What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Dylan Holman. Having worked for both leading agencies including Fast Track (now CSM) and in-house brand roles, I’m currently Global Sponsorships, Senior Manager at investment platform eToro.
This role has allowed me to develop a sponsorship strategy which now includes 15+ sporting properties across the world from Premier League, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 football clubs through to tennis ambassador Gael Monfils and The eToro Tri Nations with Rugby Australia.
Give us a brief overview of eToro as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
As a leading investment platform with over fifteen million registered users, eToro enables people to invest in the assets they want, from stocks and commodities to cryptoassets like bitcoin. The platform not only allows you to choose what you invest in, but also how you invest. You can invest yourself, copy another investor, or invest in a portfolio.
We believe sponsorship is a powerful tool that helps build and reinforce eToro as a world class brand. Research showed us that sport is the number one passion amongst our target audience and so sponsorship allows us to engage with existing and potential users, and educate them on investing.
What are you trying to achieve with your sponsorships?
Our strategic objective was to reach as wide an audience as possible and to have our brand seen as ‘always on’ across the year. This led us to developing our initial Premier League club aggregation strategy, which allows us to have eToro branding at 35% of matches spread over 10 months of the year.
This strategy also differentiates us compared to competitors and means we’re not associated with any one club, as fans are extremely tribal this is beneficial as we’re targeting users across the country. In the UK, eToro is now the most known trading platform for our target 18-44 year old demographic, and our sponsorships have played a huge role in moving our brand awareness dial to achieve this.
Due to the successes we’ve seen with the first two years of our Premier League sponsorships, we’ve now replicated this strategy in other key markets across the world.
What sporting teams and organisations does eToro partner with, and how do you go about deciding where to direct your sponsorships?
When deciding what we sponsor, there’s three key factors which come into the decision.
Firstly, there needs to be a business objective which we believe sponsorship is the best channel for and the rights available will allow us to achieve this.
Secondly, as an online platform, we’re able to extensively segment and analyse our existing clients, and so know exactly who and where we should be targeting. This allows us to then overlay this data against the sponsorship opportunity to ensure there’s strong alignment.
Thirdly, our sponsorships need to allow us to demonstrate our brand personality and so the sponsorship properties must share the same values as our brand to bring a positive association when existing and potential users think of eToro.
As one of Europe’s biggest football club sponsors, this year we’ve extended our Premier League partnerships with Crystal Palace, Everton, Leicester City and Southampton, and added West Bromwich Albion and Burnley.
We are also sponsoring teams from Germany’s Bundesliga, including partnerships with FC Augsburg, 1. FC Cologne, Hamburger SV (Bundesliga 2), Union Berlin and Vfl Wolfsburg, and extending our collaboration with Eintracht Frankfurt.
These deals add to eToro’s existing sponsorships across Europe, including Danish champions FC Midtjylland and AS Monaco. We also support top ten tennis player Gael Monfils who was already a keen investor on our platform, and so that was a natural partnership.
How do you activate these partnerships? Has the emphasis of your activations changed in recent times?
The first two years of our sponsorships were purely about awareness. However, this year we’re looking to educate fans that we’re an investment platform and promote our CopyTrader functionality. This allows you to automatically copy, in real time, the investments of some of our top investors; we feel this is a really strong offering to our football audience who may not have the time to invest themselves.
This change is based on the insight that fans are seeing our logo but due to there being so many betting brands within football, our offering is often being misunderstood.
We’ve recently launched our #TwoThingsAtOnce UK campaign, featuring football legends from each of our sponsored Premier League clubs along with Ex-England and Chelsea legend Joe Cole. We’ve created a lighthearted content series that looks at the legends passions away from football, showcasing that with eToro’s CopyTrader they’re able to automatically copy top performing investors, whilst getting on with their best lives.
To amplify this campaign, we have partnered with fan channels such as AFTV, influencers and media channels including Sky Sports. We also launched with a PR story on how watching football at home during lockdown was tough for fans with all the distractions (such as life admin and even pets), as we can’t normally do #TwoThingsAtOnce. The story generated hundreds of news and sports coverage and the videos have generated millions of organic views.
How do you measure marketing effectiveness? What metrics do you use – and what can you see happening in the sponsorship industry in the future?
We’re currently measuring sponsorship impact through brand surveys, social engagement, media evaluations and other specific internal measurements.
As often mentioned, taking these results to senior management doesn’t always answer all the probing questions when compared against performance marketing channels (e.g. PPC) which can track every action down the funnel. This makes getting sponsorship budgets signed off increasingly difficult for a number of brands.
That’s why moving forward, I believe sponsorship fees based on actual business results from the rights will become a more common deal structure. If a rights holder believes they have the right audience for a brand, offering a cost per acquisition sponsorship deal would mean a sharing of the risk, rather than the brand paying a fixed cost irrespective if the sponsorship delivers or not.
The better the audience fit, which can directly be tracked through sign-ups etc., the more the rights holders get paid. This approach should work especially for rights holders who are struggling to find sponsors but have an engaged affluent online audience which brands will be keen to tap into.