Sponsorship is dead, long live sponsorship

Those of you who are regular readers of Synopsis may have spotted a pattern. The lead articles are not Synergy’s random musings but rather the building blocks of a bigger story about the new rules of sponsorship.

But before we get to the rules, a little bit of context. Like all marketing disciplines, sponsorship has evolved over time…but every now and then, there is a paradigm shift which generates an explosion of innovation and introduces a completely new way of acting. Excitingly, we have entered one of these new eras – the 4th Era of Sponsorship.

Below is a rough timeline of how the Sponsorship Industry has evolved. There is never a clear line in the sand to separate the various eras (and of course there are always sponsorship programmes that are ahead of their time), but to keep things simple, they can be broadly separated into decades.

1970s: The Dark Art

The very beginnings of the sponsorship industry were characterised by informal deals done on a handshake in smoke-filled rooms — often literally smoke-filled, as much of the early days of sponsorship were driven by cigarette brands putting their brand on the side of fast cars to circumvent advertising restrictions.

1980s – 1990s: Off-the-Peg

Patrick Nally is credited as being the founding father of modern sponsorship. His ground-breaking partnership deal with Coca-Cola for the 1978 FIFA World Cup effectively ‘invented’ the concept of a rights package. This has set the template for how sponsorships have been packaged and sold by rightsholders ever since.

2000s: Tailored

Brands started to become much more sophisticated and proactive in terms of how they approached sponsorship. No longer was it thought of as a collection of off-the-shelf rights or as a separate marketing channel, but rather as an asset that could be integrated into the overall marketing mix and used to increase the effectiveness of the brand’s marketing activity.

2010: Social

The 4th Era is the “Social Era” for two reasons. Firstly, it has been enabled by social media which has allowed people (and brands) with shared interests to engage with each other at a scale and depth that has never before been possible. Social also refers to a sense of ‘Higher Purpose’ – the ability of a sponsorship programme to connect with its audience by delivering something that really matters.

The Rules of the Social Era

Moving to the Social Era has changed the game of sponsorship and everyone can benefit from knowing the new rules. We have analysed hundreds of best practice case studies from the world of sponsorship and beyond to identify and codify the keys to success in the Social Era.

We have been examining these new rules one by one over the past 5 months but now it is time to bring them all together.

It’s as easy as ABCDE…

Rule 1: Authenticity

Endorses for Courses by Jon Izzard

The best sponsorship programmes, the ones that really resonate with the audience, feel completely natural. The brand simply feels at home in the space. Think of Red Bull and extreme sports, Cartier and Polo, Robinsons and Wimbledon, Unicef and FC Barcelona, Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games, Moët & Chandon and F1. There are loads of sources of authenticity: products, geography, heritage, brand message and simple longevity.

Some brands have to work hard to establish authenticity in a given space, but it is imperative that they do because the very audience that a sponsor is trying to connect with can see through an imposter straight away. Skoda’s sponsorship of the Tour de France provides a great example of a brand working hard to establish credibility in a space where its source of credibility may not be immediately obvious.  Brilliant:

Rule 2: Beyond your Brand

What Can Sponsorship Learn from Farmville by Liz Brown

Sponsorship is about a brand becoming a natural part of their customers’ lives — but the audience needs a reason to invite a brand into their lives.  Brands that view the relationship with their audience as a one-way value exchange and think only in terms of “what will we get out of it”, have no chance of forming the kind of relationship they want. Again, there are a number of ways that brands can demonstrate “Beyond your Brand” thinking, focusing on delivering benefits to their customers (O2 Priority), the property (Converse and London’s 100 Club) and society as a whole (RBS RugbyForce).

Rule 3: Content

Is Content Really King by Ben Wilkinson

Consumers want to learn, laugh, discover, share, be entertained and be inspired.  And they want to do all these things around topics that are of specific interest to them.  That is what sponsorship allows you to do: create relevant content around your audience’s passion points.  But brands have to be creative to capture attention — posting a video of “talking heads” on YouTube and hoping for the best is not enough.  Great content is about innovation.  It’s about finding something that connects and resonates with your audience and providing it how they want it, when they want it and where they want it.

Our favourite example of this is Converse Domaination — a campaign that not only puts great content at its heart but also shows a perfect understanding of its audience.  Enjoy.

Rule 4: Dialogue

D is for Dialogue by Carsten Thode

Talking to each other, sharing ideas, working together, creating things, discovering  new stuff,  having fun, laughing, crying, flirting, arguing – everything that makes life worth living is built on our ability to actively engage with each other. Why should that be different from the relationships we build with the brands in our lives?

Yet for most of its history, marketing has been pretty much a one-way conversation where brands tell you what they want you to know and the customer has no way of talking back.  However, the digital age, and particularly the social media age, has smashed through the barrier separating brands from their consumers.

Now it is possible to source brilliant ideas from your customers such as Pepsi Refresh and GE Ecomagination, or to tailor your marketing in real-time to reflect input from your customers. The Old Spice Man is a classic case in point of how much more engaging the conversation becomes if you give your customers a voice.

Rule 5: Entertainment

Passion Pointers by Tom Gladstone

Sport has a particular ability to evoke strong emotions through its personal stories of courage, inspiration and determination; through its inherent unpredictability, excitement and drama. Those emotions are an essential component of successful sponsorship – and are as relevant across other sponsorship platforms (music, film, fashion, art) as they are in sport. Harness the emotions correctly, and your consumers will add the catalyst of conversation.

But while simply being visible within a passion point might increase the chances of getting noticed, it doesn’t win a place in consumers’ hearts. There has to be active emotional involvement, not just proximity or presence — engagement not impressions. Whether brands capitalise on moments of high emotion or they tap into the core emotional sensibility of the passion point, anchored in anticipation, pride, patriotism, celebration, or even pain, they all need to exhibit genuine empathy and understanding.

This rule is articulated nicely by Mark Harrison, Chair of the Canadian Sponsorship Forum: ‘You can’t manufacture emotion. It’s already there. When you find it – just find a way to trigger it; tap into it; fuel it; and watch it grow into something remarkable.’

Using ABCDE

ABCDE is not a menu, where you can choose one or two elements to focus on. Rather, a great sponsorship programme will deliver against all the rules of the 4th Era.

Obviously, this framework isn’t rocket science, but at Synergy, we have found it to be incredibly useful as we advise our clients at every point of the sponsorship process.  We use it not only as a kind of checklist to diagnose where we are strong and where we need to work harder but also to ensure that all elements of the sponsorship programme - from creating the strategy and identifying the right assets right through to the activation – deliver the ABCDE.  So, before signing off, here are a few ways that it can be used to make your sponsorship programmes even more powerful:

1. Articulate specifically how you are using sponsorship to deliver all elements of ABCDE. Sponsorship strategies should use deep audience insight and a clear understanding of the business and brand to ensure that you are using sponsorship as effectively as possible in the 4th Era

2. When making the decision to acquire a new sponsorship asset, make sure that there is a concrete plan in place to deliver the ABCDE. Use it as part of the screening process and answer questions like: “What gives my brand authenticity in this space? How can I build or acquire authenticity?”  “What is the higher purpose of the sponsorship?  How are we adding value?”

3. When creating activation plans, be specific about which elements of ABCDE you need to focus on and how you will be able to deliver them.  For example: “How can we stimulate dialogue amongst our audience?  What role should our brand play in that conversation”

4. Factor ABCDE into your measurement. Create specific targets around each element and evaluate your success at achieving them.  Where do you have to work harder?

© Synergy Sponsorship a trading division of Engine Partners UK LLP 2011.  All rights reserved

By Carsten Thode on September 1st, 2011

Tags: Advertising, Brand marketing, Branded content, Communications, community, Consultancy, Content, Default, Design, Digital marketing, Event management consultants, Event management service, Experiential marketing, Food & Drink, Football Sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Sponsorship consultants, Sport, Synergy, Synergy Loves, Synopsis, Twitter, Viral Marketing

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With the hot topic of getting more people of all ages active in the UK, a campaign produced by Nike in Amsterdam recently caught my eye that really injected ‘fun’ into running.

What happened?

At the end of last year, Nike began its Take Mokum campaign (Mokum being the nickname for Amsterdam). This campaign was launched in conjunction with the Nike Run House in Amsterdam and looked to blend running with creativity in a way that encouraged people to run. To emphasise this desired relationship between creativity and running, Nike, as the world’s leading running brand, bravely used the concept that ‘running is boring’ as the big idea to this campaign.

Now I agree with this concept that running is boring. I say this because running is an activity that the majority of people take up in order to achieve a desired goal, usually weight loss, improved fitness or improved health. It is very seldom that someone speaks of the fun they have when pounding the pavements of their city. The Take Mokum campaign therefore looked to create a different reason, away from health, for society to get running.

Nike identified the creative segment of society, the segment usually associated with self-expression through music (hip-hop), design and art (graffiti), as a segment that would be receptive to the idea of a new, fun ulterior motive to run. Nike decided to appeal to this segments passion of self-expression and sense of underground culture while encouraging them to get out on the streets running. This is how Take Mokum was born.

Take Mokum gave people the chance to create a graffiti image of a running route around Amsterdam. These images ranged from a butterfly to a skull and could be constructed and shared with friends across various social media platforms, including Facebook. Allow this video to explain Take Mokum to you.

Why we like it

We like Nike’s Take Mokum campaign due to its creative approach in appealing to the passion points of Amsterdam’s youth in order to encourage them to get running. Nike has successfully incorporated a fun and creative solution to a campaign that’s primary goal is to increase youth participation in inner city running. In doing so it has brought authenticity to the perception that Nike is not just a running brand, but rather a lifestyle brand that allows you to express the individual you are – all while sharing it with your friends on Facebook.

Over the six-week period that the campaign ran, 9,000 people signed up and the app achieved 14,500 Likes on Facebook.  This may not sound that impressive initially but when considering  that Amsterdam’s population is relatively small (767,000), and that the 9000 Take Mokum runners would have acted as Nike ambassadors, it creates, by immersing itself in the consumer’s world, engaging conversations both on and off line around the Nike brand.

By Mike Russell on July 26th, 2011

Tags: Art & Design, Athletics, Brand marketing, community, Default, Design, Experiential marketing, Public relations, Running, Social Media, Sport, Synergy Loves, Synopsis

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When I was eight years old, my Dad took me on my first museum outing – the Imperial War Museum in London – and a day climbing over and into tanks and cannons was as close to boyhood nirvana as it got. Ever since then, I’ve had a borderline obsession with museums.

From dinosaurs to ancient rocks to scrolls – you show it, I’ll walk round it (although given half a chance I’ll still climb on it). Social media sites like Facebook are as close to a personal museum as you can get, you curate your own life and share it with the world. So Intel’s taken a clever but natural next step for natural egoists like me by creating the ‘Museum of Me’.

It’s really an advert for Intel’s Core i5 processor but wrapped up in an involving way. It’s simple – you give permission for it to lift directly from your Facebook page and it then takes you on a virtual tour of a museum dedicated to you using photos, video and comments already on your page.

After moving through a mixture of gallery rooms dedicated to yourself with virtual people looking on, it culminates in a montage shot of your profile picture made up from all the shots on your page.

OK, being honest, I found parts of it a tad creepy due to the entirely random nature of it. For example an ex featured prominently throughout while my wife didn’t get a look in. In addition, I thought their opening line of ‘this exhibition is a journey of visualisation that explores who I am’ mixed with the emotive music tries to take it to a depth lost on me. But overall I thought as an interactive advert that taps into the core fundamentals of social media (narcissism) it was a very clever piece of work.

It’s simple, requiring minimal input for decent reward; it’s highly sharable and it works on a principle of a brand encouraging rather than dictating user behaviour. Most importantly, it fundamentally showcases Intel’s tagline perfectly –‘Visibly Smart’ and has over half a million likes so far.

Given a choice, I’d probably still rather climb over a tank but as a Museum I can visit in 30 seconds from my laptop it works.

By Dominic Curran on June 17th, 2011

Tags: Advertising, Art & Design, community, Default, Design, Facebook, Media, Online communities, Public relations, Social Media, Synergy, Synergy Loves, The Arts, Viral Marketing

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Ballantine’s 12 (the twelve-year-old aged brand of Ballantine’s, the world’s number two whisky) wanted to own an engaging PR property that would help its markets generate PR at a local level  – bringing to life the Ballantine’s 12 creative territory of “…leaves an impression by taking you BEYOND”.

Rising to the challenge, Synergy devised the first ever Art of BEYOND bar(above) for Ballantine’s 12, designed to combine a media launch with a whisky education for all guests.  Our role included creating the concept, developing a list of potential artists, commissioning and managing the artists during the design phase and installation process, guest and event management during the unveiling and creating a PR activation toolkit to send out to markets to inspire them to create their own Art of BEYOND events locally.

Ballantine’s commissioned six top European artists and designers (L-R below: Jovo Bozhinovski, Laurent Louyer, Luis Gallussi, Lee Broom, Oskar Zieta, Rolf Sachs – with Ballantine’s ambassador Fredrik Olsson) from different disciplines to each create a different element of the concept bar. It was crucial that the artists resonnated with the brand’s key markets such as Bulgaria, Poland, France and Spain, and that their very individual designs worked together to form a cohesive, BEYOND concept.

Bulgaria’s Jovo Bozhinovski (below) was responsible for creating the floor to represent the landmass of Scotland, home of Ballantine’s, as a shimmering puddle of water and therefore create the illusion of a bar that is literally melting.

Lee Broom created the bar stools (below), influenced by old-fashioned cut glass and crystal decanters with a youthful twist, reflecting the brand heritage perfectly.

Creatmosphere, the creative lighting studio, used artistc lighting (below) to hide and reveal the individual elements of the installation and create the ambience within the Art of BEYOND bar.

Spanish based artist Luis Galliussi was responsible for the wall design (below) where he used trompe l’oeil effects with the Ballantine’s logo.

Rolf Sachs (below) designed a new glass for the Ballantine’s 12 Art of BEYOND Bar called Double Take. The surface of the whisky glass was frosted and included reversed text which could only be clearly read when the contents of the glass had been drunk and the mirrored coaster accompanying the glass had been used, revealing the Ballantine’s 12 Year Old brand manifesto.

Poland’s Oskar Zieta was responsible for creating the actual bar (below).  Using his patented method of inflating steel he created a bar which resembled a pile of icecubes.

To add to the experience, Fredrik Olsson, Ballantine’s 12 Year Old ambassador, created a series of Art of BEYOND cocktails inspired by the work of the artists for guests to enjoy.

By all accounts the event was a huge success. As well as press coverage on the event, an extensive library of stock photography and video footage was secured and created a base for Ballantine’s to build on both in the art world and across all of its global markets.

By Lydia Oates on April 20th, 2011

Tags: Alcohol, Art & Design, Brand marketing, Communications, Design, Food & Drink, PR, Synergy, Synopsis

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The London 2012 velodrome was officially unveiled on Tuesday to universal media acclaim. Quite right too: it is a stunning creation. The media coverage also confirmed that the velodrome has already acquired a widespread media nickname because of its distinctive roof: the Pringle.

To those of us who work in Olympic marketing, this is more than somewhat ironic. Without paying a penny, courtesy of the media,  Pringles has annexed a priceless piece of Olympic real estate.

Famously, the IOC keeps the Olympics as a spectacle free of brand names and presence: this is key to the Games’ DNA. Not that the spectacle actually is brand-free of course. There are the equipment manufacturers’ logos on every athlete’s clothing and footwear, and the branding and clocks of the official timekeeper Omega are very visible. But it’s pretty close.

This ban on branding extends to all buildings used for Olympic events. Thus, for the period of the Games, the O2 will be de-branded and given a neutral name. Whatever it’s called, we’ll all still call it ‘The O2’ of course: you can’t turn the clock back. But BT, and none of the other London 2012 sponsors, wouldn’t have signed up without this type of protection – and let’s not forget the global and domestic sponsors are together providing close to £2billion – 18% – of London 2012’s funding.

Which brings me to the second irony: the Pringles brand is actually owned by one of the global sponsors of the Olympics, Procter & Gamble. What a nice bonus this is for them: it will be interesting to see if they take extra advantage of their good fortune.

So, will ‘The Pringle’ stick? Will it spread from a media nickname (coined by PA reporter Helen William, according to this blog by BBC London’s Olympics Correspondent Adrian Warner) into the consumer mainstream? Only time will tell.

One thing’s for sure: if the powers that be decide, as expected, to sell the naming rights to the velodrome after the Games, I have a feeling I know who they’ll call first.

By Tim Crow on February 23rd, 2011

Tags: Brand marketing, Cycling, Default, Design, London 2012, London 2012 sponsorship, London 2012 sponsorship consultants, Naming Rights, Olympic sponsorship, Olympic sponsorship consultants, Olympics, Sponsorship, Team GB

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By Jessica Enoch on October 20th, 2010

Tags: Brand marketing, Default, Design, Fashion, Tennis

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Anyone watching Newsnight this week may have caught the interesting feature on popular design website Information is Beautiful. For the uninitiated amongst you, the site is the brainchild of David McCandless, who describes himself as “an independent data journalist and information designer…interested in how designed information can help us understand the world”.

With nods to the seminal philosopher and statistician Otto Neurath, whose motto, “words divide, images unite”, led him to design an icon-based language to express quantitative information, Information is Beautiful presents a fascinating series of visualisations, a distillation of democratised data, if you will. In a world where we’re constantly struggling under the weight of statistics, news, opinion, video – not to mention a healthy measure of total junk – McCandless questions whether there’s a compelling means of simplifying, and in some way better understanding the constant stream of facts and figures routinely presented to us by the media.

This mission led to one of IIB’s most famous designs, The Billion Dollar-o-Gram, an exercise in quantifying the unquantifiable: I mean, what does $1billion really mean to anyone?

It was inevitable that this project would attract the attention of the media, with sites such as The Guardian’s Datablog providing a ready outlet for data and stats with a journalistic hook, that can be represented in a new and appealing way.

Mr McCandless’s appearance on Newsnight was certainly a little different, as you might expect, with host Kirsty Wark and guest, respected designer Neville Brody, critiquing McCandless’s previous assertion that visualisations had the potential to offer new insights into the politics of the world around us.

The debate’s well-worth watching, even if it involves the somewhat unjust intellectual skewering of Mr McCandless by the Brody-Wark duo, whose main argument is that designs such as those found on IIB, whilst beguiling and attractive, are likely to oversimplify the deeper issues behind the information from which they are drawn. We might feel slightly cleverer, but we aren’t necessarily any better informed; the designs are knowing, without necessarily imparting knowledge.

It was an awkward paradox for McCandless, as, by the nature of his work, he is bound by the information he illustrates, restricted to those nuggets that lend themselves to visual representation, however clever or imaginative the resultant images are.

Interpretation is all important, with IIB less about blind acceptance than mental stimulus: if it forces you to find out more, it’s achieved a goal.

Other examples of this include the excellent online resource Wordle – a word-cloud generator, which can quickly deliver images like…

Whilst certainly a valuable tool in linguistic sifting, it’s hardly something upon which you’d base an entire opinion. Instead this presents us with a means of examining the patterns in a complicated world, rather than explaining them.

Similarly, the online project ‘We Feel Fine’ – also referenced in the Newsnight report – is a resource as alluring as it is technically impressive. Scouring the global social media landscape every 10 minutes for any posts starting with the words “I am feeling…” or “I feel…”, the output is a demographically configurable snapshot of sentiment. Emotion trending, perhaps. The organic, transient and in many ways fickle nature of social media updates questions this as a means of truly tracking the mood of a nation, but it certainly offers food for thought.

There’ll always be a précis, a Cliffs Notes, an elevator pitch or edit to help us cope with today’s crowded and clouded data-stream – the impetus on us is to question, examine the bigger picture, ensure that visualisations such as those of David McCandless serve as cues to curiousity. It’s not just a design, but an invitation to explore the numbers, opinions, testimony, photos and history surrounding an issue, all accessible via a few extra clicks of the mouse.

Information might be beautiful; integration is essential.

By Jonathan Izzard on August 17th, 2010

Tags: Design, Media, Online communities, Social Media, Television

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