by Bruno Scartozzoni and Guilherme Guimarães

Inevitably, the international headlines about Brazil tend to focus on our remarkable social and economic development over the last twenty years, but there are many other things that one needs to understand about the country. Yes, Brazil is a great country, and it’s getting better, but there are a lot of unsolved problems, especially in social development.

This explains in part why the Brazilian sports industry has been able to create great campaigns using football, our main passion, as a way to make people aware of important causes.

We referenced one of these brilliant ideas, ‘My Blood Is Red And Black’, in our Top 5 Brazilian Sports Marketing Campaigns Of 2012. Penalty, the Brazilian sports brand, and Vitória, the red and black football club from Bahia, replaced the red in the team’s strip for white, and asked supporters to donate blood. Blood donation increased by 45% in the city and the red stripes returned. Very recently, Penalty won a New York Festivals International Advertising Award Grand Trophy for this brilliant activation.

This year WWF wanted to alert Brazilians to the fact that every four minutes an area equivalent to the size of a football pitch is deforested in the country. During the broadcast of a Brazilian women’s national team match, the green grass started to turn brown. It took 4 minutes to transform the whole pitch in a ‘deforested area’ through special effects. In the end, a caption on screen explained everything to the audience, and WWF websites visits increased by 73%.

Another campaign we love is from our neighbours Paraguay. They too, have a lot of social issues. In particular, around 25% of Paraguayan children aged 4 or under are not registered – in other words, they don’t have an official identity, which is a huge problem. So, during a 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifying match against Uruguay, in an agreement with UNICEF, the main local TV channels and radio stations broadcast the initial minutes without saying names. Each player was just a number. After some time the commentators explained what it was about. This campaign occurred during the presidential elections, and resulted in the two main candidates promising to address the matter.

Brazil and Latin America have a huge potential to address social issues through sport. Clubs, athletes, governing bodies, sponsors, media, and NGOs should work together and create more campaigns like these. Of course, sport won’t solve everything, but it can be a great kick-off to drive awareness and create a pathway to action.

Bruno and Guilherme are partners at Ativa Esporte, the Brazilian sports marketing consultancy which is Synergy’s partner in Brazil.

By Tim Crow on May 20th, 2013

Tags: Brazil, Brazil 2014, Brazil 2014 Sponsorship Consultants, Football, Football Sponsorship, Rio 2016, Rio 2016 Sponsorship Consultants, Sponsorship, Sponsorship Activation, World Cup, World Cup Sponsorship Consultants

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For golf fans, the onset of April is all about looking forward to The Masters, the year’s first Major and one of the jewels in the crown of global sport. That being the case, it’s also a key marketing moment for brands looking to leverage golf, which always sees a raft of campaigns unveiled. And first off the tee this year is Oakley, with a brilliant fusion of bravery, creativity and innovation, featuring reigning Masters champion Bubba Watson. The launch film – over 300,000 views in 24 hours at the time of writing – speaks for itself.

There are so many things I love about this idea and this film, but I’ll pick three in particular.

1. Its inspired use of endorsement. As Bubba is above all known for being unconventional, the endorsee and the creative idea fit perfectly – still a rarity in sports marketing and, at a time when the falls from grace of Tiger Woods and Oscar Pistorius among others are leading many to question the value of endorsement, a reminder that it’s still a very valuable asset in the sports marketing toolkit when you get it right.

(Related point. If Rory McIlroy was still an Oakley asset, I wonder whether they would have used him instead of Bubba.)

2. Its alignment with the Oakley brand. Oakley has a very strong point of view about innovation, which is absolutely key to its DNA and product portfolio. But on top of this, it also has a brand manifesto – ‘Beyond Reason’ – which it set out in a series of films launched last year, led by this.

Again, it’s a rarity in sports marketing to see brands committing so strongly to a point of view. More brands should do it, as a touchstone to guide everything they do. If Oakley hadn’t had ‘Beyond Reason’ as a framework for their thinking, I’d wager that making a call on Bubba’s Hover would have been a lot harder.

3. The film isn’t over-branded. Sure, there are some obligatory shots of the Oakley logo on the hovercraft, but overall the branding is subtle and lets the idea – and the Oakley point of view – speak for itself. Refreshing.

With brave content like this, the future is definitely sunny for Oakley…here’s hoping we see a few more bold brands making the cut this year.

By Tim Crow on April 3rd, 2013

Tags: Branded content, Default, Golf, New Product Development, PGA Tour, Sponsorship, Synergy Loves

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Around 60 years ago modern sponsorship was born, driven by the mass penetration of television and broadcasters’ simultaneous discovery of sport as premium entertainment content. Brands, naturally, followed. Subsequently there have been three major evolutions of sponsorship, and we are now at the start of the fourth, which is in many ways the most exciting and far-reaching yet.

In the first evolution, in the 1960s and ’70s, sponsorship was a dark art: a minority activity among brands and, inevitably given its newness, more than anything a leap of faith. The sell was all about how much on-screen coverage you could achieve for a logo. Tobacco led the way by embracing motor racing and just about every other sport, and stadium naming rights deals in the USA began to multiply.

History is made at the 1968 South African Grand Prix with the first fully-liveried tobacco-sponsored F1 cars, for Winston's Gunston brand

And as with every evolution of sponsorship, this type is still very much around today: the architect of Emirates’ sponsorship strategy, Mike Simon, for example, freely admitted a few years ago that Emirates’ sponsorship strategy was totally predicated on how many media impressions a sponsorship achieved.

The second evolution began in the late 1970s, when Horst Dassler and Patrick Nally created the multi-sponsor event model for the FIFA World Cup, and sold it to Coca-Cola. The IOC followed, so did just about every other major event organiser in sports, and the model became the template for how most sponsorship is still sold today.

Coca-Cola's pioneering sponsorship of the 1978 World Cup created the template for brand partnerships with major events

In the third evolution, which began in the 1990s, sponsorship took off and brands got strategic about it. Sponsorship was everywhere, if you did it right it worked, and if you weren’t doing it – especially if you were a global brand – your competitors almost certainly were. This drove intense competition for key assets and big increases in rights fees. Sponsorship became seriously big business, so big business began to think and act seriously about sponsorship. QED: by the end of the ’90s, for the first time, you could see brands beginning to adopt global sponsorship strategies based on platforms rather than on individual sponsorships. When I look back at this shift, I think in particular of Nike and they way they planned and activated football worldwide, and of Red Bull, who created a global portfolio of owned assets to drive their brand USP. Familiar behaviour now, but very new at the time.

Red Bull Stratos was the latest episode in Red Bull's long term global brand activation strategy

I believe the fourth evolution of sponsorship has started, and that it’s the social evolution, in two senses. First, in only a few short years, social media has come from nowhere to play a starring role in the sponsorship mix. It is transforming consumer behaviour and brand marketing strategies, especially around sponsorship, with an impact not seen since the advent of TV. Second, the ability of sponsorship to help brands drive and showcase their social responsibility programmes is now everywhere you look in the sponsorship landscape. And it’s no coincidence that these are simultaneous developments, because there is increasing evidence to suggest that social media is accelerating brands’ social behaviour.

When we look back at this fourth evolution, I believe that London 2012 will be seen as a defining moment of these two seismic forces in action in a big way together for the first time: the transformation of Olympic and Paralympic Games marketing in the shape of the Socialympics (a term Synergy coined back in February which subsequently went viral globally) coming together with an unprecedented array of activities by the Games’ sponsors to use sport, through the Olympic and Paralympic Games, for social good.

Welcome to the evolution.

By Tim Crow on December 13th, 2012

Tags: Brand marketing, Default, London 2012, Naming Rights, New Product Development, Olympic sponsorship, Social Media, Socialympics, Sponsorship, Synergy, Television

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There were two things I loved about last night’s Sweden v England football international.

The first was of course Zlatan Ibrahimovich’s incredible fourth goal (at 3:28 here), footage of which went viral at the speed of light and is still trending on Twitter over 12 hours later as I write this.

The second will generate only a fraction of the buzz, but deserves to garner just as much: this is the brilliant decision by Swedbank, sponsor of the new Swedish national stadium which last night’s match helped to inaugurate, to re-name the stadium The Friends Arena to publicise the anti-bullying organisation Friends which Swedbank supports. Here’s a great interview with Swedbank’s CEO and the Founder of Friends about the idea.

I take my hat off to Swedbank for their generosity, for their sponsorship innovation and for their conviction that doing good is good for business: all fundamental aspects of the new social era of sponsorship that we’ve identified over the past couple of years - see for example Carsten’s blog from September last year, specifically the B of ABCDE in this context - and which I’ll be writing more about in the next few weeks.

I also hope that Swedbank’s innovation will kick-start a new model for naming rights sponsorship.

As I mentioned at yesterday’s Think! Sponsorship conference panel on the subject, there are above all two key value drivers for naming rights sponsors. One is the value of the media impressions generated by the brand/arena name – the traditional focus behind most brand investment in the area. The other, pioneered by O2 at The O2, is to use the arena primarily as a brand experience, which Nuala Donnelly of O2 re-iterated during our discussion at yesterday’s panel.

What Swedbank has opened up is a third front in naming rights: a showcase for a brand’s social commitment, building on the model created (and now sadly abandoned) by Barcelona gifting its shirt front to UNICEF.

Wouldn’t it be brilliant if we saw a new wave of naming rights sponsorships gifted by brands to their cause partners. Great for society, great for business, and great for sponsorship.

By Tim Crow on November 15th, 2012

Tags: Brand marketing, Default, Football Sponsorship, Naming Rights, PR, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Sponsorship consultants, Synergy Loves

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Last night’s brilliantly entertaining Real Madrid versus Manchester City UEFA Champions League match also showcased one of the easiest – but most costly – mistakes in the sports marketing playbook, by new Champions League sponsor Gazprom. The design of their ad boards was so poor that you couldn’t actually discern the three Gazprom brand logos, as this shot illustrates (sorry about the quality – all my own work).

How did this happen? Because corporate identity guidelines got in the way.

Someone should have said: ”Hang the corporate guidelines around the way we reproduce our logo. We’ve bought a very expensive Champions League sponsorship. A lot of the value we’ll get back will be generated by brand exposure on TV. So let’s maximise the visibility of our brand on TV by making the logo as big and as visible as possible. That’s why all the other sponsors do it. We should do the same.”

Someone should also have said: “Let’s do a camera test and see how visible our logo is using this design.”

And maybe someone from UEFA should have said: “Guys are you sure about this?”

Maybe some or all of these things have happened. Maybe they haven’t.

But for Gazprom’s sake, I hope they do, soon – and that someone does something about it. I hate to see so much sponsorship money going to waste.

No doubt there’ll be people from Gazprom at Stamford Bridge tonight. Maybe their old friend Roman Abramovich can have a word…

By Tim Crow on September 19th, 2012

Tags: Advertising, Default, Football, Football Sponsorship, Sponsorship, Television, UEFA Champions League

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A revealing statistic from an interview with the IOC’s Marketing Director Timo Lumme in this month’s SportBusiness:

‘The sheer volume of [London 2012] sponsor activity presented challenges, particularly for the team responsible for signing-off on the use of Olympic marks and imagery. This time around they had to deal with 25,000 different partner activations, that is more than double the number for Beijing.’

More than double. And this despite Beijing 2008 having 12 TOP sponsors to London’s 11.

Assuming that Timo is only talking about TOPs, that works out at an average of around 2,500 activations per TOP for London 2012 versus an average of around 1,000 for Beijing 2008. Remarkable. Why did this happen and what conclusions can we draw?

I’d suggest three in particular.

1. China Crisis. Owing to China’s human rights record, Beijing 2008 was highly controversial, with the Torch Relay in particular the target for headline-making worldwide protests, which subsequently led to the IOC restricting the Relay to the host country from 2010. As a consequence, many Olympic partners were understandably reluctant to run Beijing-themed global promotions and concentrated their efforts inside China.

London 2012, in marked contrast, presented no such issues, with many sponsors, for example Coca-Cola’s ‘Move To The Beat’ campaign, making London the thematic centrepiece of global campaigns. Result? Far more sponsor activity around London than around Beijing.

We concluded that for the first time social media would be one of the Games sponsors’ key activation channels, which was subsequently borne out by the explosion of social activity during London 2012. This would seem to be the second major factor behind the upweight in TOP activation.

3. Procter & Gamble. New to the TOP programme for London 2012, P&G created a veritable storm of activity around the Games, to the extent that at times it felt impossible to avoid. Crucially, however, in this context, they activated not just around the P&G corporate brand (the strategy for which I’ve written about before, for example here and here) but globally across 34 of their brands.

By Tim Crow on September 11th, 2012

Tags: Beijing 2008, Default, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Olympic Torch Relay, Olympics, Rio 2016, Rio 2016 Sponsorship, Rio 2016 Sponsorship Consultants, Sochi 2014, Socialympics, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultants, Team GB, Vancouver 2010

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Think you know the slogans and straplines of the London 2012 sponsors and organisers? Did you even know them in the first place? Well, here’s your chance to test your knowledge – and the effectiveness of a lot of heavyweight marketing.

We’ve created this (entirely unofficial) crossword featuring the IOC, IPC and LOCOG slogans, and the campaign straplines of the Games’ global and domestic tier one sponsors.

View and download it here and test your knowledge. And if there are a lot of London 2012 experts in your office, why not challenge them to a speed test?

We defy you to complete it without Googling (especially 19 across and 22 across).

But when you do, you’ll find you have not just a completed crossword, but a London 2012 word cloud.

Enjoy.

By Tim Crow on August 30th, 2012

Tags: Advertising, Brand marketing, Default, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship, Olympics, Paralympics, Rio 2016, Sponsorship

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There is a large group of Olympic sponsors whose primary objective over the next 17 days is to be brilliant, but invisible: the companies who provide vital Games Time services.

For brands like Atos (IT), BT (communications), Cisco (networks), Omega (timing) and UPS (logistics) the starter’s pistol on their sponsorship fires today. Everything they have done previously has mattered only in being preparation for this point. And if they make headlines in the next 17 days, it will be for one reason only: the Games being badly affected by a problem with their services.

To illustrate the point, all I need to write is G4S. Until a few weeks ago, G4S was familiar only to the big public and private sector buyers of its services, and was hoping to use London 2012 as a showcase to that small but highly lucrative audience. Now, of course, G4S is a household name because it failed to deliver, and the resulting fall-out has been calamitous for its reputation and share price.

In this space, it pays to be invisible. Get it right, and you have a trump card case study in the high-stakes world of big B2B contracts: “If we can do this for the Olympics, the biggest most complex event in the world, imagine what we can do for you.” Get it wrong and you’re where G4S is right now.

All of which reveals other aspects of the widely misunderstood Olympic sponsorship model, and why sponsorship is far more important to the Olympics than is commonly perceived.

The media convey the impression that the Olympic sponsorship model is the same as World Cup sponsorship and the like – a small group of consumer brands paying big money only for marketing rights.

The reality is very different. The Olympic sponsorship model is actually a giant joint venture, with the IOC and the local organising committee outsourcing critical expertise from multiple partners.

Because the Games is the world’s biggest and most complex peacetime operation, it takes far more to deliver it than pure cash. This Atos Olympics ad evokes that perfectly.

That’s why there are so many Olympic sponsors, and why the majority are B2B brands – although every Olympic sponsor, B2C brands included, provides important products and services as part of its sponsorship, without which the Games couldn’t happen.  

And it’s why the majority of Games sponsorship is delivered in the form of ‘value in kind’ (VIK) products and services that are budget-relieving. In the modern era, VIK has consistently contributed the majority of domestic Games sponsorship, and I expect LOCOG’s final accounts to show VIK at 60% of its £700m domestic sponsorship total.

So if you’re ever tempted to join the vociferous chorus of those who criticise Olympic sponsorship, ask yourself this: if the sponsors weren’t there, contributing so importantly behind the scenes, how else would the Greatest Show On Earth be as big and brilliant as it is going to be, once again, in London?

By Tim Crow on July 27th, 2012

Tags: Beijing 2008, Default, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Olympic Torch Relay, Olympics, Rio 2016, Sochi 2014, Socialympics, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Team GB, Vancouver 2010

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Having been privileged to experience numerous Olympic Games at first hand, it’s been especially fascinating to watch my hometown move into Games Time for the first time. As always there have been many similarities with other Games: the highly choreographed sequence of events doesn’t vary too much from Games to Games, or the way the media and public reacts. But there have been differences.

In looking at this, I thought I’d take Vancouver 2010 as my point of reference, because there was much more to learn from open, democratic Vancouver than from closed, autocratic Beijing about how the Games would play out with consumers and the media in London.

So, here’s my take on the similarities and differences between Games Time Vancouver and Games Time London.

1. The Weather

We both obsessed about the weather. In Vancouver, it was all about the snow – or rather, the lack of it. And it never came. Whereas in London of course, it was all about the rain, which looks finally and blessedly to have been replaced by sunshine, and lots of it. At least for now…

2. The Scepticism

As in every Olympic host nation, the “Is It Worth It?’ debate raged long and hard in both Canada and the UK, with the naysayers - led by an overly sceptical national media – shouting loudest. And in both markets, the last week pre-Games saw the national mood move into optimism, reflecting - finally – the huge regional positivity surrounding the Torch Relay everywhere it went.

3. The Nerves

Again as in every host nation, the nerves about being able to successfully stage the world’s biggest event in the full glare of the world’s attention were never far away. The final verdict on Vancouver was that it was a great Games. London will be hoping for at least the same – with the help of, in particular, the weather, the transport and the security, as well as the sport. 

4. The Opening Ceremony

The Opening Ceremony becomes the focus of debate on ceremony day itself. What’s it going to be like? Are the rumours true? Who will light the cauldron? All these questions and more fuel a massive national debate and – immediately afterwards and into the next day – an ever bigger global debate centred on one, single question: was it any good? (See also The Nerves). As it was in Vancouver, so it will be in London.

5. The Socialympics

After closed Beijing, the impact of social media on the Games became a big issue in Vancouver. In London, with social media having gone mainstream globally, it’s already a huge factor – as we were the first to demonstrate and debate back in February during Social Media Week London.

6. The Home Team

A big difference here. Whereas in the UK we’ve been quietly confident about equalling Beijing’s record haul across a range of sports, in Canada only one medal, and one event, really counted: the ice hockey (a national obsession) and the gold – which Canada memorably won at the last gasp, creating wild, joyous (and not a little relieved) national celebrations.

Let’s hope London has moments like those in the next couple of weeks. Enjoy the Games.

By Tim Crow on July 26th, 2012

Tags: Beijing 2008, Default, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, Mobile, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Olympic Torch Relay, Olympics, Sochi 2014, Social Media, Socialympics, Sponsorship, Synergy, Team GB, Twitter, Vancouver 2010

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In my Jubilympics post last week I wrote about how important the London 2012 Olympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies were going to be in shaping both Britain’s and the world’s view of what it is to be British, and how well the Olympics plays the suspense card by never revealing which acts will be playing at said shindigs.

Opening Ceremony Artistic Director Danny Boyle didn’t disappoint in either regard at his press conference this morning. Here’s Owen Gibson of the Guardian’s take:

‘While the show will open with a rural pastoral vision that evokes William Blake and Jerusalem, it is expected to evolve to take on a more urban hue. Boyle said he would not reveal how the “puzzle fits together” as the show evolved. He also refused to confirm any of the acts that will take part, although Sir Paul McCartney has already confirmed his involvement and the likes of Take That and The Who are also expected to feature. But the director underlined that it was not a musical show but a narrative set to music. Underworld have already recorded two lengthy tracks at Abbey Road to score the action. The closing ceremony will be a more traditional celebration of British music. Boyle had already revealed that the three-hour opening ceremony would be titled Isles of Wonder, a title based on a speech by Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest that will be referenced throughout the four ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.’

In the same vein, the latest in a series of breadcrumb stories about a James Bond Opening Ceremony spectacular ‘broke’ this weekend.

What a tease…although to be fair Danny did definitively resolve another point I made in last week’s post: it will rain at the Opening Ceremony, because he’s going to make it. Here he is again, later in the same Guardian piece above:

‘Boyle also teased that there would “real clouds” hanging over the stadium but refused to elaborate. “They will be real clouds that will be hanging over the stadium. Work that out if you can. We know we’re an island culture and an island climate. One of these clouds will provide rain on the evening, just in case it doesn’t rain.”‘

By Tim Crow on June 12th, 2012

Tags: Brand marketing, Content, Default, Diamond Jubilee, Experiential marketing, Film, London 2012, Olympic sponsorship, Olympics, Public relations

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