The European Sponsorship Association was a media partner of last week’s sold-out SportsPro Fan Conference, held at the state-of-the-art Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Packed full of insights from industry leaders and #ESAmembers, the conference attracted more than 350 attendees. Here we outline five key themes from the summit.
- Women’s sport is flying – but brands need to invest properly to reap rewards
As many have documented, women’s sport has moved from the periphery into the limelight in recent years. Nowhere was this more obvious than the two hit sessions of the conference – the opening panel featuring Visa, Budweiser and Copa90 combining to discuss the recent FIFA Women’s World Cup, and a follow-up session featuring four of the FA’s key sponsors.
In the second panel, discussing how the FA and its sponsors have championed brand stories, Lucozade Head of Partnerships Matt Riches emphasised the need for brands to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to women’s sport. A sponsor of the England women’s football team, Lucozade invested heavily in a through-the-line marketing campaign earlier this year to leverage the Women’s World Cup.
The Lucozade activation included featuring the Lionesses on the branding of the Lucozade bottle, something Riches said was a first for the energy drink brand: “It’s a very simple thing to do but very high impact. It’s the first time we’ve ever done it [put footballers on the Lucozade bottle] – we thought that changing the look of our core product in the key summer months would be a tough conversation but it took about five minutes to decide it was the right thing to do.”
The need to resource women’s sport with appropriate investment is also imperative for rights-holders, said Marzena Bodganowicz, whose role as head of marketing and commercial of women’s football gives her license to ‘float’ between the various departments of the Football Association and work with several different teams.
“I joined the Football Association three years ago – at that time we had eight people working on women’s football. It’s now up to 16 or 17. We’ve had real integration across the team and I’m really proud of that, but we’re still at the start of the journey,” she said.
- Everyone wins when sponsors find a shared purpose
Speaking on the same panel, Barclays Senior Sponsorship Manager Katy Bowman said that a key element of sponsoring women’s football was the sense of a common goal – something that differentiates women’s sporting partnerships from other deals.
“We’ve been partnered with the Premier League for 18 years and it’s been very successful – but football doesn’t just mean the Premier League. When that partnership was up for renewal we did a big review and it showed us that if we wanted to maintain our stronghold in football, we had to sponsor the Women’s Super League [and] make a difference at the grassroots as well. We’ve made a public commitment to make football accessible at all schools by 2024 – that’s the best way to make the biggest outreach as possible.”
Bowman described the partnership as an “unprecedented” financial commitment for a women’s sport deal, something made easier for the brand by the willingness of other sponsors to also invest significant amounts.
“Working across both sponsorship of men’s and women’s sport, the key difference is that women’s sport really feels like a movement. Brands aren’t competing against each other to get share of voice, it’s about everyone moving in the same direction, which you don’t necessarily see elsewhere.”
ESA Board Director Matt Stevenson, the head of sports sponsorship at EE, agreed: “whether we’re looking at participation, attendance or even just helping to boost awareness of the women’s team, there’s a shared opportunity that makes it a really powerful partnership,” he said.
- Sponsorship can be a key platform to augment new business models
Rovio, the publicly-listed gaming and tech company that owns Angry Birds, has typically concentrated its marketing spend on performance marketing through purely-digital channels, targeting younger people who are engaged in the ‘free-to-play’ gaming economy.
But, in a competitive gaming market, chief marketing officer Ville Heijari said that Rovio knew it needed to go above and beyond performance marketing to stand out from the crowd.
“Mobile performance marketing has been our top channel – from 2014 to 2017 we quadrupled our marketing spend every year. Performance marketing helps us reach highly-targeted and highly-valuable audiences, but those are the only audiences you reach. We wanted to reach a mainstream audience and showcase what’s new with the brand – that’s where sport comes in,” he said.
Heijari was speaking during an illuminating case study session, moderated by ESA Chairman Andy Westlake, discussing Rovio’s partnership with Premier League side Everton.
Alongside the Everton deal, Angry Birds has also signed tactical sponsorships with the Lotus Formula 1 team and the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. And it has integrated some NFL and NHL athletes and gameplay into the game. Heijari said that sport sponsorship has evolved to become a key part of Rovio’s marketing mix, as it enables Rovio to fulfill a key requirement of the free-to-play economy – “new gameplay, new content, new things to purchase. This keeps players engaged and keeps them coming back,” he said.
- Rights-holders need to innovate and go over-and-above to demonstrate ROI
Another key theme of the session was the ever-growing burden of proof on sponsorship and how all parts of the industry are innovating to demonstrate ROI. Angry Birds became Everton’s sleeve sponsor in the 2016-17 season, which was the first time that Premier League clubs were able to sign sponsors to that part of the playing strip.
Everton commercial director Andy McTavish outlined how, in a market where 20 clubs were all on the hunt for a new sleeve sponsor, the Blues went above-and-beyond to demonstrate they were the right fit for Angry Birds.
“We’re very keen to be able to have some independent validation of what we were achieving. We partnered with Ear to the Ground on a piece of global research for some independent validation.”
The Everton-commissioned sponsorship research found that 64% of Premier League fans were aware of the deal, rising to 73% among Everton fans. McTavish said that awareness wasn’t enough for the club, which also wanted to deep-dive on sentiment: more than 22% of Everton’s fans now have a more positive feeling towards Angry Birds than they did prior to the partnership.
McTavish said that, in such a competitive landscape, exposure and traditional metrics are no longer enough for rights-holders.
- Women’s sport: a huge opportunity to champion equality throughout a business
Perhaps the central theme of the conference was the rapid rise of women’s sport, something exemplified best by Barclays’ new women’s football sponsorship. But, even more than this, Barclays’ Bowman said that the company’s sponsorship strategy has evolved in recent years to become much more than a branding exercise and instead reflect a holistic idea of Barclays’ principles.
“The first objective is to make our gender equality narrative flow through everything we do. We’ve put a huge investment in making sure that females have the same voice as males throughout the organisation. The other thing was we wanted to play a part in the next generation of strong, confident women. Football is a vehicle for resilience and self-esteem, and we wanted to be a part of that.”
All panelists, as well as Emma Lax from Cake, the session’s moderator, also made the point that their sponsorships were also resonating with wider audiences, appealing to women and children as well as traditional sporting fans.
“We’re not just thinking about investing in financial terms but about shared value – we’re pushing into talking about how football can help support societal change. At the moment we’re looking at how we can take the assets we have as a business and how that can also play its role,” said EE’s Stevenson.
After a record first week of attendances and interest for the Barclays WSL, Bodganowicz said that the FA has drastically increased its women’s targets – some 66,000 tickets have already been sold for the Lionesses’ November fixture vs Germany at Wembley against an initial target of 55,000.
“We’re aiming for a sell-out at Wembley. The Women’s EURO 2021 is the next big game-changer – I think it will have the same impact on women’s sport that the London Olympics did on sport in general in this country,” she said.