Chris Marking
Vice President
What’s your name and position within the organization?
I’m Chris Marking, Vice President at AEG Global Partnerships, part of AEG Worldwide – the world’s leading sports and live entertainment company. I’ve been with the team for more than 15 years – since the European team started.
Can you give us a brief outline of AEG Global Partnerships as a company and your approach?
AEG Worldwide is in the business of live events in all shapes and sizes: venues, touring, sports and festivals, and AEG Global Partnerships is the arm that works with brands to create partnerships with purpose and partnerships with reason.
Whether it is an event at one of our arenas, like The O2 and Mercedes Benz Arena Berlin, or a festival like American Express presents BST in Hyde Park and Luno presents All Points East, our philosophy is to deliver integrated partnerships that create a positive impact for all the stakeholders across the customer journey.
The aim of our partnerships is to deliver against the brand’s corporate and marketing objectives, while also providing tangible benefits to the properties involved. We work with our partners to ensure that activations add value to the fans and customers who are the lifeblood of everything we do.
What about your approach makes your strategy unique?
There is sometimes a tendency to think about partnerships and sponsorships as a badging exercise, but the reality is that they can achieve so much more when they are integrated into the experience and create a positive impact during the customer journey.
For us, it is about taking advantage of the tangible nature of live events and the lived experience it delivers. A live events partnership will always deliver impressions, but the potential for brand building and storytelling is huge, and how we approach that makes AEG Global Partnerships unique.
Real success in this field comes when you allow brands to have a platform to manifest themselves within a set environment, in a way that makes sense. To be credible (and effective), consumers need to see and understand why the brand is there. If it doesn’t make sense to them, it can feel like a sales exercise and you lose engagement, which is why we work very hard to integrate activations into our properties and events in an authentic way.
By constantly speaking to our partners, our dedicated activation team really gets to know the brand and how it works. This is supported by our insights team, which studies customers’ behaviour and needs, and identifies what has previously worked through our partnership programme and what hasn’t, so that we can advise our partners effectively. All this means we are able to develop activations together with our partners that are right for them and right for our events.
Being a large, established company, we have also been able to work with our delivery partners – for example, LS Events at our festivals – to make brands’ activations part of the event build. It means that partners can be integrated in a way that doesn’t jar; they show up in a way that’s sympathetic to the fans and the event/property but remains true to their core brand identity and purpose.”
Has your approach to sponsorship changed in any permanent ways since the pandemic?
If anything, the pandemic has just accelerated things that were already in the pipeline. In our venues and at our festivals, we were already working towards contactless payments and ticketing, but now we are fully cashless and paperless, and we are increasingly driving consumers towards apps and technology that increase partners’ ability to communicate with our fans and consumers. It’s about bringing our properties and events in line with consumer behaviour and expectations.
From a partnerships point of view, our approach during the pandemic has certainly resulted in stronger relationships after it. We threw contracts out the window and sat down with businesses to work out what we each needed, and the best way to proceed. Sponsorships and certainly long-term partnerships should always be an evolving process where you learn from each other.Covid-19 amplified that approach rather than changing it altogether.
Emerging from the pandemic, we have found that demand has shifted. Consumers want shared experiences, and they are willing to pay for memorable events that deliver to their expectations, so we’ve seen an upshift in our premium offering. So much so that we have created new experiences – like our newly announced members’ club, The Residence, at The O2 (pictured above).
Businesses are also trying to bring employees and clients back into face-to-face environments, and corporate entertainment at engaging events is a good way to achieve that.
What do you see as the key sponsorship trends in 2023, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
Corporate citizenship and sustainability form one of the biggest trends. We’re increasingly being asked about AEG’s own sustainability when it comes to the environmental impact of touring, energy use in our venues and the diversity of our acts – but partners want to get in on the action too.
For example, we’ve been working with OVO to secure Greener Arena certification for the OVO Hydro and the OVO Arena Wembley – and together, we are looking at how we can take this even further.
The cost-of-living crisis is also having an impact on sponsorship. Consumers are still willing to spend money for unique and high-quality experiences – and how brands enhance those experiences really matters to people. It is not only about access and affordability, but also about creating a richer, more memorable experience that meets, or ideally exceeds consumer expectations.
How has sponsorship changed for AEG in recent years and how do you see it changing in the next five years?
Aside from the increasing focus on integration, storytelling and authenticity, businesses’ attitudes towards partnerships is really changing rapidly. There is more recognition now that sponsorship is a collection of marketing benefits and assets under one banner – with an extra sprinkle of stardust on top – which means that partnership activity is now considered as a channel rather than a ‘nice to have’.
Of course, that shift means that delivering value and proving return on investment and opportunity has become more important. More and more, we are pre-engaging with partners to make sure they understand the potential outcomes and KPIs, putting systems in place to benchmark and track against objectives and ultimately make sure that the partnership meets (and hopefully exceeds) expectations.
Not only is robust measurement an important step in partnership reviews – but also in supporting ongoing development and ptimization of the partnership over the course of a deal, so that it delivers real value to the business and fans.
Ultimately, though, while the principles of partnerships do not change, what they look like and how we deliver them does. We need to pivot in line with consumer trends and shifts within the wider marketing industry as they happen.
The world continues to evolve and we will evolve with it, by bringing social media, influencers, AR and other developing platforms into the frame. We just want to deliver the best possible outputs for everyone involved and help brands tell their stories in the most effective and credible way.
