Monday, December 14, 2009

Dead Celeb Society

Admittedly, I'd love to post something juicy about the Tiger Woods sponsorship issue. But everyone already has - and I couldn't shed any new light on the situation - less of course he was dating my sister.

However, there are an extremely few number of sponsorship opportunities that involve connecting your brand with a high profile sports figure "brand" that won't end up carrying SOME type of negativity along the way.

Do you account for this at the beginning of your relationship or do you just measure all of that upside the agent is providing? When you do your evaluation - do you take into account the cost associated with your new crisis PR plan?

Dan Beeman gives a great reason to account for this in his blog from Sponsorship Insight Group.

I had proposed a couple of months ago that if companies want to play the celeb game, consider looking at connecting their brands with DEAD celebs instead. Silk products can brand themselves with Genghis Khan, the man credited for solidifying the silk trade route. James Dean recently made an appearance for South African investment firm Allan Gray. Monte Blanc pens provided a great example by connecting Ghandi with their pen co. in support of his worthy foundation.

Point is - if you're gonna do the dance with Iverson, Vick, Phelps, Woods, Rose and so on... be sure to take into account the negative "intangibles" (there's no such thing as intangible - but I'll save that for the Christmas break) and for goodness sake don't put your company in a situation where all your eggs are in one basket.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The Mont Blanc Cause

I typically don't run around in the circles of those in the market to spend $20 grand on a pen. But that's not by choice and by no means the purpose of this blog. It came to my attention the a couple of months ago that Mont Blanc (that's a pen company for us regular folk) has struck a deal with the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, a worthy cause, to support the foundation's peace efforts. Apparently the pen company has a penchant for cause-marketing options, such as their partnership with UNICEF enabling underprivileged children to learn to read and write. By all means, this makes great sense.

Is it me, though, or does it seem a bit against the grain for a foundation representing someone that stood for peace and minimalist ideals, to develop a cause tie-in with a pen company that is selling a pen for a mere $22k? ($200 - $1000 of which will support the foundation). Gandhi's grandson signed off on the deal.

Carrie Triblet and Nora Rifon's study from Feb. 2006, (reported in the International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing) revealed that consumers respond more positively to marketing efforts when the image of the sponsoring company or brand is compatible with the sponsored event or activity.

I'm all for cause-marketing. It's one of the more effective tools in solidifying a brand and creating a purpose for purchase - and is a great measuring tool. But, synergies have to exist between the brand and organization - otherwise it doesn't work.

Just my opinion.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

The case for Analytics

In today’s economic environment, marketers are faced with tough decisions. Many companies are cutting their marketing budgets, but unless they figure out a way to stop customer attrition, companies must continue to market. The question is: What should they give up?

In these difficult times, Analytics may be the best budget investment. The simplest definition of Analytics is "the science of analysis". Marketers may choose to make decisions based on past experiences or rules of thumb, or there might be other qualitative aspects to decision making. But, unless data is involved in the process, it would not be considered Analytics.

Analytics should play a vital role in the decision-making process. Analytics should be considered a "need to have" in tomorrow's economy. Marketers should never saddle themselves with cost-cutting decisions without first reviewing some type of performance indicators.

You may be using Analytics to measure the impact of your POS or shelf space program, measuring your media schedule against SKU movement. Yet,what Analystics are using to measure the efficacy of your sponsorships?

There are products to support your measurement of value against your sponsorship spend that will give you data to justify the spend and data on where to cut the spend. I invite you to look at the SponsorshipPro+ program and Pinpoint SES. Both products offer a cost effective method for determining accountability and value from your sponsored properties.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Auto Industry Ad Execs: Quick - Your Cheese is Moving!

2-3-0. I can't seem to get those numbers out of my head.

Forget about recession woes for just a second. Eventually, industry will level off to normalcy with or without TARP, Cash for Clunkers or anything else the government invents. And when it does - the two main selling points auto execs tout in their traditional advertising, MPG and PRICE, will be rendered obsolete.

Why? Well, the next ad promoting an estimated 30 miles to the gallon will seem like peanuts now that the MPG bar has been raised to 230! Give me 200 MPG or it's not worth talking about.

This past Tuesday, a report came out that India's Tata Motors new Nano car passed Euro IV safety tests, which are similar to those required by the US Department of Transportation Safety. With minor modifications - the Tata Nano could start selling in the U.S. by 2011 for as little as $3800.

You have to wonder how an auto brand will be able advertise an $18k car that gets even 50 MPG with a straight face. Where's the market differentiation? In horsepower? Color choices? Maybe it'll be the cool music bed that blares in the background.

Or, perhaps using the same tactics that endeared a Subaru to a core group of outdoor enthusiasts and created an immediate legacy for the Mini Cooper among consumers through VIP treatment at targeted events will be the new method for marketing car brands. If that's the case (which it should be), properties need to be gearing up to make room for test drives and photo ops so event goers can get a glimpse at the emotional appeal "behind the wheel" of something other than a Nano.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Manufacturers Demand More Accountability

Mark Dolliver reported in AdWeek online today that manufacturers are requiring greater emphasis in utilizing on-line advertising. Two-thirds of the respondents are reporting a shift in their online spend to either spending more than in previous years or at least half their budgets for online ads.

Another angle to this story might be that marketers are required to demonstrate greater accountability and ROI in the advertising. Whether its online advertising or sponsorship, over half the respondents are choosing marketing programs that can be measured because of greater pressure to demonstrate results.

So, you might start thinking about how you can demonstrate results for your sponsors.

And if you cannot demonstrate results? Well, 70% of the respondents indicated that if you're unable to measure the marketing initiative - it's slated for reduction or elimination.

Although you may have a great relationship with your sponsors, the CMO is hunting for greater accountability. So, you better be able to demonstrate measurable results. If you don't have benchmarks in place, now might be a good time to talk to your sponsors about how you can integrate metrics so they CAN measure the results.

What results are they looking for now? 44% want to generate new customers, while another 29% want to develop leads, 13% indicated that they want to show they can retain customers and 11% were wanting to increase brand awareness.

So, those signs and banners at your event may not be enough to excite your sponsors. To create sales and sales leads, your sponsor need to be on-the-ground with your event attendees. And while hospitality benefits may help retain some customers, utilizing hospitality to create customers or customer leads is going to be much more important.

As for CMO's looking to build measurable metrics and accountability for sponsorship marketing - you can learn more about Pinpoint SES, an online tool that evaluates potential ROI and measures sponsorship results using company-benchmarks at http://www.pinpointsponsor.com/PINPOINTSESdemo.mov

Monday, August 10, 2009

Measuring Results

It was noted in Jim Andrew’s blog recently that Nielsen research revealed that sponsorship marketing, (forgive me for if I offend for adding the term marketing) is the second most trusted form of advertising.


Yet, just the other day I was talking with the Exec VP of a major retail jeweler that didn’t see the need to invest in MEASURING the value they’re obtaining from their sponsorship.


Measuring our results would be a nice to have, but not a need to have.” Sounds just like that old ad agency axiom from the 60’s that “50% of your advertising works, you just don’t know which 50%.”


The main reason companies don’t measure results from their sponsorship is they have no specific metrics in place to evaluate sponsorship value and nothing in place to capture results. These companies continue to make decisions based on established relationships and intuition (It’s true – look up the peer reviewed study in Journal of Advertising Research – v32, i4 by Farrelly and Quester).


That’s like buying TV time based on your favorite TV show and from your favorite ad rep without caring about HH reach or SKU movement during the schedule.


Many companies are learning to activating relationships and measure the results of their sponsorship marketing (yes, there I go again). Not just by what the sales team heard at the VIP tent, but using tangible metrics that value impressions, potential customer extraction and conversion numbers – even if the conversation occurs 6 months after the event.


Internet advertising, event and sponsorship marketing are 21st Century tactics that will maximize brand integration into the consumer lexicon. No longer is it possible to justify spending large chunks of advertising budgets on a fragmented broadcast medium that was in its golden era 50 years ago or in a print medium that is dying under the pressure of Internet news sources in a new economy?

But the need to identify and measure metrics is tantamount to understanding and monetizing those results.

Did I mention sponsorship is one of the most trusted forms of advertising?

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Collaboration is King in Sponsorship

Collaboration is King in Sponsorship

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The Best Kept Secrets In Sponsorship Marketing

Secret #5: Small Business involvement is key

Despite the recession, we’ve been hearing about the continued growth in the sponsorship industry. In the past decade, companies FINALLY have been realizing that the holy grail of marketing products has arrived. After all, meaningfully connecting people and lives with “YOUR” product at an event or activity is pretty powerful marketing stuff, right?

I still get the calls.

“Hi, we’re a nice small non-profit that needs help in finding corporate sponsors. We had help for years but all of a sudden, our corporate supporter decided they didn’t want to work with us anymore.”

The size of the sponsorship marketing industry is expanding, no doubt. IEG, Omnicom, EdelmanPR and many other major players are promoting and defining this discipline to their large clients and activating high profile properties every day.

But, the trickle down theory of opportunities for smaller events hasn't quite happened. In fact, because of their lack of sophistication, or more importantly, lack of understanding about how to handle sponsorship, they're beginning to loose out. Without the personnel or resources, they're not able to compete with offerings made available from more sophisticated organizations. They’re just doing what they do best in making a difference where it counts, in their own community.

These small organizations need to be armed with the tools to support their developing and maintaining corporate partnerships. Just as important, the small business community must have a stronger understanding of how to utilize local sponsorship opportunities to enable the growth of their business. This would eliminate the need for small non-profits competing for dollars from multi-nationals with large non-profit organizations.

Until the sponsorship industry has a stronger educational platform, its use as a marketing tool among small businesses will remain minimal. And, until the sponsorship industry has an association that disseminates best practice and promotes its use, it'll be an uphill battle for those local non-profits.

And I'll be happy to take that call.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

The Best Kept Secrets In Sponsorship Marketing

Secret #4 The definition of sponsorship

First of all, thank you to Dan Beeman for linking this post from the Sponsorship Insights Group. Be sure to read the other three secrets as well to get a perspective of where I'm taking this post. Part serious, part tongue and cheek. But I always welcome your feedback and ideas.

It's amazing how many times I need to start conversation by defining the use of the word "sponsorship." Because the practice is fragmented so differently among companies - the idea varies from company to company. Is it a donation? Is it really a marketing or a PR initiative? Would it be a part of media planning , public affairs or even investor relations?

Perhaps all sponsorship consultants and property rights-holders need to take the initiative to define "sponsorship." In the 90's, the wireless phone community decided to redefine themselves from being about cell phones to being about wireless communication and transformed the way people connect to each other and their world. While it took new technology to do that, it took an industry to verbalize it first.

Europe's Sponsorship Association defines sponsorship as "any commercial agreement by which a sponsor contractually provides financing or other support to establish an association between the sponsor’s image, brands or products and property in return for rights to promote this association and granting of certain agreed to benefits."

I like this as a starting point as this defines how a company can market itself to a specific audience through a mutually beneficial relationship. But is that any different than how we can define traditional advertising on TV or radio, or reaching out to newspaper or magazine readers?

The secret definition may be that defining sponsorship is not about the property or the sponsor - but the way in which consumers are reached. So, what is sponsorship? Sponsorship is a way to touch, move and inspire audiences toward purchase, a purposeful two-way communication method with consumers.

"Hi, can I speak with your consumer inspiration department, please?" Perhaps it's time we let the secret out of the bag.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

The Best Kept Secrets In Sponsorship Marketing

Secret #3: Activation matters

A good partnership requires buyer and seller due diligence and a strong understanding of how the relationship is to be integrated before the sale is made. Insuring that everyone is involved in understanding their roles in activating a successful sponsorship is key to success.

And, it’s just as important to connect with the right event as it is to try and attempt to activate the wrong one.

Gerard Prendergast and Derek Poon's study appearing in the International Journal of Advertising (Vol. 25, Issue 4) discovered the importance of product relevance with a sponsorship. How a company or product integrates with an event has a direct affect on consumer response. Little relevance equals little audience connection. So, your ROO is just as important as your ROI, if not more so.

A successful sponsorship requires three things:

1. The corporate partners internal buy-in so that all parties within an organization BELIEVE it's a good fit.

2. A level of creative engagement to insure that sponsor products/services can be intelligently activated with some relevance to attendees.

3. Corporate partners plan spending an additional $1.50 for every $1 spent on rights fees to activate the relationship in and out of the event. (This is the average according to IEG/Performance Research March 2008).

Sponsors and rights-holders focusing on each other's needs and objectives throughout their partnership insures greater returns and better yields for renewals.

Up next: Defining Sponsorship

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Best Kept Secrets In Sponsorship Marketing

Secret #2: The actual value of a sponsorship opportunity

Rumor has it that the metrics for how companies derive the value of a sponsorship have been hermetically sealed and stashed away in a drawer somewhere. It’s a major conspiracy by all who hold the title of CMO.

That’s probably a bit of a stretch. But I think there are three flawed factors at play in determining the value of a sponsorship opportunity:

1. While a company or an agency may evaluate a property, it’s likely they’re using traditional advertising metrics to determine “value.” Often times the company fails to measure the value associated with an integrated consumer activity and other factors linked to a personal connection with event. Limiting value to just the potential impression or reach removes that “relationship factor” that sponsorship creates (find Derek T.Y. Poon and Gerard Prendergast study, A New Framework for Evaluating Sponsorship, International Journal of Advertising, 25(4).)

2. The vast majority of fees for smaller sponsorships are derived solely from where the dart landed on the board. Many of these sales efforts are led by volunteers who have little background in marketing and advertising but they make up for it through the passion of supporting “their cause.” These skewed dollar figures become the basis by which other sponsorship requests are evaluated.

3. Relationships and trust. The Farrelly –Quester study in the Dec. 2003 Journal of Advertising Research confirmed that the antecedent for sponsorship renewals are based primarily on the relationship between buyer and seller, rather than from empirical, quantifiable values derived through evaluation and benchmarks. So, if a sponsor is paying too much for a property because of the relationship with that property – that’s going to affect how your proposal is evaluated.

A logical solution for these misguided efforts might be in the creation of an association that could provide some framework for industry standards to guide the valuation process. A professional sponsorship association could be the catalyst that outlines the parameters for these values and establishes a more common, disciplined approach. The result would be enhanced understanding and credibility for sponsor seekers and truer valuations of properties for marketing executives.

We also need to keep in mind that part of the “intangibles” associated with sponsorship marketing comes from buyer intuition and seller creativity. It’s what makes sponsorship such a unique marketing vehicle. To evaluate the value of a relationship based solely from number crunching would be a mistake.


Unfortunately, until standardized guidelines are established and implemented for the whole industry, the value for a sponsorship opportunity and how it's evaluated will remain secret, eluding property holders and potential sponsors. Dart board anyone?

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Best Kept Secrets in Sponsorship Marketing

It seems as though the idea of using sponsorships as a means to market a company/products is finally hitting Main Street. It is no longer just the beverage and communication, big insurance firms and banks – but smaller businesses are delving into the idea behind sponsorship marketing too.

Madison Avenue has been dabbling in the practice for a few decades, but until recently, measured results from sponsorship were attributed to the "intangible" category. Peer reviewed studies have started to measure its true effectiveness. What we always intuitively knew was working, finally has some research to back it up.

The shift in more use of sponsorship widens the number of new players in the industry who have a lot of questions about various aspects of sponsorship marketing. And since we don’t have a professional organization in the North America to help shape and formalize the practice, some truths and not so truths have crept into the discipline as a result.

We're now a group of “haves and have nots.” Many have noted there seems to be industry "secrets" which have become apparent by the same questions that are asked on many sponsorship listserves. As an example, "what is the REAL value of my sponsorship and how is it derived? Is it done based on impressions, the size of a sign in a venue or something far more reaching" and secretive.

Well, I’m choosing to use this space to bring about these questions that hopefully I can quell or at least put them out there for debate. Each week, I’ll post a new "secret" and perhaps uncover a few from you. Don’t be shy – post your best questions and secrets about sponsorship marketing.

I think we should begin by tackling the biggest secret first – Is sponsorship marketing really all that effective? And, if it is – how do we position its use so that it's effective?

Secret #1: The most effective method of building consumer connections is with Sponsorship Marketing.

In short, unequivocally, sponsorship marketing creates consumer intentions to make a purchase. Not only that, but sponsorship aids in the effectiveness and recall of those seriously expensive Madison Ave. ad campaigns. However, the effectiveness of sponsorships are attributed to:
1) how deep the sponsorship has been accepted by a company internally and
2) how a company chooses to leverage their relationship with sponsored properties.
Bottom line: Sponsorship is effective with internal "buy-in" across the corporate culture and
little buy-in equals little success.


The Sneath, Finney, Close, and Lacey study appearing in the Dec 2006 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research provided the foundation that event marketing serves as a powerful lever to engage the consumer. Consumers that attend community-related activities are more receptive to marketing messages because the experience engages sensory, emotional, relational and cognitive values together. But, these elements cannot be delivered by the property alone. The sponsor needs to engage the consumer using the property as the vehicle to tap into the emotional connection. Too often, company decision-makers want turnkey solutions without having to lift an internal finger which ultimately results in half the partnerships potential.

In an article from the same journal, Measuring the Effectiveness of True Sponsorship, Harvey, Gray and Despain report that what causes persuasion in the sponsorship context appears, however, to be logically different from what causes persuasion in the advertising context. Advertising appears to work by causing improvements directly in brand perception, whereas sponsorship appears to work by causing improvement directly in the perception of the sponsoring company and often indirectly by halo effect in the brand perception. However, even when brand perception is not affected, sponsorship can result in increased purchase intent, apparently as result of gratitude toward the sponsor. So, why wouldn’t a company WANT to take advantage of this across their marketing platform? Because the decision-makers are often too worried about how their latest FSI is going to drive case sales and no one is there to point out that the sponsorship can improve the value of a POS and FSI.

As a profession, it is important that we provide the educational context to help businesses understand that, without their total internal commitment to activating their sponsorship across their marketing platform, it's unlikely they’re going to achieve consumer acceptance. They also need to understand that consumer activism is drastically shifting how purchases are made.

Aligning with consumers through sponsorships is even more important. The ability for companies to capture the hearts of consumers through consumer activism will not be dissuaded by a slower economy. Fact is, companies that utilize sponsorship within their organization and for their audiences will be given the keys to the new kingdom; consumerism with a soul.

Put that in your digital recorder and TiVo it!