Farewell then, to Robinsons’ sponsorship of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show, following this week’s decision by the BBC Trust to end the Corporations’s short-lived foray into broadcast sponsorship.

BBC signed a two-year agreement with Britvic, reputedly worth £200,000, for Robinsons to brand Sports Personality from 2007. But the deal was doomed from the moment that ITV and the RadioCentre both mounted high-profile post-show attacks on it, highlighting its breaches of BBC policy and – somewhat less convincingly given the modest size of the deal – alleging that such agreements would distort the market for broadcast sponsorship.

As a result Sports Personality 2008 will not be Robinsons-branded unless the deal can be renegotiated to make the show editorially compliant, and the opportunity will be withdrawn from 2009 along with a number of similar, smaller projects.

An unhappy episode and an inevitable result, but overall a good thing. Bottom line, this was an ill-conceived and (as anyone who watched the 2007 show would agree) poorly executed deal which took the BBC into no-win territory both commercially and editorially.

Which is not to say that sponsorship doesn’t have a role to play going forward for the BBC – quite the reverse.

The Corporation’s search for alternative revenue sources beyond the licence fee will quite rightly continue. But the big wins are in digital services, international markets and the BBC archive – and as those models develop, so will sponsorship opportunities.

But on-air in the UK, sponsors should only be seen on the BBC where they’ve quite naturally and prominently been seen for years – as sponsors of events which the BBC covers.

By Tim Crow on July 23rd, 2008

Tags: BBC, Broadcast sponsorship, Television

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