What is your name and position within the organisation?
Laurence Norman, Head of Sports Technology, NTT DATA UK
Give us a brief overview of NTT DATA as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically
NTT DATA is a global systems integrator and technology consulting business, working for some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Headquartered in Tokyo, NTT DATA combines technology leadership and ruthless customer focus to deliver exceptional results for our clients in all industries.
What are you trying to achieve with your sponsorships?
Demonstrate our brand as a trusted global innovator, bringing intelligent solutions to complex challenges and underlining our capabilities in the areas of data analytics, insights and customer experience. Our parent company, NTT is committed to driving change that enhances society – developing and leveraging new technologies to create paradigm shifts in the sports experience for fans and athletes worldwide.
What sporting teams and organisations does NTT DATA partner with, and how do you go about deciding where to direct your sponsorships?
NTT DATA works with The R&A in support of The Open, as the official IT Patron. In addition, under the NTT brand, we work with IndyCar as series sponsor, Major League Baseball and with ASO, supporting The Tour de France.
Our sponsorships focus on those sports which best demonstrate our technology leadership – those which represent the highest level of professionalism and achievement and best represent our values. We go much further than brand positioning and hospitality. We work with our partners by investing in technology solutions which solve specific challenges faced by them, which demonstrate innovation in the most compelling way and showcase our technology prowess to our broader customer base.
We call this our “triple win” philosophy, and we use this in all our partnerships. Identifying solutions which help NTT DATA, our partners and our customers.
How do you activate these partnerships? Has the emphasis of your activations changed in recent times?
As a B2B brand, we go beyond brand awareness (although that is still important). We build a common narrative across all our sponsorships, to build a story arc from April through to September. This links each event and activates them in combination, rather than in isolation. Our technology focus is the main anchor point of this story.
In recent years, we have been more disciplined in the technology we showcase and focused on leveraging key personalities from our sponsorship partners across our activation, including press conferences, webinars and client presentations.
We leverage media, social media, hospitality, brand positioning, press conferences, webinars and sports awards to support the overall storyline, and to extend our activation before, during and long after the event itself.
For The Open, our goal has always been to create a great experience for every type of fan, working in close partnership with The R&A. In recent times, the challenge to bring people closer to the game has a new dimension. 2020 looked very different for fans and tournament hosts had to develop solutions in real time to meet the needs of the market – which we experienced first-hand through the virtual Open, (The Open for the Ages) creating an innovative solution using existing footage.
Once we learned of the impacts of COVID-19 on the live event, we quickly worked with The R&A to develop a concept we could deliver in place of such event, continuing to engage fans. We were keen to demonstrate the importance of our relationship with The R&A, which involves collaboration throughout the year to ensure we are continually enhancing the event with our technology integration and fan experience on site.
We plan to build on this again this summer and, recognising that many people will not be able to travel to experience the action close-up, we have doubled down on our efforts to bring golf to life in new ways.
How do you measure marketing effectiveness? What metrics do you use – and what can you see happening in the sponsorship industry in the future?
As well as traditional measures of brand awareness, we pursue targets linked to lead (sales) generation, client engagement (for hospitality), click through rates, engagement metrics from social media and article citations and re-posts.
We are also heavily focused around other specific internal measurements too. Whilst traditional metrics are important, it is particularly key for us to be able to demonstrate tangible business outcomes from our sponsorships.
In terms of the future, in the last few years – and significantly accelerated by COVID-19 – technology has become critical for sports organisations and fans. For this reason, technology-related sports sponsorships are becoming more sophisticated, with deeper relationships.