What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Seb Dilleyston, Joint-Managing Director of Hope&Glory PR.
Give us a brief overview of Hope&Glory PR in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
We are a diverse team of 80 looking after some of the world’s best known and loved brands, fortunate enough to have been named Agency of the Year no fewer than 24 times in 10 years.
Our agency purpose is to ‘Create Work People Talk About’, and never is this truer than in the sponsorship or partnership space.
We build creative earned media campaigns that help brands engage with fans – however committed they may be – and help brands leverage sponsorship beyond the sport pages, into lifestyle and consumer audiences.
What approach differentiates Hope&Glory PR and makes your agency unique?
We create work that is relevant. It is never a badging exercise for us. We bring together what it is happening in culture, where our target audiences’ interests and passions lie, what our brand’s DNA and positioning is, with a huge dollop of creativity to make it compelling and engaging… for media, for influencers and for people.
We loathe mediocrity. And we never want to be that agency that used to be great. And so we’ve invested heavily in training to ensure standards never slip and we don’t slide into mediocrity. Ultimately, we want our next idea to be our best.
And we pride ourselves on our client relationships – we survey all clients twice a year to make sure we’re on track. As we’ve seen how a poor client-agency relationship can have a negative impact in the planning, creating and delivery of great work.
We do this with an incredibly talented team of sponsorship specialists, publicists, social media experts, creatives and strategists.
That’s demonstrated in our work.
- Offering fans a chance to stay with Eric Cantona during the COVID Champions league final for Hotels.com
- Recruiting John McEnroe as American Express’ Wimbledon ambassador to help calm fans down after an afternoon of excitement, making tennis’ angriest man the voice of a Sleep Story on the Calm app
- Amplifying our brand platform, ‘Come as Rivals and Leave as Friends’, for Guinness’ Six Nations Sponsorships through a series of fan-participated experiences with rugby legends and media-friendly celebrities
- Making O2 the most talked-about brand at the Rugby World Cup, when they weren’t even a sponsor.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your sponsorship campaigns? What metrics do you use – and how has your approach to this evolved in recent years?
We have a robust model for measurement and evaluation. We’ve taken the core elements from AMEC framework and adapted it for our own internal model. This has been a key focus for the agency over the last few years as, like many, we feel as an industry we’re not showing the full impact of the work we do.
Traditional output metrics are important, but being able to demonstrate genuine outcomes and business impact is key for us.
Whilst we look at coverage, message sentiment, visibility and engagement, we track commercial measures. Whether website click throughs, increase in brand association with an event or sponsorship and impact on intent to purchase and direct sales.
We also appreciate that different brands are on different parts of the measurement journey, so we adapt to their internal needs.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
We recently did a trends report looking at the 21 trends for 2021, which you can see here.
This looked at macro and micro trends in society that will have an impact for every one of our clients in some way, regardless of the sector they work in. Working with agency partners in the US and the Nordics, we’ve established a connection where we share insights, strategies and creative work coming out and evolving from our different markets.
We also love creative work coming out from any market, which can inform, inspire and develop strategies or ideation. So we took it upon ourselves to create and publish a book which looked at the best creative work during Lockdown – you can find it here.
Equally we’ve been running a series of sessions around how consumers are behaving, feeling and acting throughout the last year. As you can imagine, every three or so months sees a different perspective, a different set of results and behavioural shifts.
Mining these trends, creative work and cultural shifts shape our strategies and plans, making sure that our brands’ cultural relevance is spot on.
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?
We’re lucky enough to work on sponsorships across the sporting world over the last few years – the likes of GUINNESS and O2 in rugby, football with Adidas and Hotels.com, American Express and IMG in tennis, Airbnb for the Olympics, Facebook across the upcoming sporting summer – so a quick few thoughts from our experience.
1. Inclusivity in sport and culture
As is absolutely right, diversity and inclusion are at the top of the agenda for any sponsorship activity or rights holders, across gender, age, disability, race or other.
This was key to our work with Adidas around their FIFA Women’s World Cup sponsorship, where we unearthed that only 3% of posts on Wikipedia were of women footballers/teams. And so, we tried to right that wrong by working with Wikimedia, influencers, authors, media and the public to re-write history onto Wikipedia.
And this will continue to be paramount and is key in our current plans with Guinness and their role in women’s rugby and Facebook and their partnerships with UEFA, the IOC and the IPC.
2. Cross pollination
Brands are tapping into cultural passion points, by using their sponsorship to engage with different audiences at different times. This is only going to continue as rich cultural crossover allows brands to immerse new(er) audiences in their world.
We took this approach with our Guinness Six Nations sponsorship last year, where we created a series of experiences for rugby fans and non-fans that tapped into fashion, fitness and singing!
3. Creativity is King…
Creativity is going to continue to be the smoking bullet… Having a sponsorship is good, but activating it in a way that gets in between consumers’ ears, gets noticed amongst the clutter and drives consideration of the product, service or dialing up the emotional connection is so important. And as we’ve seen time and time again with brands who are brave, creativity can have a genuine commercial impact.
4. Smarter Sponsorships
Rather than channels working in silos, the walls are coming down, resulting in better integration in all sorts of things – from rights to use of ambassadors…
For example, last year for Hotels.com we arranged and executed a three-year deal with Eric Cantona around their Champions League Sponsorship, as no ambassador was in place. Which led to – from the off – a multi-market earned and owned media ambassadorial role, with an opportunity to extend into ATL.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
If you want to add creative spark to your partnerships – and to get in between the ears of your audience – we’d love to hear from you.