Building on the success of the Olympic InnerGear campaign, Synergy and Powerade commissioned rugby superstars Steve Borthwick (Captain of the England rugby team), Paul Sackey (England winger) and Shane Williams (Welsh winger and 2008 IRB World Player of the Year) to be photographed performing their sport stripped of all their performance clothing, captured without their outer gear.
The essence of thePowerade InnerGear concept illustrates that what players put inside their bodies and how they prepare – their InnerGear – is just as important as their outer gear (Sports Kit).
Following up on Tim’s blog about brands hijacking the Inauguration, the stack of Presidential-based ads running in the press the next day showed, for the most part, that the creatives didn’t fluff their lines.
Our favourite though, appeared in the Aussie Daily Telegraph. Hats off to Veet for showing that simplicity is always best.
The newspapers have been a bit depressing of late, but this morning I was greeted with a couple of early telephone calls which brought a smile to my face;a smile of incredulity, a touch of embarrassment and, above all, delight.
Apparently I’m listed in The Times Power 100 as one of the most influential people in British sport.
What an honour!Especially when you look at the exalted company with which I’m mixing.One of my callers pointed out that I come higher in the list than Tiger Woods which, I can see, I’m going to have a hard time living down.
Other names below me include Andrew Flintoff, Steven Gerrard and Zara Phillips.So,I agree with the venerable Kevin Eason and Patrick Kidd (who put the list together) that there will many hours of disagreement and debate when Times readers plough through the 100 names.
Needless to say I buy The Times every day (maybe that had something to do with it) and I think its sports pages are excellent.And, before you all ask, no, there were no backhanders.
What a great way to start our 25th year in business – as on May 27 Synergy (Karen Earl Sponsorship that was) celebrates this landmark.
Maybe Kevin and Patrick were awarding points for those still standing after all this time!
OMG! This coming Wednesday, the wildly successful CW export, Gossip Girl, returns to the UK on ITV2 for its second season. Aside from my ridiculous excitement surrounding GG’s return to our screens, the show is also an excellent example of youth marketing at its best.
For those unfamiliar with the show, Gossip Girl is a kind of Cruel-Intentions-meets-SATC for 16-24 year olds. And, for that specific and increasingly hard to reach demographic, it delivers hourly portions of marketing heaven every week for all the brands involved.
Firstly, wrapped around each 15 minute slice of the action sits the show’s sponsorship deal. The pairing of Guerlain’s Insolence fragrance with GG was well-conceived, by both the show’s producers and the brand’s marketeers. Insolence is a brand that defines its identity as ‘free, daring, unpredicatable, radiant’ and whose target female consumer embodies the ‘Insolent woman: audacious, makes her own choices and dances to a different tune…truly herself and utterly irresistable’. Values which, in turn, embed the fragrance with the sultry, aspirational qualities that fans see in the show’s female stars, and which they will no doubt seek to emulate.
As an enthused loyal fan of the first season I was a strong case study for the Guerlain sponsorship, with pretty successful results. I went from relative stranger to the brand, to sampling the product when it next caught my eye, right through to purchase. And all irrefutably due to Gossip Girl’s powers of pursuasion.
Secondly, within the show itself, each scene becomes a catwalk opportunity for every major fashion label wanting to capture the GG market. The show’s producers, savvy from the beginning to their fans’ copy-cat desires, flood the blogosphere and website forums with insider information on the designers and outlets for each of the characters’ ensembles in key scenes. Thus, GG has done for designers like Abigail Lorick (the real life fashionista behind Eleanor Waldorf’s designs in the show) what The O.C. did for a raft of indie bands from 2003 onwards: through realistic contextual integration into the narrative fabric of the show, these guys get unparalleled exposure to a whole new audience.
Thirdly, evidence of the wider cultural influence of the show seems fairly wide reaching. Knowing that probably 95% of GG’s weekly audience could only dream of browsing Henri Bendel for the back-to-school gear and party dresses sported by their counterparts on the show, UK high street brands have started to capitalize on the show’s stars’ distinctive styles. Miss Selfridge’s marked upturn in stocking preppy, WASP-ish styles (think ruffles, pearls, blazers) – that could have all been taken straight out of Blair Waldorf’s walk-in closet – is a case in point. And if their visual merchandisers are on the ball, you can bet that their Oxford Street window display will be reflecting this for the next couple of weeks.
(And if you’re still not sold, check out the NY Times story from last summer outlining the demonstrative impact of the show on retail sales in the US).
Leighton Meester as Blair Waldorf in a design by Abigail Lorick / Navy blazer with white trim from Miss Selfridge’s current collection
And finally, there is the cast – a select group of impossibly beautiful, precociously talented, walking, talking brand ambassadors for the show . The line between their real lives and the characters that they play is so imperceptible to the show’s legion of followers (even the show’s main romantic union has made the transition off screen), that all awards show appearances, publicity interviews and paparazzi shots become potential outings for the brands in the show. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the designers and brands who stock the wardrobes and dress the set allow, encourage, even pay their starlet darlings to take home their wares and showcase them off camera too.
So, if youngsters of the Z generation are all programmed to be (in the recent words of Lily Allen) ‘weapons of massive consumption’, Gossip Girl and shows like it provide all the ammunition required for brands to hit their targets dead on.
Over the next few weeks, any brand that has a remote connection to the world of rugby (officially or not) will undoubtedly be attempting to bask in the limelight of the RBS 6 Nations Championship, kicking off at Twickenham on 7th February.
One such brand, who has every right to be there, is Nike.
For the last month or so I have greatly enjoyed my twice-daily sojourn past the Oxford Circus Niketown store, gazing with slightly too much interest at that particular Regent Street window display: a 13ft high, wall-to-wall image of five top England players, all exhibiting the latest Nike offering in men’s tight-fit rugbywear.
Imagine my surprise (and, let’s face it, immense disappointment) when I noticed today, three weeks out from the start of the Championship, our England rugby boys had been removed from the Niketown display and replaced with something completely unrelated to the sport.
Not entirely sure what the thinking was behind the timing of the Niketown visual merchandising switch-over, but surely, at a time when sports fans will be so focused on the rugby world, it would make sense for an official rugby sponsor to capitalize on that partnership at every outlet?
Nike’s brilliant advertising creative around the 2007 Rugby World Cup (as displayed in the Oxford Street store in the above image) was delivered through ATL and retail platforms concurrently – so why not replicate the strategy during the build-up to the top rugby tournament in Northern Hemisphere?
You don’t get much more consumer-facing than a London flagship store, so for consistent messaging, it would make sense for brand sponsorship and retail to be on the same page – or rather, window display.
Barack Obama may have decided against signing corporate sponsors to help fund the estimated $40m costs of official events around his inauguration, but brands are deploying an array of marketing techniques to attempt to gatecrash the moment. Here’s a selection.
IKEA has led on experiential, via a mock motorcade touring Washington DC and an IKEA-furnished virtual Oval Office in Washington’s Grand Union station. The latter is replicated online at embracechange09.com, where consumers can add virtual IKEA furniture to the Oval Office and send their suggestions to both their friends and the White House.
Honest Tea, who struck marketing gold when Obama was seen drinking its Black Forest Berry tea on the campaign trail, has launched a limited-edition range renamed “Barack Forest Berry”, and will be sampling around DC all week.
And Audi of America is going seriously big with a raft of broadcast, online and print sponsorship initiatives, including an unprecedented broadcast sponsorship of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news bulletins on inauguration evening, all to launch a year-long ‘Celebration of Progress’.
The sponsorship, managed by Synergy on behalf of Powerade, was the focus of a fully-integrated campaign which was based around the concept of InnerGear - the brand’s core creative idea. Synergy worked with Powerade and it’s other agencies to activate the campaign through-the-line, resulting in the brand enjoying it’s highest-ever levels of market share.
Winners will be announced at the MCCA Best Awards dinner which is being held at The Brewery on Chiswell Street on Thursday 5 March, so fingers crossed!
As further proof of the recession, the announcement by B&Q that it would not be extending its sponsorship of Team GB Olympic and Paralympic athletes and hopefuls generated more than its fair share of coverage. But only one commentator, Paul Kelso of the Telegraph, touched on what would have been the key driver in the DIY chain’s business case: to continue the association B&Q would have had to upgrade to a London 2012 sponsorship, involving significantly increased rights fees.
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