The days of sponsorship being predominantly about brand recognition and position are long gone. Sponsorship is now used as a strategy to engage audiences which a brand would be unable, or find it difficult, to reach by themselves.
But it has competition: advances in the targeting of advertising via digital channels means that marketers now have more cut-through than ever. Proving ROI on a campaign of direct advertising has never been easier. With the advent of Google Analytics and social media, marketers have had a constantly updating cycle of applications and data points to manoeuvre campaigns on the fly to achieve maximum impact.
On the sponsorship side of the fence, until recently, many multi-million dollar value sports sponsorships were managed in large Excel sheets. Microsoft Excel, venerable as it is, isn’t a great enabler of agile marketing. In fact, it makes the execution of sponsorship commitments difficult to track and then prove ROI and ROO.
This lack of tools made sponsorship professionals into specialised project managers - working with multiple stakeholders as closely as possible to achieve outcomes, but lacking the data on the impact. This, in turn, meant the brands often found it hard to justify the spend next year when the results of an expensive, year-long sponsorship package were compared with the crystal-clear results from the rest of the marketing strategy’s tactical execution.
Getting with the program:
The future of sponsorship will be delivered through new technologies which enablemore sophistication. There is also more pressure from brands seeking more than just spend on eye-balls, wanting engagement and other outcomes alongside the usual exposure.
In order to meet these goals, sponsorship needs individuals with specialist skills, dedicated to sponsorship, to co-exist within marketing teams. This process has already begun - thanks in part to the emergence of technology within standard sponsorship practice that replaces Excel (such as SponServe). Mostly, however, it is because of the noticeable shift towards sponsorship as part of a wider marketing strategy and the partnership role rights holders must now play for these relationships to work.
For example, rights holders now have far more information on their memberships and audience, and through a variety of methods, they can target the desired segment of fans specifically in a way that they know will resonate with that segment. Armed with this specialist knowledge, they can now work with brand marketing teams so they can achieve their desired outcome with this segment. This is a blend of both, modern marketing practice, and targeted outreach that will bring back the ‘unique’ aspect of sponsorship, and differentiate it once more from other marketing exercises.
It is only through knowing which segments of a rights holder’s audience are engaged, through which channels and through which type of content, can brands start to frame partnership activation strategies with greater confidence of gaining the attention and engagement of the desired audience. This requires investment from rights holders to make the above happen in both, technology and staff, with the right skills to make these campaigns possible for brands.
The good news is that this transformation has begun. You can now see how brands are shifting away from taking tired old ‘packages’ from rights holders. Instead, brands are taking specific deliverables ‘à la carte’ that they know will conform to the broader marketing strategy objectives.
This is a great evolution, and means those rights holders are focusing on delivering the impactful elements of sponsorship, and prove both ROI and ROO for brands in the process. This modernisation of our industry is the only way we can be sure the sponsorship will succeed in being a major part of brand marketing strategies in the long run.
Sponserve CEO Mark Thomson