What started as a small music festival in Austin, TX in 1987, is now a massive event, conference, festival, trade show and everything in between, with a declared attendance of 432,000 people for 2018.
Just a few years ago, standard, and often rigid, sponsorship structures set most sponsors on the same level. But as brands get better at crafting their own narrative, generic platforms with properties are no longer working to create goodwill. Brands need to find a clear positioning for their sponsorship portfolio as well as within each property.
Formula E was launched in 2014 as the world’s first electric street racing series, attracting attention from traditional manufacturers like Audi, Renault and Jaguar, as well as curiosity from many former Formula 1 drivers. With the overall aging of motorsports audiences, Formula E provided a fresh opportunity to gain new audiences for the sport as a whole, and as with the launch of any new series, there was tremendous potential for innovation without any red tape, pre-existing agreements or politics.
Many brands still limit their sponsorship programs to promotional or tactical activations. They focus solely on the experiential side of things instead of having a program that uses many channels and dedicated messages to communicate the associations between the brands.
Don’t get us wrong. Experiential tactics serve a purpose and can be a lot of fun. But investing in an effective overall sponsorship program is another beast entirely.
As I’m writing this in a coffee shop that just yesterday was the M&M Lounge, I can’t help but marvel at the high quality, ephemeral productions I’ve seen. Brands are paying top dollar for pop-up activations in the hopes of reaching a one-of-kind audience of brand marketers, advertisers, creators and the like.
Top Sponsorship Series
The website creation platform Squarespace surprised us all with the witty and original ad it aired during Super Bowl XLIX. The absurd humour of the concept cut through the Super Bowl clutter, and
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The world’s best-selling sports watch is on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It is one of the first products sold thanks to a sports marketing strategy.
The best partnerships are those that put sponsorship at the core of their marketing strategy. By leveraging its ties with Ironman, Timex created a product that ended up becoming iconic.
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By constantly innovating and adding brand value to the festival experience, Heineken is an avant-garde player in this type of activation. The brand succeeds in generating buzz well beyond the parameters of the event.
The beer brand often looked to the festival as an opportunity to try innovative new activations, and it was one of the first brands to consider the audience experience in its concept development.
Top Sponsorship Series
You don’t hear a lot about sponsorships that are geared to the B2B world. It is an under-developed sector that Siemens and Disney are leveraging to its full potential.
The partnership between Siemens and Disney serves as a great example. Its main goal is to drive sales, push business development and position the brand with potential business clients. In a lot of ways, the ties between the two companies look more like a joint business venture.
AkzoNobel launched the project “Let’s Colour”, whereby the company and its paint brands around the world (including Dulux) supply cities with paint as a way of adding colour to people’s lives. More concretely, the initiative serves to distribute paint products free of charge and, in some markets, to get employees involved in paint projects in underprivileged neighbourhoods or with community organizations.
By leveraging a specific cause to communicate with its target audience and by finding a creative way to activate it across its sponsorship portfolio, Bank of America adopted a very clever strategy.
Causes have become a particularly interesting way for companies to capture public attention, foster a feel-good sentiment—which improves their brand image.
These companies have historic ties that go way beyond a contractual relationship. They form a true alliance and their products are intricately linked.
Few alliances in sport are as iconic as the one between Ferrari and Shell. Their collaboration roared to life in the 1930s on the F1 racetrack, but the ties that bind run far deeper than that.
