What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Kevin Moore, Managing Director of Legacy, a sponsorship and communications agency.
Give us a brief overview of Legacy as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
One of Ireland’s biggest sports stars, Bernard Brogan, founded Legacy in 2012 with his cousin James. Having both represented Dublin in Gaelic Football, the company began life as a sports agency, initially representing players. In 2013, AIG, who sponsored the Dublin team as well as the All Blacks, became one of Legacy’s first sponsorship clients and since then our work and clientele has continued to grow in this space.
We provide full-service sponsorship solutions for brands. From finding and brokering a sponsorship for clients including Littlewoods Ireland (GAA) and Indeed (Team Ireland / Olympics) to creating and executing campaigns for our client’s portfolio of sponsorships including Energia, Glenisk and Laya Healthcare, Aviva Ireland and the College Football Series in Ireland.
What approach makes Legacy’s strategy/model unique? What is your USP/differentiator?
Our DNA in sport itself combined with our full-service skillset has enabled us to play a valuable role for brands as they take on a sponsorship. The partnership between brand and agency is key to a successful sponsorship and we place an enormous emphasis on building relationships with our clients to help them achieve the most out of a sponsorship. Another differentiator we believe is our focus on creativity. Be it in our launches, our content creation or the campaign creative itself. We are particularly proud of producing the creative platform #StyleOfPlay for our client Littlewoods Ireland which has been the core of their GAA sponsorship since 2017.
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?
As an industry, it could be argued that measurement of PR campaigns has been somewhat vague over the years and we have tried to continually evolve our measurement and evaluation processes to combine the wider brand awareness piece that communications can provide with more precise measurement data available through digital activations and content creation. Our focus on Digital PR has led to a greater increase in link-building for our client’s websites and the tracking behind this as well as the engagement scores around the content we produce.
What are some recent clients you’ve worked on campaigns for, and how do these campaigns speak to wider new and emerging trends in your business area?
While some of our sponsorship projects and campaigns were paused due to the pandemic and delays on events such as the Olympics, others remained busy.
Quick and creative thinking with our client Energia has resulted in a very successful period in recent months. One stand-out campaign was for the Energia All Ireland Club Rugby Awards in May. Rather than postponing the Awards, we decided to create the first ever Energia AIL Virtual Rugby Awards. Through creative thinking and a new strategic approach, we reached over five times as many people with the new online awards and more than doubled the amount of media coverage. Now months down the line and a lot more awards are having to turn virtual, we see digital and virtual events being a key focus for clients across the board in the future.
On a similar note with our client Laya Healthcare, when rugby paused in March we quickly adjusted the strategy and utilized ambassador and Irish rugby star Johnny Sexton to front a Virtual Easter Egg Trail to promote Laya’s education sponsorship, Super Troopers – in what turned out to be a hugely subscribed for event online in the height of lockdown.
Aviva Ireland are another client who have been continuing to work away on their sponsorships over the last few months with Pride being a major one. As we were not able to march in a parade like usual, we created an emotive piece of content for Aviva featuring two Irish women football stars who publicly announced they were a couple and shared their personal story of coming out in the public eye. The content had a call to action to light up your home for Pride this year. The content was launched through Zoom interviews which has now become an everyday norm.
Energia moved its yearly Grow It Yourself sponsorship campaign from a community-based activity to a home growing initiative. The use of social influencers to help promote the campaign as something to do over lockdown made it a huge success with the website crashing from volume of people trying to access the GROWBox registrations after influencer activity went live. Using digital techniques like social influencers who are advocates for the product has proven to be invaluable to grow awareness.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
As a company our key future direction is to combine building a brand’s reputation through campaigns and sponsorships with a highly effective digital strategy. The pandemic has further sped up this process for us and the focus on a deeper digital strategy that can be more closely linked to sales and results for the brand is more paramount than ever.
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?
The change in recent months never mind years has been significant due to the pandemic. Sponsorship launches and media events with ambassadors have changed forever. Large media events are likely to be a thing of the past, replaced with the recent remote digital launches which can achieve the same if not better results.
While digital activations can thrive, experiential marketing which is such a large part of sponsorship activation around games is suffering. Covid-19 turned into a much bigger problem than first anticipated and it will take significant time for match-day experiential to recover and it remains to be seen if it will still play such a big role at games once the pandemic is over.