Sophie Morris
Strategic Marketing & Sponsorship Consultant
Millharbour Marketing
What’s your favourite ever sponsorship activation?
Can I have two?
Firstly it would be MasterCard’s 23rd Man as part of their sponsorship of the Barbarian’s rugby team. I was leading sponsorship of another Barbarian sponsor at the time and got to meet the lucky 23rd man and see what a wonderful experience it was.
The other would be 02’s activation of their England Rugby sponsorship, particularly around the RWC2015 with the #WearTheRose campaign. The core messaging that surrounded their activation was all about supporting the England team, not just promoting 02. By doing this they showed a genuine love and understanding of the game and by reaching out to new audiences they also increased the value of their sponsorship by growing the number of people supporting England and, therefore, the rest of their activation.
I also particularly loved the “Rose 2” logo in their branches, showing that they take their campaign message to heart and did what they were asking the fans to do. I also liked their utilisation of other assets with projections on the 02 arena roof and their support of the development of the game with O2 Touch.
What do you consider has had the biggest impact in sponsorship in recent years?
It would be easy to say digital but I would actually say the biggest change has been the scrutiny now applied to sponsorship investments and the returns received. We know that this is far from perfect and so many companies don’t plan, implement and measure sponsorships with the same scrutiny as other marketing activity, but progress is being made primarily because the increasing value of sponsorships, and the need to cut costs on the back of the 2008 financial crisis, spurred CFO’s to question what return this spend was bringing in.
What’s going to be the next disruptive event that takes place within our industry?
I think it will be whatever comes after VR. Most technologies skip a generation as to what will actually become mainstream. You can see this with mini discs and 3D TVs. It will take a while for VR to be used extensively and I believe that the technology that will stick will be the one inspired by VR, but not VR itself.
Are we, as an industry, using data, and the insight it provides, in the best way?
Definitely not. Of course there are those rights holders and sponsors doing it well, but I see the majority underutilising this.
As an example, rights holders have various departments that act independently – commercial from community, finance from tickets etc. – and the benefit of one framework that can connect all data points of the organisation, and give a truly personalized experience to each stakeholder, would bring huge potential to any sports club, event or exhibition owner.
It would allow them to fully understand their audience, market better to them, increase their commercial returns as a result and increase sponsorship value. This requires expertise to interpret the data and formulate a strategy, but robust data is most definitely the starting point.
What 3 key learnings can we take from other industries in order to be better at what we do?
Be strategic – a learning that can be taken from almost any other industry! Sponsorship is such a phenomenon to me, coming as I do from a strategic marketing background where everything is done to achieve the long-term business objectives of the company. Too many brands have sponsorships based on the Chairman’s Whim and too many rights holders have an outdated view of sponsorship with regards to what they should offer to sponsors and also how it should be used to increase the fan experience.
Know Your Customer – this is needed not only from the rights holders’ marketing point of view, but to be able to help sponsors identify their target audience. Most rights holders only know a small percentage of their audience; think of the sports example where one person buys the tickets for all those attending. Other industries have, as standard, CRM systems that allow them a complete view of each customer in order to be able to track and predict behaviour and adjust their marketing accordingly. Rights holders need to think of themselves as more commercial organisations, providing a product or service to their customers, which in this case is the fans. If they operate in this way, with the strategic marketing approach needed, they would be much more commercially successful.
Integrated Marketing – this is one for the brands. Too many brands do a really good job of activating their sponsorship within the framework of the assets available, but far fewer take that activation and integrate it across the rest of their marketing mix. Sponsorship can be an expensive business, with the initial rights fee and activation costs, but it can be the relatively small cost of ‘sweating the assets’ that can leverage the initial investment and bring the greatest return.
Which term do you prefer using – partnership or sponsorship?
Of course, it’s on trend to say ‘partnership’ but partnership can cause confusion as to the actual business structure, so for the time being we’ll stick with ‘sponsorship’! But the word itself is not important. It’s the mind-set you have. We all absolutely need to have a partnership mind-set, we need to think about how both sides of the relationship can add value to each other and to the audience we’re both trying to reach. A partnership approach is by nature a longer-term relationship, a more genuine relationship and therefore one that is more likely to be successful.