Nowadays there doesn’t seem to be a sponsorship in existence without a digital presence. From the early days of a fleeting mention, or if you were lucky a whole subsection (though often buried), on the main corporate website, we’re now into the era of the dedicated ‘sponsorship microsite’. But has that much really changed?

While investment in sponsorship microsites shows positive progress and a commitment by brands to invest in the important digital marketing space, it’s also created a beast. What we’re now seeing are a raft of generic websites with the same tired format and content.

What do I mean by this? Well let’s take the Heineken’s Rugby website as an example – just one of many I could have picked. As aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate as it is, with the brand ambassador’s blog, gallery, competition, downloads, newsletter, polls, stats section etc you could strip out the Heineken name and replace it with Castrol to make their Euro 2008 site.

Users want ownable and original content with a talkability factor. They’re more than happy getting news, images, polls etc from sites that do it very well and that they have a strong relationship with, like BBC Sport. The online audience are creatures of habit and for them to start consuming generic and available anywhere content on sponsor’s sites will take a long time, no matter how much is spent on SEO. As Ciaran Norris at Altogether Digital tells me “The old adage ‘you can lead a horse to water, but can’t make it drink’ rings true here. Chances are the horse is happy drinking where it is thanks.”

Creating a sponsorship microsite should not be seen as a solution in itself to the question of ‘what do we do online?’ To be honest this should never be a question in the first place, any activities should be done to solve brand problems and not fill media space. Anyhow, if we look at this offline for a moment, a brand wouldn’t start a new TV channel to reach a specific audience at a particular time. They would advertise or devise a branded content solution on an existing channel.

Sponsors and their agencies should be using this knowledge to their advantage. Heineken, for example, may be better served by using their sponsorship assets creatively to engage with the plethora of established rugby websites (e.g. Planet Rugby and Rugby World to name a few of the 115,000,000 websites returned when you type ‘rugby’ into Google) producing something akin to the highly engaging and successful Landrover rugby advert with Josh Lewsey.

This original content has great talkability and as a result is all over the web on video sharing sites, rugby blogs etc and I would hazard a guess has been seen by more people than the average sponsor’s website – as well as elicited more positive feelings towards the brand (though maybe not by football fans).

Even the most popular websites crave creative and original content that will help differentiate them from competition and the syndication of content I’m talking about is nothing new. The BBC has being doing it for years, and very successfully. As Ciaran says in his blog ‘The magic penny of giving content away’, the “…assumption of “build it & they will come” simply doesn’t hold water any more.”

So am I saying that all sponsorship microsites are a waste of time and money? No I’m not. There are many opportunities for brands online, especially those sponsoring less mainstream sports like snooker, where the online community infrastructure is in its infancy and crying out for investment. What I am saying though, is that more time needs to be spent understanding what online consumers want and how they behave as well as considering what’s already out there. It’s important to appreciate that building a relationship with your target market will take time and won’t happen as soon as the first ball of a tournament is kicked. The audience are fans of the sport first and foremost and need persuading that they should be brand fans too. Telling them the score is not going to achieve this.

By Malph Minns on July 1st, 2008

Tags: Branded content, Digital marketing, Euro 2008, Football, Rugby, Sponsorship

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