Alex Burmaster
Co-Founder; Head of Data, Research & Insights
Please give us an overview of caytoo as a company and your role in the sponsorship industry.
At a tactical level, we help rights holders solve their #1 challenge in sponsorship: getting that first meeting or initial interest with brands. We help business intelligence, business development and commercial partnership teams overcome key pain points to improve their lead generation by providing intelligence on companies, brands and organisations that rights holders can use to make more informed and relevant sponsorship pitches.
In short, we help rights holders get significantly better response rates from their sponsorship outreach. The knock-on effect is that brands benefit enormously too, by becoming aware of relevant sponsorship opportunities that might have otherwise eluded them.
At a strategic level, our role is helping grow the sponsorship industry. We passionately believe that sponsorship is the most ‘holistic’ and widely beneficial marketing channel that any business could ever employ to meet its objectives, but most companies don’t use it or aren’t even aware it’s a viable option.
The industry is worth about $65 billion worldwide – compared with $620 billion in total advertising spend (admittedly at its peak in 2019) – so there’s a lot of potential for growth if more companies become aware of the power of sponsorship to deliver business objectives.
What do you mean by sponsorship being the most ‘holistic’ marketing channel?
To misquote a famous ad campaign, sponsorship refreshes nearly all the parts of a business that other marketing channels cannot reach. A single sponsorship can help drive brand awareness, define how people perceive a company, showcase product and interact with customers, generate content, gain prospect data, directly drive sales, meet CSR goals and help society, engage and motivate employees, drive recruitment, entertain prospects and clients. It covers the entire sales or marketing funnel and then more.
Other channels such as advertising, PR, experiential and social (all of which have their place in the marketing mix) may each tick a few boxes but only sponsorship ticks them all.
Can you tell us more about the ‘key pain points’ rights holders face?
Commonly, rights holders don’t have the resource or expertise to do the required level of research. Researching the right brands and accurate decision-maker contact details is laborious, difficult, time-consuming and not what most people want to be doing. They want to be selling, not researching. They can also be frustrated with paying for lists or databases that contain out-of-date or inaccurate data or that just don’t work. Ultimately, the pain is that they waste huge amounts of time researching and pitching brands but never hear back. Hence the struggle to sell sponsorship.
Even among those that do secure sponsors, we’re increasingly seeing rights holders – particularly their financial departments – question the amount of money paid in commission to agencies. To a degree it is ‘risk-free’ but the cost-effectiveness doesn’t stack up at all. For example, instead of paying the standard commission on a £150k deal, a rights holder would get our services for 2.5 years and likely get more than 60 material conversations with potential sponsors.
What are the unique selling points of caytoo’s sponsorship lead generation strategy?
Our sponsorship intelligence process involves a combination of technology and analysts to continuously track the potential buying or ‘in-market’ signals of thousands of brands. We then match these signals and the brands against specific traits or criteria of a rights holder to identify a custom targeted shortlist which delivers significantly better response rates from their outreach. Our clients want to spot the next Teamviewer or Cazoo before everybody else does.
The proof is in the pudding: our clients typically generate a 25-50% response rate from these custom reports compared with the 1-2% industry standard. I could cite numerous examples but a fresh one that sticks in mind was a new client phoning less than 24 hours after we delivered their first report to say they’d already secured two meetings as a result of it.
What do you see as key trends within sponsorship?
We’re seeing rights holders become more progressive in the way they do lead generation. They’re moving away from the wasteful volume game of hitting as many brands as they can with the same generic message, to a more considered, qualitative approach of contacting fewer brands with a much more tailored and relevant message.
An extension of this, to repeat the earlier point, is rights holders questioning the long-term implications of the commission-only agency model. It’s not just the large sums but also the issue of having many agencies out in the market touting their rights – one brand I spoke to had been approached by four different agencies about the same rights holder.
This is part of the reasoning I alluded to earlier – about helping sponsorship get a much bigger part of the advertising pie. It should already have it because of all the benefits it provides but the short-term thinking of the spray and pay approach (accentuated by the commission-only model) has given many brands a poor impression of the industry’s relevance or sophistication when it comes to meeting business objectives.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
We have a number of free resources that rights holders can use to help their lead generation efforts when it comes to sponsorship.
Firstly, there’s our weekly “Brand Picks” alert produced by our expert analyst team which identifies brands worth pitching now because of a particular development, challenge or objective. It’s easy to sign up here.
Secondly, we’re hosting a webinar next Wednesday (10 November) in which marketers from brands who are heavy users of sponsorships – Nissan, Cinch, Hotels.com, AIG Life – will reveal their inside secrets and top tips for pitching sponsorship to them. There’s more information here.
Thirdly, following the government’s review which could ultimately lead to a ban on all forms of gambling advertising in sport, we’ve produced a report looking at alternative sectors rights holders could explore. Entitled “If not betting, which is the market we should go to?”, ESA members can email alex@caytoo.co.uk to receive it for free.