Tag: Commercial

Sponsorship DIY 16th December, 2016

‘You need money to make money’ is a common term people refer to when encountering financial obstacles and rights holders constantly face challenges when it comes to taking their projects to the next level.

Most entrepreneurial projects start off as a one-man band or in some cases they might have a small team in place, but nevertheless the amount of effort to get projects of any size off the ground is not for the faint hearted, requiring a substantial amount of time and expertise. Rights holders are now realising the importance of sponsorship not only from a financial standpoint but they are beginning to realise that brand integration can make significant improvements to their holistic business model – ultimately saving them time and money.

Yet, with sponsorship so important to rights holders – sponsorship professionals now understand their worth and as such, large fees are associated with such specialist agencies. Therefore, obtaining the money to hire their services can often be very hard to come by, making the journey from zero to hero a daunting prospect.

However, the solution is simple; identifying alternative services that allow you to function like a specialist agency might be the worthiest investment any entrepreneur can make. Enhancing your knowledge from a fundamental level in the field you operate can ultimately acts as the foundation to your success.

At Slingshot, we don’t just work with global properties but all businesses with the ambition of propelling every client we work with to the next level. For those unable to justify larger investments into agency support, we conduct commercial training sessions that have been designed to give people an insight into the step-by-step process we go through with our global clients, providing you with all the knowledge and skills to go out and secure long-term sponsorship for your own organisation.

Performing like a trained sponsorship expert will result in you developing the right propositions, having the right conversations with the right brands resulting in you building long-lasting relationships with sponsors whilst driving year on year revenue. Don’t just hire specialists, become one.

If you’d like to hear more about the commercial training sessions we run at our headquarters in London, please contact Liam Ward at [email protected].

To book onto the course, simply follow the link provided.

Honda Racing appoints Slingshot Sponsorship to boost commercial revenue 12th September, 2016

Honda Racing, the only factory team on the MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship grid, well known for shaking up the traditional world of racing, has appointed Slingshot Sponsorship to manage its commercial rights into the 2017 season.

Slingshot Sponsorship, an award-winning commercialised marketing agency, will handle all commercial rights and partner opportunities, ahead of the 2017 British Superbike season.

The Louth-based Honda Racing BSB team is progressive in the world of motorsport, signing BSB’s only female competitor, Jenny Tinmouth, who joined the team in 2015. During her two seasons with Honda to date, Jenny has improved on personal bests at every round.

Team-mates Jason O’Halloran and Dan Linfoot, both occupying the all-important BSB top six Showdown spots, with five rounds to go this season, complete the Honda line-up – representing the most successful team in the championship’s history.

“We’re delighted to have Slingshot Sponsorship join the Honda Racing BSB team. The entire agency truly understands our vision for the team going forwards,” said Nick Campolucci, head of motorcycles at Honda UK. “I’m confident that with Slingshot’s support we can take the success of the team to the next level.”

Slingshot Sponsorship enhances its clients’ commercial rights by uncovering new value through development and creation of sponsorship assets – supporting an execution that is mutually beneficial and sustainable.

“Honda Racing is visionary in its field and has expanded the audience outside of the traditional biking community. We’re honoured to be working with Honda,” said Jackie Fast, founder and managing director of Slingshot Sponsorship. “Honda Racing and Slingshot have a shared interest in pioneering ways of shaking up a traditional market so watch this space.”

Commercial opportunities are now available with the team for the 2017 season.

-Ends-

Note to Editors:
About Slingshot Sponsorship
Slingshot Sponsorship is an innovative strategic sponsorship agency based in Central London with offices around the world. Slingshot works across all industry sectors to help organisations identify, create and optimise their value to become engaging business growth opportunities for brands to partner with. Clients include diverse verticals such as sport, events, celebrities, award programmes, music festivals, and charities – all with a desire of pushing the boundaries in traditional sponsorship.
localhost:8080/slingshotsponsorship.com

For PR comments and information, please contact Kirsty Matthews
e. [email protected] t: +44 (0) 7834 238109

About Honda Racing BSB
Honda Racing BSB news releases and images are available to download from http://media.hondaracingbsb.co.uk/

Contact information
For corporate and model-specific comment, please contact:
David Rogers, PR Manager (Motorcycles)
T: 01344 888573 M: 07775 227872 E: [email protected]

For race reports and team comment, please contact:
Becky Vane
T: 01525 270774 M: 07446 472 440 E: [email protected]

Muscular Dystrophy UK appoints Slingshot Sponsorship to drive commercial strategy 5th April, 2016

Slingshot Sponsorship today announce their new client, Muscular Dystrophy UK. Slingshot has been selected by the charity to help drive new commercial relationships and a long term strategy.

Muscular Dystrophy UK, founded in 1959, supports and helps bring together people affected by more than 60 rare and very rare progressive muscle-weakening and wasting conditions.

Rebecca Day, Director of Development for Muscular Dystrophy UK says:

“For Muscular Dystrophy UK, research is at a critical stage requiring a real acceleration in investment; along with all we want to accomplish in providing ongoing support for families living with these devastating muscle-wasting conditions. Wholly reliant on voluntary income, we are keen to take a thorough and proactive approach to identify and maximize the potential of commercial partnerships to meet our goals. Slingshot responded to our brief with a perfect blend of energy and passion for the project, coupled with evident and demonstrable expertise. We are extremely excited to see what we can achieve by working together.”

Jackie Fast, MD of Slingshot Sponsorship said of the new partnership, “We’re delighted to be working with such a well-renowned British charity to help them make the most of the commercial benefit to their research and income streams.”

How To Get Sponsors Working For Your Business 4th August, 2014

The sponsorship industry is changing. The opportunities are endless and ways of engaging are ever increasing. And yet, the sponsorship industry still remains fairly static. Since inception, the typical transaction includes rights holders trading ‘space’ to sponsors for money. Everyone seems pretty happy. But is everyone getting the most out of the relationship? With ROI crucial to good business, I’d question whether everyone is getting as much return for the investment that is being put into the sponsorships created.

But money talks and quite rightly, rights holders utilise sponsorship to drive revenue. However, sponsorship can do so much more. When done cleverly, sponsorship can open business avenues and new profit centres rights holders wouldn’t have been able to create by themselves.

But it needs a rights holder who is willing to look at the bigger picture with an ambition to think outside of the box commercially.

Rather than just chasing money for logo placement, rights holders need to identify what their ideal ambition is for incorporating sponsorship revenue within their commercial objectives. For many B2B events, it’s about attracting leading consumer brand names to their event. For music festivals, it’s about differentiation and adding value to the festival experience. For sport, it’s getting fans to engage with the team beyond the pitch. Sponsorship does all these things, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

Many rights holders fail to realise that they have to consider their sponsorship ambitions in a series of steps. Just like growing any business, in order to reach the end goal there are milestones of achievement – each one built upon success of the other. A good sponsorship strategy should be developed in the same way – with the long view in mind including phases that drive to deliver objectives beyond the financial.

And even if money really is the only objective (although if you dig deep enough, this is rarely the case), you need to create phases which will allow you to continue building value in order to increase revenue year on year.

So how do you go about building a sponsorship strategy that does all this and more?

Figure out if you have ambitions beyond money. And if you do, find out if sponsorship can help you reach them.
If you cannot offer a strong proposition to the sponsors you really want, carve out areas of rights that you can provide on a reduced rights fee or for free while still maintaining your core sponsors. This allows you to negotiate with the right sponsors that can deliver on some of your long-term ambitions while still ensuring your financial targets can be met by the usual suspects.
Talk with your current sponsors about your ambitions and find out how they can play a role in achieving them.
Partner with sponsors whose long-term goals and objectives are aligned with your own.
Stop thinking transactional. Get creative.

Can too many Sponsors Dilute a Rights-Holder’s Brand? 22nd August, 2013

In sports leagues around the world, success on the field is ultimately driven by commercial revenue. As a consequence, their response has been to bring in sponsors to help facilitate the gap in funding. But this growing emphasis upon sponsorship has left many people asking – are too many sponsors diluting the right-holder’s brand?

Sponsors make the brand more vibrant

When discussing the ever increasing number of sponsors in sport, it would be hard not to mention Manchester United, having just signed another spread of partners across the globe. The club has recently signed the Indonesian tyre producer bringing the club’s sponsorship total to 33. It begs to ask the question – are these sponsors devaluing the Manchester United brand?

Jonathan Rigby CM for MU, has rejected that the club has anywhere near reached its limit. He states that by implementing a local model amongst the 77 countries they have sponsors in currently, they are appealing to each fan individually, making the brand more vibrant and producing a follow on effect which will ultimately benefit all sponsors involved.

This certainly seems to be the case when you look at their operating profit, which has increased this year by 13.7%. The club has also just signed a new shirt deal worth nearly £500 million over 8 years, increasing their commercial sponsorship revenue to £118 million annually.

More value lies in fewer partners

In comparison, Juventus believe going the other way is more rewarding. The club believes that having valuable relationships with fewer brands will bring you more credibility amongst your following, and as a result will lead to greater financial weight behind the deals. This is the case for Jeep who is currently their headline sponsor, and one of 15 corporate partners. In a public image driven market, and where it is only public interest which governs your reach; keeping it close to home can be seen as vital.

It’s the end product that matters

Brands enter into sponsorship for a multitude of reasons, but generally speaking, brands sponsor rights-holders for the audience, exposure, association and to fulfill their own brand objectives. For rights-holders, one of the main things they rely upon, aside from funding, is the fans/ their audience. As a platform, sponsorship allows both the rights-holder and brand to connect to their audience in a wholly tailored way.

The focus, therefore, shouldn’t be based on the amount of sponsors, but upon the end product – what the partnership has created for the fan, the overall experience and the club. MU’s model works because it has such a wide fan base and global sponsorship platform that allows them to associate with their following in all corners of the world. Juventus, on the other hand, has had success through its emphasis upon a few partners that have a strong affiliation to the club, keeping it close to home allows them to stay true to both the sponsor and the rights-holder’s objectives.

The Outcome

So long as the sponsorship is delivered and is aligned to the brand’s objectives and these objectives align with those of the rights-holder, the end product should ultimately benefit both club and sponsor. Dilution of the brand will come when parties lose sight of their overall objective.

Promoted Posts – a decline of Facebook or a reflection of a shift in marketing? 21st November, 2012

In recent weeks Facebook has come under increased scrutiny over its introduction of charges on fan pages to promote posts. Charges on these pages – used by businesses to interact with potential customers – have caused widespread anger against the social media giant. From tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban threatening to leave the NBA teams fan page neglected to George Takai’s claims he will dedicate a whole chapter of his new book to the matter, Facebook has come under fire for their commercial shift. Is this profiteering?

Behaviour targeting

Effective in January, promoted posts work in conjunction with wider changes made by Facebook regarding what users see on their newsfeed. Facebook has created an algorithm to filter the content that reaches people. This behaviour targeting reacts to how people engage with posts and other people and will feed marketing and behaviour information accordingly.

Promoted posts

Promoted posts provide the new option of paying to promote specific posts. This change bypasses the behavioural targeting mentioned above to guarantee a certain amount of a targeted audience (and at a price, their friends) are guaranteed to see a specific post. Payment for this service is scaled.

The advantages – Business

While many are outraged at this new model, there are a number of commercial advantages for brands:

Analytics – when a post has been promoted you are now able to receive a breakdown of post views and viral capabilities.
Fan Appz – provides instant measurement of any advertising campaigns in real time and works to help you convert fans into advocates.
Affordable – the scaled system of payment means promoting posts is a viable option for all sizes of business.

The advantages – Consumer

Better creative – payment to promote posts forces brands to consider the quality of their advertising far more. While before pages could churn out posts with little thought for content quality, the introduction of charges should encourage companies to be more thoughtful in their approach.
Targeted information – as internet users currently fight a war on noise receiving millions of marketing messages online, targeting ads ensure that you are served ads that are relevant to your purchase behaviour.

A wider shift

While Facebook’s promoted posts for many will always appear part of its wider decline since capitalisation, it in fact marks a larger shift among social media companies into being viable businesses. From Twitter’s ‘Promoted Tweets’ to Tumblr signing agencies to bring in advertising revenue, Facebook’s model both fits a growing trend while offering clear advantages for both business and consumer.