorship structures set most sponsors on the same level. But as brands get better at crafting their own narrative, generic platforms with properties are no longer working to create goodwill. Brands need to find a clear positioning for their sponsorship portfolio as well as within each property.
Sponsorship can be extremely effective at reaching communications and business objectives. However, building the equity of a partnership requires a lot of time, mainly because audiences need to naturally associate the brand with a property, especially if the sponsor is replacing another brand from the same category. The good news is that the positive effects will last as well.
Using Tech to Empower Decision-Making
How do you know if you’re making the right sponsorship choices? This is a hard question to answer because sponsorship is a complex industry with lots of moving parts. But when you start with the data and use tech to track your progress, it empowers you to make better, more informed decisions.
Data measurement. We talk about it so much that it almost registers as a trending topic. And yet, despite all of our chatter, the truth is that sponsorship initiatives often go largely if not completely unmeasured, and, when we do attempt to quantify success, we often go about it wrong.
There are three gaps that undermine most attempts to measure sponsorships....
For a sports property looking for sponsorship, finding companies that are willing and able to enter into partnerships is no mean feat. But before plunging into a deal, what are some of the considerations the sports property should consider about to ensure success? There are plenty of risks and pitfalls which could harm the property’s prosperity and brand. Taking time to assess risks before making a sponsorship agreement ensures that the property can mitigate some of these potential issues in the planning stage.
In 2014, the Canada Sponsorship Landscape Study noted a 6.7% decrease in sponsorship spending in the country after years of steady increase. This sector is once again seeing growth—IEG predicts a 4.5% increase in 2016—in large part due to the arrival of new players and the increase in activation budgets (which is often taken from the amount paid in rights). As a result, several properties are facing a cap on their sponsorship revenues, especially in high-level professional sports and important music festivals.
Because anything can be sponsored—or almost anything—you’d think that companies would be busy transforming their sponsorship portfolio every time a new trend hit the market. Instead, they tend to focus on their existing partnerships because long-term relationships have a way of paying off.
We are seeing a stabilization of partnerships in the major sponsorship categories, which suggests that brands are adopting a more strategic approach. The average duration of a partnership has also gone up. There is less movement in the marketplace overall, with the exception of brands pulling out during more difficult economic periods.
Relevent15 conference review
By Joey Franco
The terms “pioneer” and “trailblazer” come to mind when describing Tom Moser’s career in the entertainment/sports sponsorship marketing field. Moser, a mastermind marketer for British American Tobacco, including its Canadian subsidiary Imperial Tobacco Company Canada has run the gamut in high profile tobacco sponsorships; from IndyCar racing to jazz festivals and of course, Formula One.
Due to tobacco legislation restricting more traditional forms of advertising and promotion; sponsorships became one of the only communications vehicles for marketers at tobacco companies. “It was actually a benefit in some ways,” says Moser as he describes those transformative years.
While this magazine can’t possibly do justice to all of the insight and effervescence that speakers and participants alike brought to the three-day event, we hope it will give you a little taste of the amazing discoveries we shared during this first edition. Hopefully it will also whet your appetite to join us next year for the opportunity to get even better at what you already do so well.
The number of organizations that have jumped into the sponsorship ring in the hope of growing their revenues has skyrocketed in recent years, resulting in an overflow of requests in sponsors’ inboxes…
Is there a simple tool out there that can spare a promoter the futile hassle of filling out lengthy forms and save a sponsor from drowning under a sea of requests? There is now!
How many times have you heard that sponsorship is no longer about visibility but all about engagement? Pretty often, I’d wager. While this is true enough in principle, the fact remains that 1) sponsorship can still be an effective way to build brand recognition and 2) before even thinking about engagement, you’ve got to first be sure consumers are going to remember who you are. Almost in all cases, the link between sponsor and property needs to be made before moving on to more complex objectives.
The vast choice of sponsorships can by tempting for any company, especially if you assess each one in a vacuum. It’s easy for a sponsor to feel like a kid in a candy shop when so many options abound, but the wrong choice can lead to a scattered portfolio. Such an approach can sometimes yield positive results for a sponsor, but a well-structured selection can enhance your performance tenfold. Here we’ve broken down the strategies successfully leveraged by major brands, and drawn a few important conclusions. Here are six sponsorship strategies worth taking note of:
Sponsorship is an evolving area and the recent 2015 Relevent Conference shed light on a new way of approaching sponsorship. The speakers addressed numerous issues that are gaining traction in the sponsorship field such as the increased usage of social media as an important channel for activation, the effectiveness of the performance evaluation, the need to clarify precise objectives beyond awareness and finally is the logo dead? What the speaker Ian Malcolm, President of Desperado Inc. agency, would call the in-ice-logo dilemma, which stresses the fact that sponsorship is no more about visibility but way more about engagement.
You spend years building a partnership between a brand and a property and then, for various reasons—objectives not being met fast enough, lack of vision at the management level, a changing of the guard or simply the strategic realignment of a scattered portfolio—and the time comes to call it quits.
No matter how good the reasons are for leaving, every brand needs a solid exit strategy. There are multiple players involved, from the property to the media to fans and the general public, and their reactions should not be underestimated. You don’t want to run the risk of having years of hard work crumble with a single news story.
All good things come to an end, and partnerships between sponsors and properties are no exception. Financing sponsorships is becoming an increasingly costly endeavour, and when a contract comes up for renewal, there are times when a brand decides to walk away. The results of the above study suggest that even if pulling out of a sponsorship is negatively perceived by consumers, brand sponsors can mitigate that response by paying special attention to how they announce the news and when they decide to make it public.
When a scandal breaks, keeping quiet can seem like the most appropriate course of action for a sponsor. But there are, in fact, many different tacks a sponsor can take when the time comes to distance itself from an important property.
Long before Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France already had a number of scandals under its belt (hence the nickname: the Tour of Doping). The most significant scandal was the Festina Affair in 1998. For the first time in the history of cycling, an entire team was excluded from the Tour de France after their soigneur was arrested at the border with large quantities of doping products in his car. It was tough for Festina—the luxury watch brand sponsoring the team—to distance itself from the scandal when its name was peppered all over the media. The Festina team put an end to its activities in 2001, and the brand redirected its involvement in the event: it became the official sponsor of timekeeping for the Tour de France and set up a foundation to prevent doping.
This series introduces readers to university publications on sponsorship. It offers a summary of the article and highlights the impact of the findings on sponsorship management.
Change in a Sponsorship Alliance and the Communication Implications of Spontaneous Recovery
Original authors: Anna R. McAlister, Sarah J. Kelly, Michael S. Humphreys, and T. Bettina Cornwell
When sponsorship deals are up for renewal, we often see a tide of change when it comes to the organization’s partnerships. And that brings about a communications problem: the public continuing to associate the event with the previous sponsor.
With only 3% of sponsorship budgets devoted to research[1], several companies can’t answer the following questions with any certainty:
There is no point investing a penny in sponsorship if, as an organization, it’s impossible to confirm whether or not the set objectives were met. Of course, the efforts invested in measurement tools should reflect the importance of the sponsorship for the organization. The bigger the sponsorship, the greater the need to measure the results.
To measure the impact of a sponsorship, it’s important to understand every piece of the puzzle, and to keep in mind that the criteria will change depending on the company and the sponsorship. But you don’t need to be a business analyst or a numbers person: when you understand how the process works, measuring sponsorships becomes an instinctive tool that you can build upon as you go.
A little reality check before we continue: budgets often leave no room for research, and companies often don’t have the specific expertise required to build a program to measure performance. Here is a brief guide to help out in that regard.
This series takes a look at the academic literature on sponsorship and offers a condensed summary and managerial implications.
By Hakim Azrour, M.Sc.
For the past few years, morality clauses have been cropping up in a lot of endorsement contracts, enabling companies to end their association with a celebrity and distance themselves from a negative event should it occur. That’s how endorsement contracts came to an end between McDonald’s and Kobe Bryant, Kate Moss and Chanel, and H&M and Burberry, not to mention Tiger Woods with Accenture, Gatorade and Gillette.
Because of the extravagant nature of celebrities—or maybe just because they’re human—endorsement scandals are inevitable. Unfortunately, such scandals are also totally unpredictable, and a company generally has no advance warning when its highly paid spokesperson decides to stray from the script. The one thing a company can control is its reaction when the media is in an uproar about its association with an offending celebrity.
Some people have a hard time saying no. With sponsorships, it’s part of the routine for big sponsors, but also for smaller, local businesses that might have to refuse distributing money to members of their community.
Saying no to sponsorship opportunities is part of having a well-structured and strategic program. It also all about finding the right properties that align with your specific objectives. Turning down offers require a certain finesse if you do not want resentment to build with potential customers and influencers.
Being rejected can be perceived as harsh; however, with some simple tools it will be both easier for you—and the prospective sponsor. Here are three steps you can implement to better manage sponsorship requests:
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