As the British Comedy Awards once again (dis)graced the small screen with its infamous ceremony last Saturday evening, there was an embarrassing degree of mirth at the sponsor’s expense.
Ironically, despite being both title sponsor and broadcast sponsor of the event and after show party, the increasingly raucous antics of the guests and nominees displayed little evidence that much, if any, water was being taken at the tables on Saturday night.
Bottles, undoubtedly, of the Highland Spring water that proudly adorned every table and remained largely unopened for most of the evening.
Admittedly, the creative was strong. The idents that wrapped each section of the broadcast were cute and wonderfully conceived. Simple but effective, positioning a bottle of Highland Spring as an award-winning celebrity itself, under the tag line, ‘If you’re this good, you must be rewarded’.
And that is where the brand presence should have ended. Instead, Sally Stanley (the brand’s courageous but arguably ill-advised Marketing Director) braved the toughest crowd in the business and took to the stage alongside Frank Skinner to present the highly coveted Best Comedy award as the pinnacle of the evening.
Error.
Angus Deayton [introducing Stanley]: ‘And of course a big thanks to Highland Spring - without whom tonight would certainly not have been as…cheap.’
And it only got worse. Granted, with the amount of subsequent mentions that Deayton and Skinner managed to notch up between them, the brand probably regained its rights fee in media value alone. But they also succeeded in presenting the brand as an intrusive, resented necessity, over-playing the contractual exposure that was guaranteed for them, and generally making Ms. Stanley look like a bit of a joke.
With marketeers across the country already cringing with embarrassment on her behalf, she then attempted to squeeze in a suitably ‘on-message’ introduction which was predictably ignored and cut short by her co-presenters and the less than captivated crowd:
Stanley: ‘[the sponsorship] is a perfect partnership as we strive all year round to make people feel better…’
(Err…what?)
Skinner [doubtless echoing the thoughts of the entire room]: ‘Well, it certainly makes me feel better - as a recovering alcoholic. Not quite as good as an actual drink, but you can’t have everything.’
Words alone cannot do the whole episode justice - watch for yourself:
A prime example of when a sponsor should be seen and not heard - always engage, but never intrude.
However, whether or not you believe that a television awards sponsor has a rightful active role in their presentation, one must ask how the brand association with this particular ceremonial joke can be seen as beneficial in the long run? The announcement of the 2006 deal suggested that Highland Spring did know what it was getting into, but as the calibre of this most ‘notoriously unpredictable’ awards night continues to decline, how much longer can the brand deem the association a desirable one? Can the value of numerous shameful on-air plugs really outweigh an association with an awards show that is increasingly becoming the laughing stock of the industry? And how does a high-profile water brand sit alongside an event renowned for the drunken, outlandish behaviour of its celebrity guests?
Albeit that we’re not sure if we’re glad or sorry(!) to read that we missed out only ’by a whisker’ on Marketing’s Sponsorship Agency of the Year for 2008, we’re very proud to have either won or been shortlisted every year since the award’s inception in 2004, so it was great to be recognised again this year, and to see that our work with Guinness received yet another commendation, this time for the Guinness Honesty Bar.
Thank you to Marketing and the award panellists, and congratulations to Octagon on their debut win.
The International Express Eventing competition was held in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium last weekend. There was much debate as to whether it would be successful but with big names involved, both on the competitor side and the judging panel, and a late minute Sky deal the organisers were set to prove everyone wrong.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Arlene Phillips (Strictly Come Dancing judge) were drawn in to judge the horse and riders’ interpretation of music. Tara Palmer Tomkinson and Jodie Kidd were drafted in for the half time entertainment and all 20 riders considered to be the cream of the crop were competing. How could this not be a success? With all those names in that venue it was sure to be the ‘great day out’ that I mentioned before.
The key to success was simple. Give the spectators a memorable experience. Offer them shopping, horses, entertainment, and a social experience. However whilst the Millennium stadium is great for the rugby, it was sadly not the right venue for Eventing. It was too harsh for this audience. There was no Pimms tent or healthy eating vendors for the socialising I had planned. Instead after the 45minute queue I was faced with a choice of crisps, or a Yorkshire pudding roll (whatever that is?). Then there was a definite lack of shopping. Rumour had it, not that I found them, that there were 6 stalls; two saddle makers, a Musto stand, and a few horse feed products. Hardly a great shopping experience to engage the punters.
The half time entertainment caused additional concern. Jodie Kidd and Tara Palmer Tomkinson were due to ‘jump off’. Jodie went first and completed the course. Tara stepped up and after five fences withdrew in absolute terror. I can’t imagine organisers were very pleased with her performance after the fee that I’m sure she was paid to entertain the fans.
In terms of the equine content, the line up was spectacular. I’m sure they couldn’t have hoped for more. However, the momentum that had built up throughout the day came to a rather abrupt end with the tragic loss of one of the Equestrian worlds greatest horses. Mary King’s Call Again Cavalier fell half way through the cross-country course and was later put down. Hats off to the emergency team who reacted quickly and efficiently to get it all cleared from the public eye. However, his tragedy may have an adverse affect on the future of the event.
A second incident in the ring occurred when an awkward jump from a horse exposed a hole in one of the fences. After a sterling effort from the course designers to fix it, the decision was made to remove the fence. This meant that half the fleet would have jumped it and half would not. With many horses and riders falling victim to the technicality of the course, this seemed an odd decision to make. How would those who had already jumped be compensated? A decision was made to reimburse those who were on the leader board with a 2second time reduction. With this bizarre decision being made, it seemed that those who hadn’t completed the course had grounds to complain, as they had had the extra pressure of an extra fence. Rules were definitely being made up as they went along, sadly devaluing the contest in the process.
The event ended with Oliver Townend picking up the £100,000 prize money but I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been a success. My experience as a fan was that the venue was the wrong choice. With only approximately 15,000 people in the stadium, we did rattle around a little. The food was selective, there was no shopping and the equine event management was debatable. Originally I said this would be a success if they managed to make it a ‘great day out’. In my opinion it was not. The organisers did manage to get a TV broadcaster onboard but the coverage was shown five days after the event. Not ideal. There were obvious teething problems and I hope that the tragic loss of Mary King’s horse doesn’t mean the end for this competition. I believe with a rethink it can be repeated and return a much stronger concept.
“I don’t think it will work - it’s an absolute non-starter. Even if it does generate income it will not generate £79million. Athletes are supposed to give three days of their time (per year) to support the lottery programmes. But it will be an extra demand on their time and there will be conflicts of interest between athletes’ own sponsors, their governing bodies’ sponsors and the sponsors of the Medal Hopes scheme.”
The mystery is why it took DCMS and Fast Track over two years to come up with something that would be so obviously problematic and unpopular.
Now, with UK Sport leading, and LOCOG advising, the global and domestic sponsors of London 2012 will be reassured that whatever finally reaches the market will not dilute and ambush the Olympic sponsors’ territory in the way that Medal Hopes was clearly going to.
Indeed I hope that UK Sport will explore non-sponsorship solutions, and take inspiration from innovations which others have already created to fund the Olympics without ambushing it, such as Team Business West Midlands and BeNumber 1.
They could also look at why it is that our Olympic athletes’ contractual appearances for the National Lottery are, as The Times’ Olympic Correspondent Ashling O’Connor revealed recently, ‘rarely used’, and how they might be used to drive additional funding via the Lottery rather than being re-sold as part of Medal Hopes.
Traditionally, November is the sponsorship industry’s conference time of year.Last week’s Future Sponsorship conference in Brussels is now well-established as a gathering of the great and the good in the industry and, as its name suggests, where the future is discussed.This year was no different.
The first question on most people’s lips was “how will the sponsorship industry be affected by the credit crunch?”
My answer was, and is, that the sponsorship industry will be affected, just like all other industries and it’s short sighted to pretend otherwise.Budgets will be trimmed, cuts will be made and everyone will be squeezed in one way or another.
But the industry is far better placed than it was during the last major downturn in the 1990s.Then, only some marketers were convinced that sponsorship worked.As a consultancy, we were still busy educating companies on the benefits of sponsorship and showing them that it worked.
Now, we spend little, if any, time persuading marketing directors that money will be effectively spent on sponsorship – they’re already convinced.They have numerous examples for reference and it’s pleasing to note that they are considering sponsorship in their current and future strategies as a matter of course.
Increasingly, sponsorship is being asked to provide tangible business benefits.And, thank goodness, it can, because now is the time when proof is needed that marketing expenditure can indeed put money on the bottom line.
A great deal of time is spent within the industry discussing precisely how that proof should be declared.Unlike the advertising or PR industries, sponsorship has no universally-agreed evaluation system, arguing as it does that sponsorship’s success depends upon objectives set at the outset.The difficulty (or, as many argue, the advantage) being that these objectives can be immensely varied and, therefore, results need to be individually tracked.Thus a universal system is both impractical if not impossible.
I’ve always argued that sponsorship’s marketing advantage is its flexibility; the fact that it can solve a multitude of business challenges.
But I came away from Future Sponsorship thinking that it would be in the industry’s interest if it can make itself bullet-proof against accusations of non-accountability, especially in this economic downturn.
If you get the product right, everything else follows.
So General Motors has inevitably parted company with Tiger Woods. Some commentators have claimed that this somehow proves that endorsements of this type don’t work. Nonsense. In Tiger’s case, Nike and Accenture in particular disprove the point. Tiger may be a miracle-worker, but not even he could have saved GM from its current predicament. The problem isn’t Tiger, it’s GM.
Which brings me to the latest example of NPD on the PGA Tour, the Kodak Challenge. Like both the FedEx Cup and the Red Bull Final 5, it’s a competition-within-a-competition, its USP being to link great holes on different courses, with $1m going to the player who posts the lowest score on the Kodak Challenge Holes over the season.
Again, only time will tell if Kodak has got the product right - on which point I suspect they’ve missed a trick by not adding a cause-related overlay to counter-balance the $1m prize - but there’s a lot to like here, in particular the integration of Kodak’s ‘Kodak Moments’ heritage; the opportunity to leverage the wonderful imagery that great golf courses provide; and the season-long campaign platform. What I most like is that, as the Kodak blog reveals, Kodak planned their activation upfront - one of the keys to successful sponsorship.
Congratulations to the Guinness team who picked up their fourth award last night for the title sponsorship of rugby’s Guinness Premiership. The sponsorship, managed on behalf of Guinness by Synergy, won the Rugby Business Award for Rugby Sponsor of the Year (over $500k).
The judges particularly commended the ground breaking work on the Guinness Club Together campaign across 2007/8. Synergy manages all aspects of the sponsorship from strategic consulting to experiential events and PR.
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