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.
While we don’t want to overstate this issue, it is a sad realization that both event promoters and brands need to take new security threats into account. Promoters and local police forces have been quick to make adjustments in the wake of recent events. At South by Southwest, where police cars blocked street access near pedestrian areas, and in Europe, where giant (branded) sandbags were set up to prevent vehicles from entering crowded areas.
Sponsorship is the Swiss knife of marketing communication. Great sponsorship programs usually leverage multiple activation channels, which requires broad knowledge. While communication professionals tend to be experts in one channel, sponsorship experts must think across multiple platforms. And yet sponsorship is seldom taught in school, or only in passing, and a lot of people working in the industry landed there largely by accident and had to learn things on the spot.
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.
For this third edition of our Sponsorship Guidebook, we decided to take a look at our ability to predict trends. Here is an update on our 2015 and 2016 predictions.
Rights holders have built empires selling broadcasting rights, tickets and sponsorships, with some held by private interests driven by a strong vision, like Ecclestone and Formula 1 or the France family and NASCAR. Changes in media are affecting these structures, both in terms of consumption habits and technologies used for display, which challenge the established revenue and sponsorship models.
Fashions come and go, but there are always some trends that run deep and tend to stick. Here are nine of them (yes, nine and not ten!) from our editorial desk that are influencing our industry, from measurement issues to tech changes to broader advertising trends that affect how we plan and execute sponsorships. Read our Nine Sponsorship Trends for 2018, an excerpt from our latest annual Sponsorship Guidebook.
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.
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.
By Samantha Phelan
You wouldn’t sponsor a live event and not have an on-site presence; you wouldn’t buy a banner and not ask for its measurements or placement to ensure optimization of space and exposure; you wouldn’t buy title partnership of the Super Bowl and then sit back and expect the sales to come in on mentions alone. And yet, here we are in the digital space with seemingly complete complacency and no shame in our game.
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