What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Tim Davy, Head of Sponsorship & Commercial Partnerships
Give us a brief overview of E10 and what makes your company unique?
E10 is an independent sponsorship agency that focuses on brand consultancy and working with rights holders to develop their commercial growth. We operate with minimal overheads which allows us to charge competitive rates for award-winning talent and are structured to deliver both short-term contracts based heavily on deliverables as well as long-term retainers.
As a boutique agency, we only work with a set number of clients at a time and pride ourselves on being more nimble, adaptable, and cost-effective than larger agencies. Where necessary, our extensive industry network enables us to create a cohesive team of like-minded experts to tackle any specific assignment.
While we can’t claim to be unique, our strength is based on our personal experiences which for me is through a variety of roles which have allowed me to work with leading rights holders across multiple sports including football, rugby, tennis, cricket and F1. This has given me a widespread insight into how different sports operate commercially and first-hand experience of the varied opportunities they present for sponsors from both an agency and in-house perspective.
One of those roles was Global Sponsorship Manager for Emirates, what was it like working client-side for one of the world’s biggest sponsors? What do and don’t you miss most?
I was approached to join Emirates after working on their account at CSM and learnt a huge amount in my three years working for them in-house. My first six months was spent on their local partnerships which allowed me to become familiar with Dubai and work on some prestigious events before moving on to manage their European sponsorship portfolio. This encompassed AC Milan, Arsenal, Benfica, PSG, Real Madrid, European Tour, ATP, Roland-Garros, F1 and 2015 Rugby World Cup, so it was a busy but at the same time thoroughly enjoyable period with a huge amount of travel. It provided an unusual amount of exposure to leading rights holders, and we had a brilliant team who delivered some highly successful activations. It also taught me the importance of ROI and analysing the worth of everything we did in order to justify in minute detail to senior management the multi-million-pound budget for which I was responsible.
In terms of what I do and do not miss, when you’re a gatekeeper to a large sponsorship budget then you’re in high demand. As a team we received around 11,000 sponsorship proposals a year of which many were speculative and ill-thought out, so I don’t miss reviewing those. That said, the role came with a lot of perks and as a sports fan I was able to attend some fantastic events and privileged to work with some of my sporting heroes.
How did you measure the effectiveness of your sponsorship campaigns at Emirates? What metrics did you use – and how has your approach to this evolved in recent years?
Emirates is often accused of not fully activating its partnerships which is largely untrue. Yes we enjoyed fantastic media value across our portfolio which drove brand awareness and brand preference, but we also invested a huge amount in our activations. An example of this would be our physical experiential activations at events around the world where you had to join the Emirates Skywards membership programme to take part. Once on the database, we could track and measure members’ purchase behaviour over 12 months and know their first touchpoint with the brand was from a specific event we sponsored. This would allow us to measure customer acquisition compared to other channels, as well as the revenue generated from customers over a period of time which contributed to the sponsorship ROI.
With the rise of digital, we began to focus more on social campaigns and create branded content to reach more fans and to amplify our sponsorship to those who didn’t physically attend the respective event or tournament. We used basic metrics such as views, engagements, new followers etc. but the real value was from the uniqueness of disruptive branded content which we were able to produce through our association with the rights holder. Winning a Cannes Lion for our Benfica Safety Video remains a career highlight and was a great example of the brand exploring more innovative ways to activate their sponsorships. We were able to measure PR and SEO value as well as run acquisition campaigns to drive the rights holder’s audience through the value funnel which generated measurable brand and commercial results for Emirates.
Focusing back on E10, who are some recent clients for whom you have worked on campaigns, and how do these campaigns speak to wider new and emerging trends in your business area?
We’re fortunate to work with a great client; LiveScore – the global sports content platform and go to digital destination for fixtures, scores, results and news – who have, in some ways, started a new trend by becoming LaLiga’s ‘Official Global Scoring Partner’. This is a new sponsorship category which most rights holders had not previously commercialised and since their partnership with LaLiga, LiveScore have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been contacted by many others enquiring about their broader plans in the sponsorship space.
LiveScore are a digitally focused brand and a lot of their sponsorship evaluation metrics are based around exposure and engagement to positively impact brand health metrics such as awareness, trust, consideration etc which in turn ultimately affects usage and traffic to their app and website. To launch the partnership, we created and delivered an event at LaLiga HQ in Madrid with LaLiga President Javier Tebas, LaLiga legend Samuel Eto’o and former Real Madrid Manager Jose Mourinho focusing on LiveScore’s key brand pillars of speed and innovation within football. This was the first physical event LiveScore had ever hosted and by building awareness of the brand and its sponsorship through social content and global media coverage, their new app users rose globally by 25% during the week of the Launch. The ability to produce these spikes and devise specific activations that can track web views, app downloads etc is not the only objective of the partnership but is a big part of the brief.
This is a great example of a brand investing in sponsorship for the first time and generating immediate brand and commercial results through activating their assets efficiently. In terms of new and emerging trends, I think it shows that if done properly sponsorship can be a very effective marketing tool and as rights holders learn more about their audience, and how they are consuming sport, they’ll be able to carve out more new sponsorship categories that currently are under exploited.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
E10 is a young agency and we look forward to making the most of the opportunities that being an ESA member provides. If you’d like to discuss any of the above or anything industry related then please feel free to contact me at tim.davy@e10sponsorship.com .