Tag: Sponsorship

Global Action Plan supports London Irish Big 5 10th February, 2011

Global Action Plan has signed on to support London Irish Rugby Club alongside the London Irish Big 5, set up through the Slingshot Sponsorship agency. The legendary rugby club has this season expanded the annual St. Patrick’s Day Party into five big events with live entertainment and activities for supporters young and old. 

Global Action Plan is an award winning environmental charity that works with all kinds of groups, from school children to corporate employees, to bring about engagement and action on sustainability issues. For the London Irish Big 5 events, Global Action Plan will be promoting their youth volunteering project, Climate Squad, with its wide-reaching environmental initiatives; Operations Pump It Up and Bust-a-flush.

Some of the young volunteers will be based in the car park of the Madejski Stadium pumping car tyres and explaining to car owners how keeping your car tyre pressure at the recommended level can save you up to 8% on fuel costs and reduce emissions.

Felicity Greenland, London Irish Marketing and Events Director, comments: “We are very happy to have Global Action Plan involved in our Big 5 programme. We are excited about helping to showcase environmental issues as well as providing an engaging experience for our supporters.”

Through their support, Global Action Plan will be provided with a fantastic profile opportunity to get involved in sport sponsorship and to promote their cause to an engaged audience.

Trewin Restorick, Global Action Plan CEO, states: “We are looking forward to bringing our Pump it up Programme to London Irish and the Big 5.  We can’t wait to showcase how our charity works and how young volunteers can get involved.”

Global Action Plan has agreed involvement with the February 12th – Valentines vs Newscastle Falcons and the February 26th– Festival of Rugby vs Harlequins. 

More Information

London Irish Big 5: http://www.london-irish.com/Big5.ink

Global Action Plan: http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/

Slingshot Sponsorship: localhost:8080/slingshotsponsorship.com

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.

Sponsorship resurges in the Marketing Mix 23rd January, 2011

Sponsorship, once a symbol of corporate excess and indulgence, is resurgent as marketers find a new place for it within the marketing mix.

As sports fans will be all too aware, many leading companies and brands are pulling out of their sponsorship deals with major sporting events, high-profile teams and sports stars as they look to shore up their marketing budgets. Prominent sponsorship deals such as Honda’s Formula 1 racing team, Vodafone’s long relationship with the English Cricket Board and the Derby, and GM’s endorsement deal with Tiger Woods are just a few of the notable examples of the lucrative partnerships that have bitten the dust as embattled companies rein in their marketing spend.

The hundreds of column inches given over to these tales of woe has created the impression that the golden age of the sponsorship deal has been dealt a severe blow by the Credit Crunch. However, while many of these multi-million pound sponsorship deals are drying up, there is surging interest among marketers to find new sponsorship vehicles. This has seen the integration of brands that are not natural competitors, but nonetheless share the same target audience. Thomas Cook has just signed up to sponsor Kiss FM’s Saturday night ‘Kissalicious’ show, their very first media spend on their Club 18-30 brand in four years.  The Co-operative is the new sponsor of the next instalment of the High School Musical franchise, their second deal with a Disney-owned series.

 Why include sponsorship in the marketing mix?

Sponsorship is a powerful way to engage with consumers. At a time when people are constantly marketed to through an increasing number of channels, engagement is vital for marketers to get their message across to their target audiences. Sponsorship is a medium which can facilitate this by creating tangible ‘touchpoints’ for the consumer to come into contact with and interact with a brand. Entering into a sponsor partnership can give a brand access to a space outside the reach of regular marketing channels, as well as create unique touchpoint opportunities through which to build brand awareness.

 Sponsoring a sporting spectacle, team or cultural event is also a way to foster within the target audience positive feelings towards a brand. Aligning a brand with something about which the target audience feels passionate can serve to create goodwill. It is an age old fact that people tend to favour others who like the same things as they do; this dynamic is no less true when it comes to forming a relationship between brand and audience.

This engagement between brand and audience is vital to engendering ‘receptivity’ in consumers, which is especially useful for a company trying to launch a new product or break into a new market. Even if a brand has been successfully established in one field, it can still find it difficult to penetrate a new market because of a lack of audience familiarity. Through sponsorship, the target audience can be ‘primed’ to be receptive to the brand, which means that they will be more likely to pay attention to specific marketing messages. 

Finding the right sponsorship deal

Sponsorship is usually classed as an ‘above the line’ activity because of its mass engagement between a brand and a broad audience. However, while the essential marketing principles of sponsorship are common to every sponsorship deal, marketers are now unlocking its ability to deliver the benefits normally associated with ‘below the line’ marketing channels. Traditionally, the grand sponsorship deal was as much about the kudos of being seen to be a patron of prestigious sports and arts spectacles, as it was an exercise in engagement. Nowadays, finding the right sponsorship vehicle, as opposed to the most illustrious, is vital for measurability and demonstrating ROI.

Integrating sponsorship into the marketing mix means that the targeting strategy behind a sponsorship programme should be no different to that for any other form of direct marketing campaign. Outside of sport and entertainment, marketers are now turning their attention to sponsoring non-traditional vehicles that lack a broad public profile, but are nonetheless the right medium for reaching their exact target market. Recent sponsorship deals we have done for the Direct Marketing Association (UK) (DMA) with sponsors Royal Mail, ITV, Equifax, VisitScotland and other major brands, show how effective these partnerships can be.

For example, Equifax, a global leader in credit and business information, recently signed a deal to become the official data sponsor of the DMA to promote its ‘Heart of Data Intelligence’ campaign to the UK marketing industry. As many of the DMA’s 900 corporate members are prime users and suppliers of data, this was the exact market Equifax wanted to target. The sponsorship deal has enabled Equifax to engage with its target market through having a strong brand presence at the DMA’s 2009 and 2010 DMA Awards, regional and networking events, data-focused seminars, conferences and symposia, and the Young Spark Award organised by DMA Scotland. Equifax has integrated this sponsorship into its marketing campaign and reach potential customers in ways that are not possible through other channels.

As this partnership shows, sponsorship is a versatile marketing channel that is well suited to B2B brands, not just B2C brands. While sport and the arts may be the first sponsorship vehicles that come to mind, there are many more opportunities available for the marketer to consider. Sponsorship can actually work better for B2B brands than B2C as there is more flexibility to the relationship and the audience is highly targeted.  If you have not yet thought about integrating sponsorship into your marketing mix, or felt it wasn’t useful to your type of business, take a look at your current market and what your competitors are doing – it may surprise you.

Haymarket Consumer Media appoints Slingshot Sponsorship as exclusive sponsorship agency for What Car? Car of the Year Awards 10th January, 2011

Slingshot Sponsorship, the thriving new sponsorship agency run by Jackie Fast, has recently been appointed as the exclusive sponsorship agency for the popular consumer publication What Car? along with the What Car? Car of the Year Awards published by Haymarket Consumer Media.

The What Car? Car of the Year Awards are the most prestigious awards programme that every manufacturer wants to win.  Through a rigorous judging process, winning manufacturers of the What Car? Car of the Year Award can prove the highest standards in their class.  With over 900 of the automotive industry leaders in attendance, the upcoming event held on January 13th will be the highlight in the automotive industry’s social calendar.

The What Car? Car of the Year Awards has chosen to work with Slingshot Sponsorship as their exclusive sponsorship agency in order to implement a strategic and sustainable sponsorship programme across this event and publication.  The key objective will be to develop a sponsorship programme that is both attractive to brands that are looking to reach the automotive industry as well as initiate sponsorship relationships to build brand awareness of What Car?

Andrew Golby, Publishing Director of What Car? comments, “We’re very pleased to be working with Slingshot Sponsorship. The What Car? Awards are recognised as the automotive equivalent of the Oscars, and our ambition is to take the event to even greater heights. Through strategic sponsorship, we hope to offer an effective marketing opportunity, and share the power of the What Car? brand that winning car makers already enjoy.”

Jackie Fast, Managing Director, Slingshot Sponsorship commented: “For rights owners looking to develop sponsorship programmes that have longevity and growth, strategy and brand engagement are vital.  We are looking forward to applying our expertise with rights owners to help What Car? integrate their many assets into a coherent sponsorship opportunity that help fulfil engagement with brands.”

Slingshot Sponsorship will work with the What Car? to create and develop sponsorship opportunities leading up to their event in January 2012.

If you are interested in finding out more information on being involved with the What Car? Car of the Year Awards as a sponsor,  please contact Jackie Fast, e: jackie@slingshotsponsorship.com, t: 0207 420 8217

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!

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4.  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.
  5. 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: jackie@slingshotsponsorship.com

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


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!


The Challenges Facing Sponsorship Evaluation 8th December, 2010

So What’s Wrong With Sponsorship Evaluation? Right now sponsorship evaluation should be a hot topic. Sponsorship spend continues to rise year on year and with the current economic situation you would think being able to demonstrate ROI would be critical right? Despite this evaluation budgets are still seemingly being cut left right and centre. So what prevents the sponsorship industry from embracing evaluation?

Here are seven possible reasons…

1. Poor objectives result in poor evaluation: Effective evaluation relies on being able to evaluate whether sponsorship objectives have been met. So if no objectives have been set, or if they simply aren’t measurable any research you commission is ultimately going to be a waste of money. However, few research companies are going to turn down the opportunity to spend your money just because you give them un-measurable objectives. The result…the industry gets flooded with ineffective evaluation.  At this point marketing directors cut budgets as the research tells them nothing they don’t already know.

The misconception that evaluation results in the termination of a sponsorship programme: In reality that is very unlikely. In the majority of cases the decision to sponsor, although not always based on sound consumer insight, is at least logical and follows good common sense. No one is going to question a beer brand that chooses to align themselves with a social occasion like a music festival. So once this basic fit has been confirmed the evaluation should be able to provide a steer to improve the effectiveness of future planned activations. e.g. Increase spend for on-site activations that deliver cut through and decrease spend on radio adverts which research shows are failing to cut through. If the evaluation can’t do this, the conclusion is your budgets probably could be better spent.

Connected to point two is point three…

3. Conflict of interests: The person most likely to commission sponsorship evaluation is the very same person that created the programme or brokered the deal. Why would you want tangible evidence to show you have wasted your employers’ money? Suddenly selling sponsorship evaluation has become a lot harder! However, let’s go back to point two. There needs to be a mindset change, sponsorship evaluation should be commissioned to help fine-tune the effectiveness of the campaign. Evaluation is a tool that can help the sponsorship look better not worse, if vanity is really so important.

4. Limited understanding of the benefits: Sponsorship evaluation should be your friend. Here is how it can help. i. If you have tangible evidence that proves sponsorship has driven bottom line value it is much easier for you to protect your future sponsorship budgets. ii. Evaluation can be used during re-negotiations to ensure rights fees are kept in-line with the likely returns for the business based on previous experience with that property. iii. Consistently planned evaluation can be used to compare the performance of sponsorship programmes within your portfolio, so you can easily see which ones are delivering the best returns and how best to allocate future budgets. iv. Evaluation helps you understand the effectiveness of all your communication touchpoints, so if radio is providing less consumer cut through you will know to switch your focus to an activity which is working more effectively.

5. It’s too expensive: It is true consumer research can be expensive, but anyone can begin to understand and benchmark their sponsorship activity without spending a penny. Ok this output data won’t tell you about the effects of sponsorship but it can help you understand the reach comparative to the other activities within your portfolio, and that’s a start. Output data can include: Unique website visitors, event attendee numbers, number of free samples distributed, competition entries, number of VIP guests that actually showed up. Suddenly you have a way of benchmarking your sponsorship portfolio.

6. Advertising equivalency values (AVEs) / media evaluation has damaged the credibility of evaluation: The sponsorship evaluation industry was founded on media evaluation with students using stopwatches to calculate the length of time a sponsors’ logo was exposed, this exposure time was then turned into a figure purporting to show what this coverage would be worth if it was bought as advertising. How on earth did this ever become the established form of evaluation?

Well going back to point 3 if you don’t want to risk your programme from being cut, this is perfect. You get a simple figure, which suggests to your bosses you are delivering real monetary value to the business and no one has the time or desire to rock the boat. There are tons of reasons why advertising equivalency value is pointless, but here is one. Advertising is evaluated on effectiveness, not the cost to buy the space. So why should sponsorship be different?

7. The poor definition of sponsorship: Every sponsorship agency has at some time tried to write their own definition of what sponsorship actually means. Most practitioners would agree it is a two-way or mutually beneficial transaction between the rights holder and the sponsor. The sponsor gains access to valuable rights and the rights holder benefits from sponsor money or expertise through a value in kind deal. However, incredibly very few definitions ever suggest that a sponsorship should be directly linked to the business bottom line and generate actual sales.  What message does this send out? You can blow thousands if not millions on sponsorship activity and never have to worry about proving a return. Sounds like a cop-out.

History suggests that in times of recession creativity and business agility come to the fore. Could this be the time when sponsorship finally grows up and begins to prove its true worth? Let’s hope so.

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