Tag: Sponsorship strategy

My 15 Minutes of Fame on the London Hotspots Blog 7th March, 2011

I recently was interviewed for the London Hotspots Blog with Executive Offices Group. The London Hotspots blog has the best of business advice, entertainment, travel, food and drink from across the capital so make sure to check it out.

My interview was a great experience and gave me an opportunity to talk more about the great things we are doing with Slingshot Sponsorship and our newest client campaigns.

They asked everything from the best piece of business advice I had ever received down to what we are planning for 2011 and beyond. I thought I’d give a little sneak peek on our blog with one of their questions on what our average week is like, but you can check out the entire interview here.

What is an average week like for the MD of Slingshot?
There is no average work week for me. Things change all the time and we constantly have to be flexible to meet the needs of our clients and our business. This is one of the best things about what we do. Some weeks involve attending a lot of client events – anything from black-tie balls at the Grosvenor House Hotel to high profile breakfast events in the City. Other weeks can involve white board strategy planning and briefing in creative work for new sponsorship proposals.

As we typically start working with clients at integration stage – with them having little experience in sponsorship – and then taking them to delivery, we can be at many different stages with different clients. This means that one day might be spent tweaking copy for benefits in a sponsorship proposal for one client and the next day spent on the phone setting up meetings to discuss how brands can get involved with our client’s media assets. The variety of our day to day work makes working at Slingshot Sponsorship exciting.

Need a Sponsorship Sales Consultant? Top 10 Things to Ask Yourself 21st February, 2011

The need for sponsorship sales consultants is apparent everywhere. On almost every LinkedIn Group, Twitter feed, and on numerous email requests I see people looking for someone who can sell their property rights. Considering money can be hard to come by, I understand the reasons why this is now one of the most sought after positions. However, there are things that you should consider and things you need to be aware of before you take someone on.

In this blog, I’ll explain the Top 10 Things You Should Ask Yourself before considering hiring a sponsorship sales agency or consultant. There are variations of sponsorship consultants – those that work on commission-only, those that work on tactical, those that work with sports personalities, and many more variations.

In this first blog of a series, we’ll start by looking at whether you even need one and if you do, can you support one?

Do you need a sponsorship sales consultant? If you have enough resource and staff with a good knowledge of both your property and an idea of what sponsorship can achieve, then you might not even need a sponsorship sales consultant. If you don’t have this, then…
Can you outsource sponsorship sales to another sales department? Sometimes this can be disastrous – most often when the media ad sales team tries to take this task on. However, sometimes all it needs is a bit of sponsorship sales training and the right sponsorship proposals for your media ad sales teams to hit the ground running.
Do you understand sponsorship strategy? If you are unsure about what sponsorship assets you own and how to package them, typically you will need more than just a sponsorship sales consultant, you will need a sponsorship agency to valuate rights, put together a strategy and do the research.
Do you know if your property rights can be sold? History is a great way to understand what rights you have and if there is a market for them. However, many rights owners are just starting to integrate these strategies and are unsure of whether it can be done. As such, you really should determine the evaluation of the rights first before you waste time and resource in outsourcing sales that haven’t been strategically developed in the first place. You should evaluate your sponsorship rights before even considering hiring a sponsorship sales consultant.
Is sponsorship an organisational goal? Sponsorship takes a lot of time and effort (even if sales are outsourced) within an organisation. If it is not an organisational goal, it will often get left behind and sales (whether done internally or externally) will not be successful. It takes a whole organisation to support this activity and the resource should not be underestimated. However saying that, sponsorship can help drive organisational change and innovation – we just suggest that everyone is behind the idea before you get started.
Are there politics within offering sponsorship? Sponsorship can sometimes be a tricky thing to integrate due to politics. Sponsorship sales consultants who are not involved with the strategy may not appreciate these constraints without having a more long-term approach to working with your rights.
Do you have senior staff and/or board members who will be against new sponsors coming on board? If this is the case, it will be difficult to get sponsors involved and those that do get involved with have difficulty activating their sponsorship and will not renew, making your sponsorship unsustainable.
Do you understand your objectives with integrating sponsorship? Sponsorship not only can become a new revenue stream, it can also reduce costs. This is a great avenue, especially for new property rights and needs to be considered when approaching brands. Understanding the objectives and all the benefits you can achieve through sponsorship is important before hiring consultants so you can measure performance against KPIs.
Do you have enough time? Sponsorship tends to be an afterthought when budgets haven’t been met. This creates a situation of distress sales and can often be detrimental to the rights owners. This needs to be communicated carefully and sales need to be strategically thought out.
Do you know who to go to? Putting out random messages on social networks is not the best way to find sponsorship sales consultants. You need recommendations from people who have worked with them or have done the research. As mentioned, it is quite easy to call yourself a sponsorship sales consultant because so many people are in need. However, you need to do due diligence to ensure your programme is not dependent on people who cannot do the job.

Further to Question 10, we’ve had so many properties looking for consultants so we’ve put together an industry roster of sponsorship sales consultants. If you every need advice, please email [email protected] with your brief, property rights, and location and we will try and pair you up with a consultant that is most relevant to what you are looking to achieve.

For any sponsorship sales consultants who want to be on our roster, please check out this blog in order to qualify.

Slingshot Sponsorship Wordle & our 3 Key Terms 7th February, 2011

Although not shocking, I recently created a Wordle that highlighted the most commonly used words on our blog. Unsurprisingly, three key words outside of the word sponsorship came up: Audience, Brand, and Marketing.

Audience

Without an audience sponsorship cannot exist. An audience is the most relevant part of a sponsorship as it is the key reason why brands use the sponsorship platform as a marketing tool. Although the benefits and perks of sponsorship are always great – exclusive access to unique events, such as the pit at Formula1 and tickets to private concerts – these no longer are the key reasons brands choose sponsorship.

Sponsorship creates access to a brand and builds relationships faster than straight forward advertising through the built-in goodwill and association. The audience is typically already engaged with the platform and presents a prime opportunity to slowly enhance this through brand relationships or dramatically change brand perceptions through positioning.

The audience is key and should always be the core focus of how brands can cleverly positioning their marketing and experiential activity with their sponsorship rights in order to create an impactful campaign.

Brand

The brand fit is also crucial to a successful sponsorship. As noted, brands can utilise sponsorship for a number of reasons – launching a product, brand awareness, changing positioning and changing perceptions to name but a few. Depending on the rights and activation strategy, the brand health needs to be considered to ensuring that sponsorship doesn’t intrude on the rights purchased. Many consumers, especially in the charity or government sector, can sometimes view sponsorship as a commercial ‘sell out’ against the brand, which may turn into a lack of audience, which then negatively influences what the brand sponsor set out to achieve in the first place. These issues need to be considered from both parties when purchasing sponsorship rights and when bringing on board sponsors.

Marketing

Sponsorship is a form of clever marketing – or we think so at least! However, basic marketing techniques need to be applied when using sponsorship to ensure that value is delivered for both parties. One of the key things that I think the sponsorship industry continues to fail in comparison to the marketing industry is measurement.

Historically, sponsorship has been difficult to measure and therefore became an afterthought. However, with more red tape in the sponsorship industry, ROI and measurement is vital and needs to be built into sponsorship activation strategies at the outset. Measurement in sponsorship can be as simple as focus groups and surveys to as complicated as consumer purchase behaviour patterns with brands.

Whatever the strategy, it should be discussed and built into whatever sponsorship you are developing in order to comparatively show how sponsorship can truly outperform standard marketing campaigns.

Sport Sponsorship Rights for a Fraction of the Cost 31st January, 2011

London Irish Rugby Club, the legendary rugby team, will this year expand the popular St. Patrick’s Day Party to five big events. These include a total of five games with experiential activity known as The Big 5 – five games of world class rugby combined with live entertainment, creating a fan experience beyond ‘just another rugby game’.

Experiential Marketing: Creating the Experience

Slingshot Sponsorship came on board to help London Irish Rugby club take these events to the next level. We developed an experiential sponsorship offering for brands which created value for both the brands involved as well as the fans. Not only did this create an experience, it also helped London Irish create synergy of marketing activity, a new revenue stream, as well as some exciting experiences. By providing flexibility and a low entry cost, London Irish enabled brands to leverage their best assets ensuring brand fit through their experiential activity.

Case Study: Global Action Plan

One partner involved is Global Action Plan, an award winning environmental charity based in London. Global Action Plan has created the Climate Squad with their wide-reaching environmental initiative Pump It Up. Pump It Up involves young volunteers pumping car tyres and explaining to car owners how keeping your car tyres pumped at the recommended levels can save money and the environment. As the Madjeski stadium car park is a prime location for car tyres, this provided Global Action Plan a fantastic opportunity to get involved in sport sponsorship, whilst also accessing a prime audience to their initiative.

In addition, the involvement of London Irish Rugby Club provides an incentive for Global Action Plan to recruit volunteers to both The Big 5 and introduce other volunteer opportunities with Global Action Plan in the future. And best of all, London Irish fans get their tyres pumped and learn how to start saving the environment!

Through these additional events running alongside the most well attended London Irish games, The Big 5 creates an unrivalled opportunity for consumer brands to engage and associate with London Irish fans and the London Irish brand. This can help current premier rugby league sponsors enhance their sponsorship rights as well as new brands to ‘get their feet wet’ with rugby sponsorship for a fraction of the cost of shirt sponsorship rights.

Email Newsletter Sponsorship: How to do it and Why 17th January, 2011

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels available, ensuring a wide reaching audience and proven results. E-Newsletters are particularly useful for organisations as a tool for communicating with customers, building engagement, driving traffic, and directing customers to key content. And, with a groundswell of readers behind it, an email newsletter can be used as a platform for sponsorship – providing a great revenue opportunity as well as a great marketing opportunity for potential brand partners to create new engagement opportunities with your audiences.

Sponsorship of e-Newsletters can be a powerful way to tap into a new customer segments and aligning your brand to relevant and complimentary topics or propositions. It helps increase exposure in a receptive environment (your customers’ inbox) and can subtly promote your brand whilst gaining goodwill through association.

For the converted, there are a variety of e-Newsletter sponsorship investment levels to consider, which vary according to type of audience (mass market B2C vs niche market B2B), frequency (daily vs monthly), and style of content (promotions vs editorial). From a cost perspective, most range between £1,000 and £3,500 a campaign (which may translate to a one off, mass market hit, or a monthly ‘takeover’ of display ads).

A great example of an e-Newsletter sponsorship opportunity is eConsultancy, who offer a prime position on their daily alerts for £2,250, which is sent out to a 10,000 to 12,000 opted-in subscriber list.

However, not all e-Newsletters are appropriate for the task. There are a few points that we always take into consideration when talking to clients about before considering this style of sponsorship. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Audience: an e-Newsletter can only be sponsored if it attracts an audience that is either sufficiently large or very niche. To state the obvious, B2C e-Newsletters require a large audience to be of interest, whilst B2B e-Newsletters can deliver value with smaller audiences with greater purchasing power. If you have an e-Newsletter that might be attractive to sponsors, but you don’t yet have a sponsorship sales strategy, you will need to demonstrate value in your audience through proof of size, quality and engagement of your audience. Most email marketing applications will provide you with basic analytics tools to generate this information.

2. Measurement: ROI is key to sponsorship and vital for brand sponsors when choosing who to spend their marketing budget with. Analytics tools will also provide publishers and sponsors with all of the necessary metrics to understand views, click throughs and open rates; and it is this data that will ensure that pricing and value for money are maintained at the right level.

3. Resource: sponsorship is not just about attaching someone else’s brand to yours. For this style of sponsorship to be successful there needs to be a dedicated team behind it that understands data, brand synergies, and the ability to unearth unseen co-branding opportunities. This is no small task, but this kind of attention to campaign management can turn e-Newsletter sponsorship opportunities into gold.

5 Sponsorship Predictions for 2011 5th January, 2011

We anticipate that 2011 is going to be a great year with a lot of changes in sponsorship. Not only for Slingshot Sponsorship, having recently signed some exciting clients including Haymarket and London Irish, but also for the sponsorship industry as a whole. With the Olympics around the corner, an interesting shift in marketing that has occurred as cause of the recession last year, as well as public funding cuts, we think sponsorship will take on a whole new meaning in 2011. We anticipate it will be a shift for current sponsors, rights holders, and brands alike looking to break into sponsorship. We can’t wait!

But before the year starts, we thought we’d put some of our 2011 predications together and then see how they play out!

More Engaging Sponsorship Campaigns: following the trend seen in 2010, we anticipate that the industry will become more creative in regards to creating brand engagement campaigns through sponsorship. Especially with the 2012 Olympics around the corner, everyone will be vying for the title of activation champion and devising some thought provoking campaigns to catch the attention of brands.
Decrease in Brand Ambassadors: after the backlash of negative publicity surrounding Tiger Woods and Wayne Rooney, we expect that we’ll see a decrease in the sponsorship of individuals and signing of brand ambassadors. Especially considering that the economic climate is still difficult, marketing directors are finding more red tape in regards to negotiations with the leading sports and music stars.
Increase in Sponsored Events and Tournaments: as a result of the decrease in brand ambassadors, brands will be looking to for new sponsorship opportunities to align themselves through main sponsorship of the events and/or tournaments. This will provide brands the opportunity to align themselves to the sport while minimising the risk of negative individual publicity.
Increase in Digital Sponsorship: digital sponsorship activation is starting to really take shape and drive sponsorship opportunities. In 2010, we saw an increase in iGaming companies sponsoring sports – especially premier league football. The introduction of these sponsorship deals has helped develop the rights owner’s digital strategy with the sponsor, enabling them to create synergy of digital resource. Our favourite digital sponsorship campaign in 2010 was the Manchester United vs Manchester City online campaign with slogans that fans could submit online for the promotional campaign produced by Betfair. This showed a great leap in digital sponsorship activation led by a digital sector based sponsor.
Cluttered Market for Public Funding: due to public funding cuts in the United Kingdom, we anticipate that there will be an influx of adequately written sponsorship proposals for fantastic CRM programmes sent directly to brands. As such, this will make it harder for sponsorship proposals to really stand out from the crowd. This creates a great opportunity for sponsorship agencies to help educate the market and aid in creating credible and sustainable sponsorship programmes in 2011.

Whatever 2011 holds, we’ll be sure to keep you posted on our Slingshot Sponsorship Blog. To ensure you don’t miss anything, please sign up on the right hand side of this post.

Slingshot Sponsorship wishes you all the best for 2011!

Slingshot Sponsorship signs The Institute of Direct Marketing 4th January, 2011

Slingshot Sponsorship, the thriving new sponsorship agency run by Jackie Fast, has recently landed new client, The Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM).

The IDM is Europe’s leading marketing training and qualifications provider for direct, data and digital marketing professional. Since it was founded in 1987 the IDM has developed a worldwide reputation by training more than 45,000 marketers and providing more than 10,000 programmes across 28 countries. However, the Institute is also an educational trust, for which sponsorship funds are vital.

The IDM has chosen to work with Slingshot Sponsorship in order to supplement its existing, and ongoing, sponsorship programme.

Lisa Turner, Marketing Director at the IDM comments, “We’re very pleased to be working with Slingshot Sponsorship. Sponsorship is vital to the IDM, not only to help us continue to deliver the very best professional development programmes for marketers, but, crucially, to help fund the charitable IDM Education Programme. Without it, we’d be unable to continue our essential work with UK universities and ensure that a stream of bright young graduates continue to enter the direct and digital profession.”

Slingshot Sponsorship will work with the IDM to provide sponsorship opportunities across some of their larger events in 2011.

If you are interested in finding out more information on being involved with IDM activities as a sponsor or an exhibitor, please contact Jackie Fast, e: [email protected]

About the IDM

The IDM is Europe’s leading training and qualifications provider for direct and digital marketers. It assists the lifetime professional development of marketing practitioners – from before they enter the profession (via the IDM Education Programme) and at every career stage afterwards. The Institute provides over 40 different marketing training courses and is the awarding body for 7 professional marketing qualifications in order to help professionals develop the essential skills for today’s accountable marketing. It also runs world-class thought-leading conferences as well as a series of knowledge and networking events. The IDM is a not-for-profit organisation, an educational trust, a membership organisation, and a registered charity.

To find out more about each of the IDM’s areas of activity, visit the following:

IDM Training: http://www.theidm.com/training

IDM Qualifications: http://www.theidm.com/qualifications

IDM Education programme: http://www.theidm.com/education

IDM Events: http://www.theidm.com/events

IDM Membership: http://www.theidm.com/membership

Do you want Slingshot Sponsorship to Recommend You? 20th December, 2010

We’ve noticed a significant increase in sponsorship opportunities recently, which follows our belief that sponsorship is going to be the way forward for marketing. We have noticed it becoming more integrated within the marketing mix at a request from clients as well as an increase in importance for organisations due to a combination of public funding cuts, the current economic climate, and the need for a proven return on investment.

With such an increase, we have been approached by so many sponsorship rights owners that we can’t keep up. Slingshot Sponsorship likes to help people, so rather than having to turn down these opportunities and leave them without options, we’d like to create a sponsorship roster so that if we can’t help them, we can find the right person or team who can!

Our comprehensive sponsorship referral roster will include both sponsorship agencies and consultants. We are approached by many different rights holders in every sector, so whether you specialise in sport sponsorship, health, art, music, or fashion please get in touch and let us know what you do best to see if you qualify.

Information requested:

For all interested sponsorship consultants and sponsorship agencies who are able to take on rights owners please send all the information requested below to [email protected] with the subject:

CV and history of sponsorship experience

Current/previous list of clients

Recommendations

Specialty

Region you work in

Contact information

Range of fees

Credential deck

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at: [email protected]

Sachin Tendulkar: the last ethical man in sport? 16th December, 2010

So, with the England team about to complete a historic victory over the Australians in their own back yard, I read with interest a cricket story making slightly fewer headlines.

The darling of India, “The Little Master” and a genuinely good guy, Sachin has once again underpinned his iconic status both on and off the cricket pitch. As quoted on Cricinfo, the popular Indian saying goes; “Cricket is my religion and Sachin is my God”.

The integrity of sponsorship and the importance of picking both a spokesperson and a target sport is crucial. Getting someone like Tendulkar on board to promote any product to the huge Indian market, would provide any potential company with a huge new clientele. Unfortunately for whoever was trying to get Tendulkars endorsement misjudged the maestro and were left with less impressive options.

Before he made it, Sachin was given a piece of advice by his father; “Never accept endorsements for alcohol or cigarettes, no matter what they offer”. It would now seem that these words have been fully adhered to. Reports say that this recent offer would have been the biggest deal for any Indian sportsman (No mean feat considering the package that MS Dhoni has just received!), but Tendulkar stood true to his morals and turned it down.

So far we don’t know the exact brand of alcohol that he declined to sponsor, but his agents (World Sports Group) did offer the following; “He did get an offer but we are not in a position to name the company or give details of the offer”.

What else would you expect from a character that has been in the spotlight since his introduction as the saviour of Indian cricket? The first man to deliver a double century in one day international cricket and now turning down a well paid (albeit moral bending) offer, Sachin can do no wrong and fully deserves the adulation of his adoring fanbase. That includes me if you hadn’t noticed!

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