What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Owen Laverty – Director of Fan Intelligence® at Ear to the Ground, a global creative agency working with the likes of New Balance, PlayStation, STATSports, Arsenal, FIFA and Beats by Dre to build campaigns and brands that lead culture.
Give us a brief overview of Ear to the Ground as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
We’re an independent creative agency using sport and esports to build brands that lead culture. Without going into the deep history of the business, it was founded by Steve Smith and Jon Drape, who came from the music industry and arrived into sport almost by accident as they were asked to bring the cultural credibility of music into the world of sport.
A few iconoclastic and disruptive campaigns later and suddenly 80% of the business was in the world of sport and sports sponsorships!
As the business has evolved, this mentality to challenge the status quo has stayed, but the key thread that feeds our approach to building brands today is the simple fact that youth audiences don’t see or connect with sport in silo anymore. Instead, it merges and blends with fashion, music, art, entertainment, technology more than ever before. And the speed at which it moves and evolves means that what is currently being spoken about in boardrooms around the world today, is probably irrelevant tomorrow.
Our approach has been created to get out clients’ heads out of the boardroom. For an agency or brand to think they can lead culture because they have satellite offices in 60 cities around the world just seems wrong to us.
We have instead developed a digital platform which allows us to connect with thousands of people in an instant. Individuals who are actually at the heart of the fan bases our clients want to connect with. So, instead of thinking we innately understand the inner thoughts and feelings of football fans in Rwanda and NBA fans in China, we bring those individuals into our agency processes – the people who are driving trends within those fan bases – to answer our clients’ challenges.
Fundamentally, to stay relevant in this era of relentless cultural change that we live in today, we believe that brands need to co-create with these influential fans, in real time.
What approach makes Ear to the Ground’s strategy/model unique? What is your USP/differentiator?
Fan Intelligence®.
Fan Intelligence® is our digital platform that houses a global network of 11,000+ of the most culturally influential fans on the planet. Our Fan Intelligence® Network has a representative global footprint and is an eclectic mix of musicians, designers, content creators, producers, social activists, gamers and bloggers, plus many more. The common theme is that they are all global tastemakers who connect us and our clients with culture. As we’ve said, we believe that brands can’t win and stay relevant in the speed at which everything is changing without collaborating with these people in real time. So our agency processes are built to bring them into every stage of the process.
We collaborate with these individuals who influence and understand culturally led audiences, in real time, to track their shifting moods, behaviours and expectations. Our Fan Intelligence® Network’s brand insights and creative viewpoints are an integral part of our agency model. It’s a straight forward process. For every brief that comes in, we curate bespoke collectives from our network around shared interests or markets relevant to the brief. We then collaborate through insight, strategy and creative phases with these people, or even recruit huge panels through them to do this at scale. And really key to the process is that we do this in real time. So it’s not some one-off focus group – we return to them live throughout the process and campaigns being delivered.
How do you measure the effectiveness of sponsorship? What metrics do you use – and how has your approach to this evolved in recent years?
We’re bored of businesses trying to come up with the magic number for sponsorship effectiveness. It’s like they haven’t been speaking to any of the other departments within brands for the past 20 years. The effectiveness of sponsorship within any business is so uniquely tied to what they are trying to achieve as an organisation during that period of time.
Arriving with a ‘score’ or ‘predefined model’ feels like a back slapping exercise, so immersing ourselves in the wider business is at the heart of what we do at Ear to the Ground.
We’ve invested in campaign analysis and have built a team, and evaluation approach, that allows us to be flexible to what the clients partnerships are actually looking to achieve for the brand. This makes all of our campaigns trackable and accountable, whatever the metrics are – from direct sales to customer acquisition and retention.
Running these alongside focussed audience trackers gets a feel for how we are moving the needle on a campaign by campaign basis. Then, from a big picture perspective we plug into the brands ongoing brand trackers. We think this final thread is particularly important. Collaborating with brand tracking and measurement platforms that our clients already work with is key to understanding the real impact of the sponsorship, rather than arriving with some new model or approach to tell them what success is, which may contradict what the wider business intelligence says.
The main evolution we’ve seen is the volume of data that can be curated and accessed during any sponsorship. So that full picture – from granular campaign level through to wider brand focus – has become more detailed to make judgment calls on where the successes and failures are.
How has Covid-19 and the subsequent economic effects changed the way you operate? Is this an opportunity for innovation and better sponsorship, and if so how are you delivering on this?
It’s clearly been a really difficult year across the world, seeing the number of businesses struggle and individuals without jobs, it’s really tough, and so many industries, particularly many linked to sponsorship have been decimated across the world.
But it’s an interesting question related to the changes its caused, and to be honest we’re of the firm belief that every market shift is an opportunity for innovation and better partnerships. It creates the opportunity for new ways of thinking to excel and outperform old ones. And it’s not to say old ways of doing things are bad or wrong, they’re just outdated. That’s what our model is built to tackle for our clients. To stop them becoming outdated and the growth we’ve experienced in our business in 2020 is testament to that.
Fortunately for us the idea of building Fan Intelligence® in the first place was to give our clients access to a network of 11,000 of the most influential and intelligent fans on the planet, from their own homes. That has never felt more pertinent than a year when the world has at times been reduced to being locked at home. So, when everything changed, and people wanted to know what to do next, being able to speak to the heart of fan bases in real time – never felt so relevant!
With that in mind it wasn’t so much about changing how we operate, that was already in place. It was more about changing what our creative output looked like – switching from polished TVC shoots to smart, self-shot creative campaigns with athletes and ambassadors, and moving from experiential activations to digital experiences and streaming platforms. But those creative shifts were easy when the model of working was already in place. Whilst this year has been challenging in different ways, we’re set to see another period of record breaking growth.
How has sponsorship changed in your industry over the past few years? And what predictions can you make about how it’s going to change in the next five years?
There are two things that are particularly interesting right now – the power of individual ambassadors keeps feeling like it has reached new levels, and then it goes up again. The sway they have over audiences is maybe stronger than ever. As trust in organisations continues to decline, the power of idols in sport, music and entertainment seems to be growing. This is coupled with ‘traditional’ celebrity talent, such as footballers and musicians, who have finally started to adopt and apply the techniques and tactics used by content creators over the past five years. We’re seeing a new generation combining the on-field or on-stage talents with the creative content and fan engagement tactics of ‘influencers’ and it’s a potent mix for building huge audiences for brands to tap into and leverage.
The other is Gen Z’s influence, and with it the increased demand on rights holders and sponsors alike to use their platforms to drive actual change and positive action. This is an audience with record low levels of trust and extremely high demands. What’s interesting, is that it isn’t naivety. They’re practical, they see the positive role brands can play in society, and they’re making consumer selections based on those who do play that positive role.
Our recent global study of the world’s most cultural relevant brands goes into more detail on this. The research looks at the significance of ‘cultural relevance’ as a key factor to connecting with Gen Z sports fans. The Fan Intelligence Index 2020 not only provides a global ranking based around a brand’s ability to influence culture through sport, but defines what it means to fans for a brand to be considered culturally relevant in 2020.
Anything else to add?
Only to say that whilst it has been an unprecedented six months. I’ve been hugely inspired by the way people and businesses in the sector have rallied around each other for support, helping to build a road map for the industry moving forward. I’ve taken a lot of heart from that personally. There are so many brilliant, good people in the sector and I am confident that this space will evolve and bounce back across the board. Be kind and let’s keep it going.