Author: Slingshot Team

It’s Not Who You Know 25th July, 2016

Far too many of our new business meetings focus purely on who Slingshot knows at Board level with brands. Undeniably, we know a lot. But that’s our business – it’d be like if McDonalds didn’t know what types of condiments to use for their hamburgers. It would be ludicrous if after 6 years of selling sponsorship rights to global brands, we didn’t make a friend or two along the way.

Unfortunately, almost all sponsorship sales agencies use this angle in their pitches – providing a false sense of security, to the potential new client, that sponsorship sales is all about speaking to the right person. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In my 15 years of selling “stuff”, it’s almost never about who you know. Bad salespeople focus on this in a new business pitch because it’s easy. Rather than take time to review the boring strategic processes that underlie sponsorship sales, it’s easier to provide wow factor by name dropping. This masks the fact that the challenge of selling sponsorship actually is controllable by a rights holder and can be fixed without hiring a specialist sponsorship sales agency, and no one really wants that do they?

Slingshot’s approach is never about the black book, which many think is unconventional and also means we lose a lot of pitches to those that guarantee sponsors and often unachievable revenue targets. The smoke and mirrors sales pitch champion who they know, but if you are struggling to maximise your full sponsorship potential it’s not because of your sales people, your property or your access to LinkedIn – it’s your commercial strategy.

Without a commercial strategy that understands what assets you have, what assets brands require to drive ROI, your fair market value and a pretty spectacular proposal – you honestly don’t really have a chance. I am pretty good friends with a lot of big brand buyers, but even I can’t flog something without the above. Gone are Chairman’s Whim days, but it means you have got to start thinking about your proposition if you are going to invest time and resource into selling sponsorship.

Brexit and What It Means for Sponsorship 18th July, 2016

The sponsorship industry has seen a significant growth recently, but will Brexit stall that growth?

As the world gets smaller and brand reach gets larger, the value of global and pan-regional properties such as Formula1 and the Euros become more appealing. These platforms provide brands buying efficiencies, homogenisation, and brand consistency – being able to unite fans through passion. As passions are shared regardless of region, language or culture, the ability to utilise cross-border sponsorships is a cost effective and often resource light way to reach a target audience. Regardless of what happens when the Government enacts Article 50, the demand for these sponsorship opportunities is unlikely to decrease.

However, the challenge will be on the increased pressures to effectively deliver the same output with additional issues around talent, visas, logistics and more. This is likely to be reflected in an increase in costs of activation which is unlikely to be pared with additional brand budget. Given that working and activating in Europe could become a lot more challenging – the appetite for purchase or allocated resource for implementation will decrease, especially if budgets aren’t increased in line with the additional resource. This could then significantly impact activation decisions to support a focus on logistics, rather than a dedication to creativity.

With the UK flying the flag for creativity in our industry, it will be interesting to watch how potential cross-border challenges could impact our nation’s sponsorship activation and positioning on a global scale.

“How Long Should My Sponsorship Proposal Be?” 9th March, 2016

I am asked this everywhere I go – it seems to be the thing that most people think is holding them back from securing that perfect partner. As much as I’d love to provide a one-size-fits-all solution, unfortunately (much like most of sponsorship) this is not the case and the answers vary with each sponsorship platform. The golden rule is to keep it as short as possible, but still retaining all the information a prospect absolutely needs to know. As most people are not quite sure what information a prospect absolutely needs to know, I’ve created some tips to help you when creating your sponsorship proposal:

Keep it short, sweet and concise. Sponsorship proposals are not the latest Grazia or best Faulkner – put simply they aren’t interesting and regardless who you send it to in whatever format, people are not desperate to read them. Sponsorship proposals are just not exciting regardless of how exciting your actual property or opportunity is. Rather than accepting this, people overcompensate the boredom by writing excessive copy hoping to draw people in. This is simply not the case – mostly because you aren’t a copywriter and even the best copywriters in the world are unlikely to make your sponsorship proposal a page turner from copy alone. Therefore, don’t try and make your proposal exciting just by writing more about it. In our digital age, if you can catch their attention and imagination – they will Google you.
Following on from above – make sure whatever they Google is good.
A picture says a thousand words. If you have great imagery – use it in the best format possible which is typically in a landscape format. Saying this, don’t fill the entire proposal with a load of the same pictures – if they want to look at pictures of an event or people at an event, they will go on Facebook.
Put a price on it. Don’t waste people’s time. If you are going to go to the effort of sending a sponsorship proposal, make sure everything that the buyer needs is in there and this includes how much you expect from them in return.
Be professional. I estimate that over 95% of all sponsorship proposals in the world are done by the person looking for the investment. You are often the Founder, Marketing Director, Event Manager or Sponsorship person. It’s not your fault you are not a graphic designer, you have other important skills. But it is important to recognise you are not a graphic designer. People like things that look good. You wouldn’t try out the new restaurant in town if they handed you a hand-drawn flyer made out of copy paper and crayons so how can you expect someone to part with budget when you won’t even invest on your own sales collateral?

In terms of a litmus test, I recommend taking your sponsorship proposal to a brutally honest friend and asking their opinion. They don’t need to work in marketing to have an opinion – they just need to not worry about hurting your feelings. Listen to them. They will definitely help.

Failing getting a friend’s sign off, get some actual professional help. Speak to a sponsorship agency for feedback and/or hire them to put together a proposal for you. Slingshot obviously does this, but there are also many other agencies who can help too. It is such a shame to see people fail at securing sponsors for their event because of a bad proposal, but not a bad property so don’t go it alone!

If you are interested in having Slingshot review or create your sponsorship proposal drop us an email: proposalreview@slingshotsponsorship.com

Sponsorship Predictions 2016 1st February, 2016

Sponsorship has undergone a seismic shift in communications and it seems that everyone is finally catching up. This means great things for our industry – realising that sponsorship is more than a logo opens up a whole world of opportunity for industry growth this year.

Every January I like to start the year off with a handful of predictions for what I think will be in store and this year is no different. To gauge my predictive power, you can read last year’s sponsorship predictions here.

2016 trends:

Sponsorship spend will continue to surpass advertising spend. Forecasts by GroupM project ad spending to increase by 3.8% while sponsorship spend is set to increase by 4.1%.
People will continue to talk about engagement, but not truly deliver it. Attend a sponsorship conference and you are likely to hear ‘engagement’ being the key point of discussion; however, the activation strategies continue to remain the same. Just because you call something engaging, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Growth in non-sport sponsorship markets. At Slingshot we have seen a new appetite for commercial innovation among governments and venues. This is quite exciting when compared to basic naming rights deals – allowing significant creative impact to make a real difference. We think this is the year that naming rights will take on an entirely new meaning.
Online will become more prominent with spend complimenting onsite sponsorship activation. Online sponsorship is becoming more robust and clients have become more educated on how this drives brand ROI. Slingshot have recently partnered with technology ticketing firm Billetto to be the first to introduce this concept across thousands of events in the UK and Europe – read more here.
Brands take on the challenge of becoming rights holders. Personally, I find this quite exciting – brands revolutionising the space, creating events themselves, and securing brand sponsorship to fund their actvity. Initially launched with Vodafone Firsts many years ago, the concept is becoming mainstream and even smaller brands are understanding that if commercialised correctly, this is a cost neutral way to radically build your brand.

We wish you a successful 2016 and be sure to watch out for Slingshot – it’s going to be a big year for us

Slingshot Sponsorship Walk Away with Two Bronze Awards at the Field Marketing & Brand Experience Awards in London 2nd November, 2015

Last week the Slingshot team attended the Field Marketing & Brand Experience Awards at the Troxy. It was a really great night with eccentric British themed activities, topped off with two bronze awards! We were rewarded for the Outsourced Sales Performance of the Year for our work over the past five years with the What Car? Awards as well as the Most Effective Sponsorship Activation for our work with Ableton at Outlook and Dimensions Festivals in 2014.

Slingshot came on board with the What Car? Awards in 2011 transforming the sponsorship revenues within the first year; however, being retained since, revenue has continued to increase year on year. Beyond that sponsors now working with the What Car? Awards have been integrated throughout other areas of the business – illustrating how partnerships are integral to the overall organisation. As one of Slingshot’s first clients, their success and multi-award winning sponsorship programmes is recognition for our new approach to developing sponsorship in today’s changing landscape. Find out how we did it on the case study here.

Securing bronze for the Most Effective Sponsorship Activation is particularly relevant this year – outlining how Slingshot worked with a rights holder to develop new properties based on insight. The development of the Knowledge Arena is the first activation of its kind worldwide. This development of roundtables, show and play technologies, and panel discussions at a music festival was welcomed and become a key driver for music software and technology companies partnering with the festival overall. See the full case study here.

Given the fierce competition, we are really proud of this achievement which is a testament to the team and the clients who worked hard to make this happen.

2015 ESA Excellence Awards Now Inviting Entries From Across the European Sponsorship Industry 18th August, 2015

Submissions for the 9^th annual Excellence Awards close on 30^th September, with a glittering presentation ceremony taking place at London’s Café de Paris on February 11^th 2016

The European Sponsorship Association (ESA), the membership body that works to inspire better marketing across rights holders, brands and agencies, is today inviting interested parties to submit their best work in order to be considered for a prestigious ESA Excellence Award.

Now in its ninth year, the ESA Excellence Awards are the only awards to recognise and celebrate the best sponsorships across Europe and reward the outstanding work achieved by sponsorship industry professionals.

Earlier this year, ESA announced that it was overhauling its Awards categories to better reflect the way sponsorships are being conceived and then activated across Europe. The 2015 ESA Excellence Awards will now feature 18 new-look categories across various industry sectors, including music, sport and arts and culture.

The full list of 2015 ESA Excellence Award categories are:

ESA Best of Europe Award
B2B Activation Award
Best Use of Hospitality Activation
CSR/Community Sponsorship Award
Mass Participation Sponsorship or Event Award
Sponsorship of the Year Award
Media Sponsorship Award
Employee Engagement Award
Live Music Sponsorship or Activation Award
Arts & Culture Sponsorship Award
Best Use of Social Media
Sports Sponsorship Award
Best Use of Digital
Best Use of PR
Rights Holder Achievement Award
Multi-National Award
Best Use of Insight
Best Use of Integrated Marketing

After inviting candidates to submit applications to become a judge for the 2015 Excellence Awards, ESA is delighted to be gathering together a group of industry experts who will review and select the best campaigns according to a strict set of judging criteria.

The deadline to submit an entry for the Awards is 30^th September 2015 and the shortlist for each category will be publicly announced in October 2015. The ESA Excellence Award winners will then be revealed at a glittering awards ceremony in central London’s Café de Paris on February 11^th 2016.

To enter the 2015 ESA Excellence Awards agencies, rights holders and brands should visit http://sponsorship.org/awards/awards-home/ for the online application forms, and to obtain further details of the Awards process. Organisations and individuals are also encouraged to enter the Awards as soon as possible in order to qualify for the ‘Early Bird’ entry discount, which expires on 11^th September 2015.

Karen Earl, Chairman of the European Sponsorship Association, said:

“For almost a decade now the ESA Excellence Awards has come to represent the industry ‘gold standard’ and it is a great opportunity to celebrate the best-in-class sponsorship projects from across the continent.”

She continued: “The sponsorship industry goes from strength to strength and the new-look ESA Excellence Awards highlights how we have evolved the initiative to better reflect this progress and change, and so ensure that we remain relevant to the professionals who are producing outstanding work across a vibrant European sponsorship landscape.”

Slingshot MD and ESA Board Member Jackie Fast, who has chaired a team of professionals working within the sponsorship industry to revamp the Awards, commented:

“We now encourage the whole industry to enter their best campaigns for these Awards. There are opportunities for everyone from across Europe to be involved, no matter what the size of the sponsorship budget. The judges will look for creativity, campaigns that have achieved the business objectives, and where there are clearly measured and evaluated results that prove success.

“Winning an ESA Excellence Award provides a valuable marketing platform to showcase your great work and promote your achievements to industry peers, and helps foster new, valuable sponsorship connections. The very best of luck to everyone who enters!”

Further general information about the 2015 ESA Excellence Awards can be found here: http://sponsorship.org/awards/awards-home/

Full details of the new Award categories can be viewed here: http://sponsorship.org/awards/categories

For information on how to enter the Awards: http://sponsorship.org/awards/how-to-enter

To purchase a table for the Awards ceremony, please visit: https://billetto.co.uk/en/events/esa-excellence-awards (UK Sterling payments) or https://billetto.eu/en/events/esa-excellence-awardseu (Euro payments)

For further information about the Awards, contact the ESA office, Tel +44 (0) 20 8390 3311 or email awards@sponsorship.org

Sponsorship Sales Basic Series – Part Two: The Three As to Building a Package 17th August, 2015

We have been running a monthly Sponsorship Sessions event at our Head Office since December and some of the challenges and hurdles that are being faced by quite diverse companies we have been helping seem to be the same. Therefore, I have decided to create a Sponsorship Sales Series for the beginner. If you are an expert, this blog is not for you – you might be more interested in reading this.

Benefits are key to any partnership as they provide the rights and capability for any brand to activate. Essentially they are the rights of usage. It seems simple enough; however, surprisingly many people don’t truly understand what a sponsorship benefit actually is and how it differs from the use of that asset.

Audience: Your audience is what a sponsor is interested in reaching. Your audience is not a sponsorship benefit and shouldn’t be included in a contract. The sponsorship benefit is what enables a sponsor to reach your audience.

Asset: An asset is the benefit you are providing a sponsor and is included in a contract. This forms part of a rights holder’s deliverables during the term of the agreement.

Activation: Activation is the activity a sponsors chooses to utilise with the asset(s) they have purchased. Typically the more creative, engaged and insightful – the more the activation will resonate with the audience, which is key to driving ROI for all parties. Activation developed alongside the rights holder typically engages audiences better due to the fact that the rights holder understands their audience better than the sponsor.

For example, in a sponsorship agreement with the benefit of social media for the sponsor the breakdown is as follows:

Audience = the rights holder’s Twitter network
Asset = 5 Tweets
Activation = running a Twitter competition giving away 5 prizes to the first person who responds to a Tweet

Far too often, rights holder bulk up their sponsorship package by creating a lot of benefits that is really one asset communicated in different ways. Although this may make the rights holder feel like they are offering a great deal more, it doesn’t add any value to the prospective sponsor. Additionally, because rights holders feel like they are giving so much away, then tend to overvalue what is on the table because they themselves are confused about the benefits and the activation of those benefits.

By truly understanding what your assets are, you will start being able to clearly identify what packages and the value of those packages will be – rather than over inflating your proposition.

Sponsorship Sales Basics – Part One: “It’s Not My Proposal, It’s My Lack of Contacts” 26th June, 2015

We have been running a monthly event at our Head Office since December (find our next Sessions event) and some of the challenges and hurdles that are being faced by quite diverse companies we have been helping seem to be the same. Therefore, I have decided to create a Sponsorship Sales Series for the beginner. If you are an expert, this blog is not for you – you might be more interested in reading this.

The one thing I hear quite often is that the lack of success in sponsorship sales has nothing to do with the capability, the product or the proposal – but rather, because they just don’t have the contacts.

Opportunities that are truly great opportunities for a company and are communicated well will get noticed within any business. It is quite easy to make excuses for lack of sponsorship sales from junior sales teams because they just don’t know the right people, when in actual fact the problem lies not in their little black book, but their inexperience at understanding the true proposition between your organisation and the prospect’s strategy.

With the right proposal, right property, to the right brand – there is no sale.

Far too often a significant amount of investment is spent in sponsorship taking sales training courses and the creation of tools to support the value such as media research – without actually addressing the real issues. Media results and training are incredibly useful tools for a sponsorship team, but if the people generating the leads don’t understand why they are making the approach, these tools become useless.

The 5 Top Tips of Prospecting for Sponsorship:

Know your USP – what makes you a more viable sponsorship opportunity than your competitor
Stop contacting the Big 5 just because you’ve seen their logo on other sponsorship campaigns: HSBC, Barclays, Coca-Cola, Google, and Emirates. This is not a good enough reason to be contacting them.
Know your prospect’s challenges and understand why you can help them when no one else can.
The sponsorship needs to work on a number of levels across a brand’s business – so understand how this will impact and support wider business objectives.
Stop randomly contacting people in hopes that someone will read your proposal. Within any Marketing Director’s job description nowhere does it ever read “to read over 12,000 proposals, feedback to each person who has submitted something, and then find one that works for the business”.

How Small Businesses Can Maximise Sponsorship Potential in 2015 15th January, 2015

*This article was originally published on Smarta

Sponsorship isn’t just for Premier League football clubs – and despite what the front covers of newspapers might tell you, it can actually be more impactful for small businesses if you do it well. Jackie Fast, founder of Slingshot Sponsorship, has worked with big brands across the globe and the entrepreneur gives her 5 tips for securing sponsorship this year.

The benefit of being a small business in 2015 is that you have many more sponsorship assets that you can work with than ever previously, allowing you to create more sponsorship packages, additional value, and ultimately driving more revenue to your bottom line.

Here are my top 5 tips for securing sponsorship successful in 2015:

1. Don’t Just Think Money

There is a big misconception that sponsorship is a cash transaction. However, a lot of sponsorship is done through contra agreements or value-in-kind. You can significantly decrease expenses by partnering with experts in the form of Venue Sponsors, Photography Sponsors, Branding Sponsors, PR Agency Sponsors, etc. Have a look at what is costing you the most and if your audience is of value, then there is an opportunity to work more collaboratively with your suppliers.

2. Think Outside of the Box for Contra Deals

Sponsorship can also expand activity you are doing, which may lead to an increase in sponsorship. For example, many smaller businesses do not have the expertise, resource, or money to be as digitally savvy as they wish they were. However, by partnering with other digital firms or technology products, you may be able to incorporate more digital based services or products which may help increase your core revenue stream.

3. Consider Being A Sponsor

Most small businesses rarely consider sponsorship as part of their marketing mix as they feel that sponsorship is only for big business. However, securing sponsorship rights can also be done on a contra deal and can greatly increase your marketing activity with minimal cost.

4. Don’t Forget Your Audience

Sponsorship isn’t just about money, sponsorship is about creating a partnership which provides mutual benefits for both parties. You need to understand your audience as well as the audience you are going after before you start considering how to create a partnership. The better understanding of audiences and how those businesses can work together, the stronger and more sustainable your sponsorship will be.

5. Get Help

Sponsorship isn’t rocket science, but it also requires more than just going out and doing it. You don’t want to burn bridges and equally you don’t want to waste time, so some advice can help you get there much quicker than going it alone. Read blogs and articles, attend sponsorship conferences and events, or get training (check out Slingshot’s Bootcamp or Sponsorship Sessions!).

You can network with Jackie by following her on Twitter

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