Traditionally, November is the sponsorship industry’s conference time of year. Last week’s Future Sponsorship conference in Brussels is now well-established as a gathering of the great and the good in the industry and, as its name suggests, where the future is discussed. This year was no different.
The first question on most people’s lips was “how will the sponsorship industry be affected by the credit crunch?”
My answer was, and is, that the sponsorship industry will be affected, just like all other industries and it’s short sighted to pretend otherwise. Budgets will be trimmed, cuts will be made and everyone will be squeezed in one way or another.
But the industry is far better placed than it was during the last major downturn in the 1990s. Then, only some marketers were convinced that sponsorship worked. As a consultancy, we were still busy educating companies on the benefits of sponsorship and showing them that it worked.
Now, we spend little, if any, time persuading marketing directors that money will be effectively spent on sponsorship – they’re already convinced. They have numerous examples for reference and it’s pleasing to note that they are considering sponsorship in their current and future strategies as a matter of course.
Increasingly, sponsorship is being asked to provide tangible business benefits. And, thank goodness, it can, because now is the time when proof is needed that marketing expenditure can indeed put money on the bottom line.
A great deal of time is spent within the industry discussing precisely how that proof should be declared. Unlike the advertising or PR industries, sponsorship has no universally-agreed evaluation system, arguing as it does that sponsorship’s success depends upon objectives set at the outset. The difficulty (or, as many argue, the advantage) being that these objectives can be immensely varied and, therefore, results need to be individually tracked. Thus a universal system is both impractical if not impossible.
I’ve always argued that sponsorship’s marketing advantage is its flexibility; the fact that it can solve a multitude of business challenges.
But I came away from Future Sponsorship thinking that it would be in the industry’s interest if it can make itself bullet-proof against accusations of non-accountability, especially in this economic downturn.
By Karen Earl on December 2nd, 2008
Tags: Brand marketing, Public relations, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy





