The sponsorship industry needs to urgently rethink measurement as clients demand more sophisticated solutions to the way they engage with sports and events, the head of one of Melbourne's leading sports sponsorship agencies has warned.
Rob Mills, head of Melbourne-based sports and entertainment marketing company Gemba, highlighted the increasing sophistication of marketers and the rise in audiences for live events as a reason the sector will continue to grow - but data is still lacking.
The move has cast fresh attention on the sector and Bastion founder Fergus Watt highlighted Gemba as a company which he admired.
Mills said that as sports, events and the companies looked to better leverage sponsorships the industry was still plagued by a lack of data and outdated measurement.
He said that simple measurement tools that equated things such as logo exposure with impact were still being relied upon by too many companies in a trend he warned was becoming dangerous.
“What we see is it's an industry that is still too preoccupied with logo exposures,” Mills told AdNews.
“We spend a lot of time with clients saying if we were to do this, how would we measure it? Thinking through that regime of metrics is critical. There is a really dangerous thing for the industry which is these exposure metrics which are very counter-productive for the industry.”
Gemba handles a broad range of clients including Toyota's engagement with the AFL and Foxtel.
At the same time he said sponsorship agencies needed to bring the same sort of discipline to research and planning that media agencies had become known for.
“The level of sophistication that brands are looking for is increasing,” Mills said.
“We have deliberately built a business that is underpinned by large consumer insight studies in the same way that media planning is underpinned by research and we have built propriety research programs that do that.”
He said that sports were also having to take extreme long term views to revenue based on the complex infrastructure they were having to create.
“If you think about some of the decisions that the national rugby league is having to make around long term stadium strategies or football clubs around elite facilities and the like, the are major investments and the level of planning and implementation that has to go into them is quite significant.
“There is a very interesting opportunity to provide the professionalism of consultants and brand experts but with a strong empathy for sport entertainment which is our proposition."
He has also highlighted the rise of retailers, taking a direct interest in events rather than just applying their logos.
“The big shift we are seeing in the industry is the rise of the retail power, the sort where Coles go and buy the One Direction rights and pass those through their trade marketing expenditure to their partners and in the old days we would have seen the brand go and buy those rights and then pass them through to the retailer,” he said.
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