Although sponsorship has really taken flight over the past few decades as an important marketing communication tool, it has been in existence for much longer than you would think. We retraced the origin and history of sponsorship, and it might surprise you. In this first post, we will focus on sponsorship before the 19th century.
Sponsorship can be extremely effective at reaching communications and business objectives. However, building the equity of a partnership requires a lot of time, mainly because audiences need to naturally associate the brand with a property, especially if the sponsor is replacing another brand from the same category. The good news is that the positive effects will last as well.
Social sponsorship has proven to be a relevant tool to express a brand’s values and to add a social dimension to a brand identity. It has the potential to improve brand image, generate better attitudes toward a brand and increase purchase intents. Besides, it is a more powerful lever for brand image than commercial sponsorship.
The IEG sponsorship conference held in Chicago this past March 26 to 29 remains the biggest event of its kind, bringing together over a thousand sponsorship professionals from all over North America, plus South America and Europe. This 34th “Pivot” edition was classic IEG, with its tried and true formula. In general, I feel that the audience is getting more property and non-profit heavy than when I started attending in the early 2010s, but the content from keynote speakers was very diverse and, in my opinion, better than 2016.
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.
After visiting the massive Sony space (post 1), I was eager to see how Panasonic played it. The brand used the time at SXSW to showcase its spinoff “Game Changer Catapult, an initiative to transform your ideas into reality regardless of where or how you work and live.” Taking advantage of flexibility and start-up mentality by using top talent outside of Panasonic is part of a broader trend for big corporations seeking to generate new ideas—like when the giant accounting solutions Intuit launched Mint, the personal finance management tool.
Cause sponsorship is of great interest, regardless of its relatively small size. That’s because corporate social responsibility has become an indispensable tool for brands looking to set themselves apart from the competition.
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.
One of the most popular articles on the Elevent sponsorship blog is a piece called “Top 10 sponsorship ambushes.” This always makes me wonder: why is this still a thing?
Many of the examples in that article are dated, with the most blatant cases of ambush marketing perpetrated by Nike in the 90’s (though they remain the bad boys of sponsorship to this day).
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
Top Sponsorship Series
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.
Top Sponsorship Series
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.
The new magazine is out. It contains over 50 pages of original content for marketers and sponsorship pros.
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