What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Ant Garstang, founder and MD of Flash.
Give us a brief overview of Flash as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
Flash was founded in 2014. We’re a specialist sports marketing consultancy that focuses in the commercial rights space, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. We represent a hand full of established, well-respected rights holders and our purpose is to seek out and match them with like-minded partners that are looking to connect and engage with their fans and athletes.
Our strategic direction and creative solutions provide a fresh way of delivering on partner expectations for rightsholders using simplified commercial structures that are measurable. Rights holder contract development and management play a crucial role in ensuring both our rightsholders and brand partners receive exactly what they need to deliver on their strategic goals and brand targets.
I’ve been fortunate to work in the business of sport for almost my entire career on both client and agency side. This has included leading global programmes during the FIFA World Cup 2010TM in South Africa for MTN and at the Tour de France for Dimension Data.
We currently represent the following rightsholders on an exclusive basis;
- Comrades Marathon https://www.comrades.com/
- Ironman South Africa https://www.ironman.com/im-south-africa
- The Sharks https://sharksrugby.co.za/
- RideJoburg https://947ridejoburg.co.za
- Spartan OCR https://www.spartanrace.co.za/en
What approach makes Flash’s strategy/model unique? What is your USP/differentiator?
We have developed our own methodology over the years where we deconstruct properties and apply our own science to better understand their component parts. We then use our understanding and experience to develop innovative yet practical ideas which can be taken to market. The real art of course is in the selling and closing.
Our proven methodology and commitment to combining highly effective working practices ensures we deliver on time, to target and beyond our client’s expectations.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your sponsorship? What metrics do you use – and how has your approach to this evolved in recent years?
Most important at the outset of any relationship is to agree what commercial success looks like for both parties. Once have established what our brand partner and rightsholders are looking to achieve together, we work collaboratively to put internal and third-party metrics in place that guide what work we do together, and everything flows from there.
What are some recent clients you’ve worked with, and how do you speak to a wider, new and emerging trends in your business area?
Together with IRONMAN South Africa we constructed a commercial package around the Facebook Watch live stream of the IRONMAN African Championship race. The race partner was specifically looking to reach international audiences in specific territories, the traditional television broadcast would not have been able to deliver on the brand’s objectives and so a specific set of rights around IRONMAN’s OTT offering was required. More and more brands are looking to direct their spend, and sponsorship efforts, at specific market segments to drive a better return on their objectives and are becoming more prescriptive about the exact rights they wish to procure from rightsholders.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
Everybody is adapting to life in the sports space during a pandemic. For Flash, it’s about working with our clients to help them to maintain their relationships with their partners while we all navigate the new norm. We’ve completely changed our way of working. It’s about being flexible and responding instantly to change.
Showing quick and decisive leadership is crucial during times like this. Where our partners have been able to respond quickly and definitely, they have been the most successful in managing athlete, partner and fan expectations during this time.
Everybody has rushed to create events in the virtual space to replace their live events. These virtual events are important to stay connected to your audience during these unusual times, but they are not a commercial replacement, they are simply an opportunity for your brand to remain relevant.
It is possible to bring on board new clients and do deals during lockdown which we have done with brands who are looking ahead to utilise the benefits of sports sponsorship once the restrictions are over. Most of our time however has been spent updating and revising contracts and expectations to allow for certain rights to be carried over into 2021 and beyond.
While our movement has been restricted, the travel and sharing of knowledge certainly hasn’t been and this has been one of the highlights for us over the last few months. The opportunity to attend webinars from all over the world and sharing experiences with our fellow industry professionals is something that we have loved being able to do!
How has sponsorship changed in your industry over the past few years? And what predictions can you make about how it’s going to change in the next five years?
All the best laid strategies that were created before March this year are no longer relevant. Our key focus now is to work with all of our partners across their properties to understand how their businesses have been impacted and how we can play a new role to deliver for these stakeholders.
Contracts will get more of the attention they deserve. Many rightsholders have over-looked the force majeure clause for years, and in some cases are been debilitated because they don’t have the necessary clauses in place to allow a mutual solution to be found under these circumstances.
Rightsholders are also going to need to not just adapt their entire models moving forward to provide new and different rights to brands that can be delivered should their events not take place. Better understanding of a brand’s business and sponsorship objectives will be more of a priority now to ensure rights are not solely dependent on broadcast or activation.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Mass participation events are going to struggle for 18 – 24 months, but they will recover. In the interim, those codes that are able to take place are going to have to re-baseline everything they are doing in order to adjust to new budget realities in a sporting landscape that may not be the same again in our lifetime.
We have been able to survive and thrive in these different times by creating meaningful remote connections with brands, rightsholders and agencies while we have all been locked down. Relationships are a big part of our business, and are often sidelined to focus on the numbers. We have enjoyed using this time to focus on relationships – old, current and new, and working with all our clients to pave the way forward in the coming months.
This too shall pass and when it does, we all need to be ready.
Contact me on ant@flash-mrs.co.za