Stuart Owen
Sport & Sponsorship Lead
Hi, I’m Stuart! I’ve been with SQN for six years working across a range of our sponsorship, PR, content, and comms clients. During my time with the company, I’ve been fortunate to undertake the ESA Diploma, and this year had the proud honour of being an ESA Awards judge.
Give us a brief overview of SQN in general, and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically
The power of partnerships is at the core of everything we do, not just in context to sponsorship, but more generally in how we work. Our approach has always been first and foremost about building relationships over a long period of time, establishing trust and becoming extended members of our client’s teams, rather than just an external agency.
When it comes to sponsorship, we partner brands with organisations that will meet their objectives, not ours. Our measurement of success has never been about how many likes we get on a Tweet or LinkedIn post; it’s about seeing the end impact our work has on meeting our client’s objectives; that’s where our satisfaction comes from. The longevity, loyalty and trust our clients show us has been the foundation of our gratification over the years. By maintaining relationships with global manufacturers, giant corporations and fintech start-ups, we’ve prided ourselves on being a small agency delivering a big punch.
Driven by the foresight of our CEO Claire Ritchie, SQN was created to fill a gap in the market – agencies that could effectively tell the stories of technology sponsors. In doing so, over 20 years, we have brought to life a great number of technology sponsorships. With an even greater number of technology brands in existence today, and with rights holders only beginning to get to grips with the huge amount of data points they have at their disposal, SQN’s original objective is arguably more relevant now than it ever has been.
What approach differentiates SQN and makes your sponsorship strategy unique?
Our strength is in our size and our broad skillset! We are a small but fast-growing agency that is made stronger by the sum of the individuals we have in our team. We place a great premium in the human side of our business. It’s all about the personal touch that we’re able to provide our clients to make them feel valued.
We have experts that have come from a corporate background who can speak the right language to brands. Instead of just being sponsorship-led, we tend to be business-focused, giving our clients the confidence that we fully understand the challenges they are trying to solve. We use the power of partnerships to help them meet their objectives. We are on the journey with them because we instantly understand where they are coming from.
Being a multi-faceted agency that offers services in PR, comms, content, and events, means that we benefit from being able to bring different individuals into sponsorship conversations based on their expertise. Those specialising in PR, comms or content creation provide a different perspective, and challenge our thinking on certain areas of our sponsorship business. Being flexible and open enough to involve different members of our team means we benefit from an exciting fusion of those with in-house and agency-side experience combined with passionate rising stars who bring fresh and creative thinking to the table.
How has your approach to sponsorship changed during Covid-19? Have you created any new initiatives or altered your operations to reach sponsors and audiences in new ways?
To be honest, as an agency that has always based its sponsorship business on building long-term partnerships with clients, our approach became even more relevant during COVID-19. In times of uncertainty, brands want to work with those who they can trust, so we reacted quickly and made sure we were that dependable pair of hands. We had to practise what we preached to our clients – communication is key! Instead of staying silent and being too slow to respond, we came up with activations and campaigns that enabled our clients to continue telling their stories to their audiences in an effective manner.
What are the current trends within sports sponsorship, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
Authenticity has become a really important word in sport sponsorship and will only continue to be so. Sponsorships based around ‘purpose’ are now the norm; we’ve gone beyond the point where it made brands stand out, purpose now has to form part of any sponsorship, rather than being an optional extra. This means that audiences expect brands to deliver on purpose with every sponsorship they enter, but still very few can back up their words with true authentic actions to show they are making a measurable positive impact on society. Therefore, when we speak to our clients, we challenge them on what they think delivering on purpose really means, and work with them to ensure they are acting credibly and with legitimacy.
Target audiences are becoming wiser and more knowledgeable about sponsors and their motives. They are also becoming more confident in challenging them, supported by a multitude of platforms and methods by which they can do that. Either as a direct result of their actions, or indirectly, sponsors are finding themselves more commonly at the receiving end of fan anger or distrust. As a result, the consultative element of our sponsorship business – including our reputation management and crisis communications offering – has become of greater importance – advising brands new to sport or unfamiliar with that audience on potential impacts and knock-on effects that they may not be aware of.
How has sponsorship changed for SQN over the past few years, and what predictions can you make about how it’s going to change in the next five years?
We have long advocated for tech brands to showcase their products and solutions through sport, and that has never been truer than today. Digital and technology-led transformation was already underway pre-COVID-19, but the past few years have seen that trend accelerate. The opportunities for tech companies in sport are vast, but we’ve moved from B2B to B2F – where consumers are the fans.
You only have to look at the number of tech brands involved and activating in Formula 1 to see how buoyant the sport sponsorship market is. It’s about authentic product-led storytelling, rather than cash-for-branding. In the next five years, there will be even greater focus on the power of partnerships and a move away from the traditional understanding of the term sponsorship.
For far too long sponsorships have been one-sided: brands approach rights holders with the expectation that they will list out a set of rights, and then, following a little bit of negotiation, come to a sensible conclusion on a fee. If we consider it more in terms of a partnership, then sponsors should be considering the value they can bring to the table that the rightsholder could benefit from.
We’re not just talking about VIK in the form of product integration, as that has been around for a while, but what is it that these brands have that the rights holders could benefit from? Some of the largest sponsors are the biggest brands in the world operating with thousands of members of staff, meaning everything from their organisational ability through to their CSR campaigns are well-devised and well-considered global operations – something any rightsholder could benefit from bringing into their own organisations.
Brands need to, and will, realise the value they bring to a partnership, and rightsholders will gain from this, and realise that value isn’t always just in the form of money.