WHITE OUT CONDITIONS AT THE 105TH GREY CUP HINDER SPONSORSHIP VISIBILITY
All eyes may have been on the game Sunday night, but they certainly weren’t seeing all the logos that paying sponsors intended, as an unexpected snowfall covered the field – the most coveted branding real estate for the CFL Grey Cup. According to data analysis run by our SPOT tool that assesses and values on-screen logo and branding visibility, some major sponsors didn’t get what they paid for.
Using Tech to Empower Decision-Making
How do you know if you’re making the right sponsorship choices? This is a hard question to answer because sponsorship is a complex industry with lots of moving parts. But when you start with the data and use tech to track your progress, it empowers you to make better, more informed decisions.
You are sitting at your desk wondering what to do with the tons of sponsorship requests pouring in. You just received an email from the finance department asking you to do an in-depth review of sponsorship spending and effectiveness. Your budget has been cut and you need to optimize your partnership portfolio.
Elevent is the world’s first and most innovative sponsorship valuation software. Built with groundbreaking research, an optimized user experience and relevant data. It can build a strong business case for you, with all the arguments you need to make the right decision and strongly justify it.
With only 3% of sponsorship budgets devoted to research[1], several companies can’t answer the following questions with any certainty:
There is no point investing a penny in sponsorship if, as an organization, it’s impossible to confirm whether or not the set objectives were met. Of course, the efforts invested in measurement tools should reflect the importance of the sponsorship for the organization. The bigger the sponsorship, the greater the need to measure the results.
To measure the impact of a sponsorship, it’s important to understand every piece of the puzzle, and to keep in mind that the criteria will change depending on the company and the sponsorship. But you don’t need to be a business analyst or a numbers person: when you understand how the process works, measuring sponsorships becomes an instinctive tool that you can build upon as you go.
A little reality check before we continue: budgets often leave no room for research, and companies often don’t have the specific expertise required to build a program to measure performance. Here is a brief guide to help out in that regard.
When it comes to evaluating a sponsorship package, pulling a number out of a hat is not enough. That’s where the Elevent report can serve you well. We’ve collated the latest data on the market so you can have a fair and independent assessment of sponsorship plans.
Sponsorship valuations have always been the specialty of a handful of agencies or consultants because it requires media knowledge and a thorough understanding of sponsorship. Sponsees and sponsors alike have very little information on how sponsorship evaluations are actually done. Today we open the black box and share some of the practices. As the old saying goes, knowledge is power.
At the core of the sponsorship value evaluation lays the media values. Equivalencies are used to determine the value of sponsorship assets compared to other communication channels and their actual costs. Our media values are always up to date. Furthermore, we use media values for every single market. That means the values are specific to your reality and are a more precise representation of the value of your sponsorship package.
On one hand, a precious tool in the sponsorship arsenal; on the other hand, a fundamental—and sometimes harsh—element of the reality of supply and demand.
In fact, sponsorship valuation is key to establishing a pricing strategy, estimating market value and managing your sponsorship portfolio.
Sponsorship valuation is an essential part of acquiring a new property. In this day and age, all marketing expenses can be under scrutiny. This is especially true for sponsorship because of its very nature: the presence of hospitality and the entertainment aspect attached to it might raise suspicions that the decision to sponsor was motivated by top managers’ appreciation of a particular sport more than by sound market insight. John Kerry, secretary of state, raised the issue in his now infamous quote about sponsorship being wasteful. He tried, to no avail, banning companies that received bailout money to pursue such a marketing strategy. In other words, the process of sponsorship selection and evaluation must be extremely thorough. A strong business case must be put in place because folks from the finance department, external controllers, or even stockholders will ask questions about the sponsorship value and how the decision to sponsor was made. After all, sponsorship is a marketing investment, not a donation; thus you need to assess the value of your buy as you would do with any media campaign.
Sponsorship evaluation is built by pulling together the hard and soft assets a property owns. The “hard assets” are the media value equivalencies for every elements offered to a sponsor. These media values are adjusted to the specific nature of the benefits and visibilities sponsorship can provide. Intangible values, or “soft assets”, are measuring the qualitative aspects of a property. The resulting score will be multiplied by the value of tangible assets to determine the overall value of the sponsorship proposal. Today, we will deep dive into sponsorship intangibles and what goes on while evaluating the magic behind an event.
“The Science Of Sponsorship” is a series dedicated to scientific discoveries driving the sponsorship marketing sciences world-wide.
Conclusion: the complex tasks involved in assessing the financial impact of sponsorship investment and the impact on shareholder value can be rigorously addressed and sponsorship managers can make improved decisions which are underpinned by market and financial analysis. Read the full article Kourovskaia, A. A., & Meenaghan, T. (2013). Assessing the financial impact of sponsorship investment. Psychology & Marketing, 30(5), 417-430.
