Damien Gillman
Co-Founder and
Chief Strategy Officer
Can you tell us in less than 100 words what your company does?
Luscid is a software platform that reimagines the sponsorship search process. Brands and their representatives cross-reference their key parameters with the global sports and entertainment rights-holder ecosystem, and efficiently source accountable and transparent partnership recommendations.
The user inputs their budget, marketing objectives, brand values, key marketing touchpoints and target audience – allowing the platform to analyse 80 separate sponsorship genres and the thousands of individual rights holders within them.
Once the brand can understand the genres of best fit, the platform analyses real-time market conditions, allowing them to recognise competitor activity, budget alignment and upcoming opportunities.
Who are your customers?
Brands and their representatives (agencies, consultants etc).
What makes you stand out from your competitors?
A belief that brands should be able to proactively engage in sponsorship search and validation, rather than primarily respond to rights-holder commercial output directed their way.
Luscid is designed to sit centrally in this process, and we do not engage directly in brokerage. The brand receives a complete overview of the sponsorship market, ensuring every option is scrutinised – making us the first of our kind! Our evaluation covers the sports, esports, arts and culture, music, film and television sectors.
What are the current trends in your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how do you deliver on strategy?
Across the wider marketing world, the impact of data and technology has driven huge upward shifts in the accountability, transparency and efficiency of brand investment.
The sponsorship and partnership space has seen progress in recent years, but we believe more can be done to create the same kind of centralised connection between the buyer and seller as other marketing verticals can demonstrate.
The recent ESA Breakfast seminar ‘Selling Sponsorship Internally’ provided a number of fascinating insights – including an understanding that the huge influx of rights-holder proposals received every year by brands simply can’t be evaluated in the time available. Too many connections are still left to luck, gut feel and chance.
We believe that a centralisation of this process will benefit all parties involved in our industry. A more accountable process will lead to more partnership match-ups that are proved to be correct – and ultimately deliver positive ROI and results.
What challenges have you encountered, and how have they been overcome?
We are bold in our approach at Luscid. Providing brands with the scale and granularity of a platform truly global in scope was by no means straightforward.
We have successfully integrated multiple data sources via API, each of which adds unique value to our platform’s capability. Our immovable belief that brands and their agencies are not getting a full and clear picture of the sponsorship landscape, to help them make adequate assessments, is why we believe the challenge was worth it.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
In the few weeks since we launched the platform to the industry, we have been highly enthused by the positive response from the brand, agency and consultancy community. It is increasingly apparent that there is an appetite for the capability of data-fuelled technology to enrich the sponsorship search process.
We are excited to see how the next few months play out – and look forward to witnessing the creation of multiple new and exciting partnerships across our sector.
- Visit Luscid for more information