What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Greetings from the Caribbean! I’m Ben Bradley, Group Head of Sponsorship at Digicel based in St Lucia. We are a market leading telecommunications and entertainment brand operating in 32 countries across the Caribbean, Central America and South Pacific.
How did your organisation come to work with your current rights holder(s)?
Every market has their own local partnerships in place.
We have regional sponsorships with rights across multiple markets plus every market has their own local partnerships in place. How we came to work with our current rights holders depends on conditions in each market and where our business was in its lifecycle, when the bigger regional deals were signed.
What “bigger picture” did this relationship seek to meet?
It’s a big question with multiple answers! To simplify I’ll advise about the bigger picture moving forwards…
Valuable content is core to our future.
Like many telcos around the world, our business is transforming through technology. Valuable content is core to our future. Accordingly, our sponsorships seek to meet this need. For example, we sponsor the Caribbean Premier League but also have OTT broadcast rights through SportsMax (largest pay TV sports network in the Caribbean whom Digicel owns) enabling us to show all matches live on our streaming app PlayGo. Adoption and usage of data led products like PlayGo is important.
How is the effectiveness of the relationship(s) measured? What metrics do you use?
A combination of brand metrics (NPS, brand consideration, perception shifts…), commercial/product metrics (product uptake, content viewership, app installs…) and digital metrics (engagement, CPV, CPI, traffic, data acquisition…).
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
See above. Telcos don’t make money from calls or SMS anymore. Diversification of products and services are key for us and sponsorship opens the door for our customers to these products.
How has sponsorship changed in your industry over the past few years? And how do you think it’s going to change in the next five years?
Branding, ticket promotions and hospitality haven’t worked for a while.
Sophistication. Even though we are in developing markets the old ways of branding, ticket promotions and hospitality haven’t worked for a while. We need to get increasingly sophisticated with both the structure of future deals, the rights we acquire and how we activate these.
How are you harnessing and executing on digital strategy, and what problems / opportunities has this created?
We are digital first in our thinking, activation and reporting.
All our new products and services are digital. Accordingly, we are digital first in our thinking, activation and reporting. The opportunity this has created is the ability to test and learn, optimize, report and be accountable. The problem is internet and technology proliferation across our markets varies wildly. We also have language variances and literacy rates to additionally contend with, providing extra complexity.
Social Media – Cure or Curse ?
Cure or curse to what? Social media is a critical channel for us and our audiences. Culturally it seems further weaved into societal norms than in the UK which is scary, but also a huge opportunity.
What challenges have you encountered, and how have they been overcome?
We’re still working on getting it right!
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I’m excited to put eight of my team on the ESA Diploma. If you have the opportunity to say “Hello” to any of them, please do!
And please forgive my cheesy corporate shot with the casual lean! For balance I’ve also provided one from a West Indies v England cricket match in Antigua we were activating at not too long ago and one with colleagues before we climbed St Lucia’s world famous Pitons.