Marketers are ignoring one of the most potent spaces to advertise and engage by not embracing sponsorships, Kirsty Muddle, founding partner of Cummins&Partners, has warned.
Muddle, who has helped engineer major sponsorships in the UK, Middle East and Australia, said that sponsorships were one of the most under-utilised tools in the advertiser's kit, allowing them to get closer to consumers while basking in the halo of their love for their team, sport or event.
Speaking at the Sponsorship News conference in Melbourne this week, Muddle said that sponsorships were being too easily rejected as a channel because of a lack of understanding in how to activate them.
“I'm putting my brand in the heart of someone's passion and so they are going to be incredibly engaged with what I do in that arena if I get it right,” Muddle said.
“You can drop $900,000 on a sign, and that still happens, and there is no leveraging. And that probably to me isn't value. You might get a Repucom number at the end that says you got $5.7 million worth of airtime, but I don't actually think that represents any real value.”
She said that the science and data that could now support sponsorships meant brands could accurately forecast just how much product a partnership could move.
“Sponsorship, and I say this in front of most of my clients, it's the most secure marketing channel that there is,” she said.
“It's almost like mergers and acquisitions. It's like you're buying another business in a way and it sits in a different place in the financial book.
“Within a sponsorship or a partnership, it pretty much includes every single media channel, every single touch point you could hope for and so if you ask for all of them you almost have a mini communications schedule within that entity itself. If your audience is watching the Melbourne Storm [a Cummins&partners client] then you haver got your digital plan, you have got your TV, you've got your long form content, you've got your CRM and so I don't know why it wouldn't be on everyone's marketing plan.”
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