When people find out I work in sponsorship, I always get asked two things:

1. Do you have any decent tickets?
2. Do you have any decent gossip?

There was a time when I had plenty of the latter and little of the former. Unfortunately these days my gossip is about as revealing as a Tiger Woods press conference. The reasons for this are twofold due to changes that have happened over the last few years.

Firstly, the lines between sportsman and celebrity have blurred. Any star worth their salt should now be able to change their first name to ‘Brand’ and sound believable – think Brand Beckham, Brand Murray, Brand Schumacher. Could you ever imagine Brand Botham or Best?

The worlds of sport and entertainment celebrity, or ‘Sportainment’ as it’s naturally called in America, are now firmly linked and in more then a few cases by marriage (or separation). This means you become a front page story rather then a back page one, especially if it’s for the wrong reasons.

Secondly, and this is the significant recent change, with the rapid rise of digital and social media our appetite for instant news and our ability to create it has never been so strong.

Sports stars and clubs themselves are in on the act – basketball player, Shaquille O’Neal has a whopping 2.8 million twitter followers, while Barcelona FC has 1.3 million Facebook friends – but the real control lies with the person on the street.

After Tiger’s conference (streamed live on YouTube), we didn’t need to wait for the papers’ reaction the next day to gauge public opinion – in just the hour after there were over 93,000 tweets about it.

The headlines of Messrs Cole, Terry and Woods show us that the sports stars haven’t really changed – in fact the only surprise is that Tiger kept it quiet so long. The change is that now they are considered fair game by both a salivating media and an unforgiving public able to influence and drive the agenda. This means there few secrets that don’t come out eventually – or in other words not a good time to be straying from home.

Oh and before you ask – no I don’t have any tickets to the World Cup, Wimbledon or The FA Cup Final. No change there then.

By Dominic Curran on March 2nd, 2010

Tags: Andy Murray, David Beckham, FA Cup, Facebook, Public relations, Sponsorship, Tiger Woods, YouTube

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Having just returned from two weeks at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, I’m still catching up with my UK reading. So it was that I turned last night to the February 10 edition of Marketing magazine, and an article on sponsorship by one of my favourite columnists, Mark Ritson, on which I really have to comment. Here’s why.

In his characteristically forthright style, Mark lambasts the sponsorship industry in general and a number of people in particular for predicting that Tiger Woods’ travails would not damage his image and endorsement deals:

‘Then there was the scandalous inability of an array of experts to predict correctly the impact of Woods’ misdeeds on his sponsorship deals…If ever we needed proof that most pundits in the world of sports sponsorship and celebrity endorsements are buffoons, here it was, in spades. This is one thing they are supposed to know about, and they managed to be 100% incorrect in the assessments. Not just wrong, but dead wrong.’

I’m not about to defend the industry, or the people Mark names and shames. What I am here to do is point out that Synergy did call the Tiger situation correctly. On December 12 last year, the day after  Tiger announced he was taking an indefinite break from golf, I made the following post on Twitter:

‘Tiger’s move will play well in the media. It also makes it easier for his sponsors to quit – or to stay. Most will quit: Nike will stay.’

Time has of course proved me right. I’m not sure whether Mark is on Twitter – and if you want to follow me Mark, you’ll find me there as @synergytim, along with numerous other Synergists – but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he had Synergy in mind when he said ‘most’ – ie not all – pundits called the Tiger situation wrong!

By Tim Crow on February 25th, 2010

Tags: Golf, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Synergy, Tiger Woods

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Previously, golf’s best-known connection with Tweeting was the (probably apocryphal) story of Tiger Woods’ ’I just wopped Tweety Pie’ SMS to friends, having just beaten an infamously canary-clad Sergio Garcia in the final round at The Open in 2006. But now Ian Poulter is opening up a new front for golf in the Twitterena.

After only a matter of months, Poulter’s microblogs have attracted almost 250,000 followers - a phenomenal number for the platform – and won him widespread media coverage and praise. Which is just how the savvy, outspoken Poulter likes it. “It’s a very clever marketing publicity tool and one that I have complete control over”, he was quoted as saying recently.

Poulter’s success is no accident. It’s down to two factors

First, his dedicated, thoughtful use of the platform. As he puts it: ‘…this is a great way of getting the information out there quickly and giving golf fans some insight they’ve never had before.’ And he’s as good as his word. Take this morning for instance, when Poulter uploaded pictures from each tee at Turnberry as he practised for The Open. Brilliant.

Second, his use of media interviews to market his microblog and create his very own content factory. Enter ‘Ian Poulter Twitter’ into Google, for example, and you currently get 120,000 returns, and plenty of interviews like this, from today’s Times.

Plenty of food for thought for marketers on a variety of fronts. But Peter Alliss won’t approve at all.

By Tim Crow on July 14th, 2009

Tags: Blogging, Branded content, Default, Digital marketing, Golf, Tiger Woods

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OK everyone, you can breathe again – he won and his knee didn’t give in. Last July I wrote a blog about the effect Tiger Woods’ absence from The Open would have on golf, and on his return I thought it would be interesting to see just how much the sport has missed him.

The world’s economy has of course changed dramatically since Tiger picked up his last trophy, impacting on all sectors, including sponsorship in North America, where companies are expected to increase spending on sports, arts, cause and entertainment marketing by just 2.2% to $16.97 billion this year, compared to 11% growth the year before (IEG). On top of this, viewing figures were down by almost 50% across eight tournaments minus Tiger compared to the year before (Nielsen).

Put the two together and it adds up to one big ‘Welcome Back Party’ for golf’s most vaunted star with more then a sense of perfect timing. The significance of this return can be measured by the eagerness of marketers to crash the party.

He may have lost one of his sponsors - Buick – in the downturn but his other backers are wasting no time in heralding his return. Gatorade, Tag Hauer and Nike (it’s brilliant – watch below) have all launched new campaigns this week with Cindy Davis, President of Nike Golf summing it up well – “We knew when Tiger returned it would be a big, if not the biggest, sports story of the year. We wanted to capitalise on that.”.

Need any more evidence? Well some of the loudest sighs of relief have probably come from the governing body of the sport in North America, who even launched their own ‘Tiger Returns’ micro-site (http://www.pgatour.com/tournaments/r470/video/tiger_returns.html).

It’s somewhat unlikely that even Tiger Woods can turn the world’s economy around (if only), but he does provide some much-needed distraction. I just hope that knee is well fixed – it has a huge corporate responsibility to support.

By Dominic Curran on February 26th, 2009

Tags: Brand marketing, Golf, PGA Tour, Tiger Woods

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If you get the product right, everything else follows.

So General Motors has inevitably parted company with Tiger Woods. Some commentators have claimed that this somehow proves that endorsements of this type don’t work. Nonsense. In Tiger’s case, Nike and Accenture in particular disprove the point. Tiger may be a miracle-worker, but not even he could have saved GM from its current predicament. The problem isn’t Tiger, it’s GM.

Also this week, the PGA Tour announced the FeEx Cup’s third format overhaul in as many years. As I wrote back in September, in this case, the problem is also the product – the Cup format. Only time will tell if, this time, the PGA has got the product right.

Which brings me to the latest example of NPD on the PGA Tour, the Kodak Challenge. Like both the FedEx Cup and the Red Bull Final 5, it’s a competition-within-a-competition, its USP being to link great holes on different courses, with $1m going to the player who posts the lowest score on the Kodak Challenge Holes over the season.

Again, only time will tell if Kodak has got the product right – on which point I suspect they’ve missed a trick by not adding a cause-related overlay to counter-balance the $1m prize  - but there’s a lot to like here, in particular the integration of Kodak’s ‘Kodak Moments’ heritage; the opportunity to leverage the wonderful imagery that great golf courses provide; and the season-long campaign platform. What I most like is that, as the Kodak blog reveals, Kodak planned their activation upfront – one of the keys to successful sponsorship.

By Tim Crow on November 28th, 2008

Tags: Branded content, Default, Experiential marketing, Golf, New Product Development, PGA Tour, Public relations, Sales promotion, Sponsorship, Tiger Woods

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I’ve posted before about the fact that NPD has been one of the key drivers in modern sponsorship, with virtually every week seeing new platform and property models being unveiled. NPD being what it is however, they don’t always work out, and the most recent example of this is golf’s FedEx Cup.

Launched by the US PGA Tour two years ago as an attempt to reinvigorate the final weeks of the Tour and counter audience migration to the start of the American football season, the FedEx Cup has had a difficult start to life.

For two years in a row, the Cup has been won anticlimactically early, last year by Tiger Woods (remember him?), this year by Vijay Singh, who has only to finish the final tournament of the season this weekend to claim the title. As one columnist from the National Post put it:

‘Under the current FedEx points system, Singh would have to step in a gopher hole or assault a rules official in order to lose the event. He could play all 72 holes with a belly putter and a persimmon three wood and still take the title, even if his card went into three-figures four days in a row.’

And despite changes introduced this year by the PGA, the format and credibility of the FedEx are still being roundly criticised by the media, in pieces with headlines such as ‘Once again, playoffs are a snoozefest’ and ‘FedEx Cup ending with a whimper’.

Tim Finchem, Commissioner of the PGA Tour, admitted that it was a case of back to the drawing board for next year in a recent media conference, although I suspect what he said will have done little to reassure the players, the media and most of all, his sponsor (whose current tagline is ‘Relax, it’s Fedex’).

Using the analogy of golf course designer Donald Ross and his work on the famed No. 2 course at Pinehurst NC, Finchem said that even a second set of format changes to the FedEx might not get it right:

“[Ross] made 213 or 220 changes in the first 12 years of [Pinehurst No. 2's] existence. Sometimes to get perfection, you have to keep working at it, and we intend to do that.”

Let’s hope, for the sake of FedEx in particular, it’s a case of third time lucky in 2009.

By Tim Crow on September 25th, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Default, Golf, New Product Development, PGA Tour, Public relations, Sponsorship, Sponsorship consultancy, Sponsorship consultants, Television audiences, Tiger Woods

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As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all.  This is a classic example of taking time to understand your online audience and getting digital marketing right – as the 1.5 million people that have so far viewed the clip can testify.

As I said in my earlier blog ‘Sponsorship’s need for a more creative approach to digital marketing’, “users want ownable and original content with a talkability factor” – and this video from EA SPORTS has that in abundance. 

You’ve only to look at the comments on YouTube to see what a positive effect this video has on even the toughest audience – as YellowOnline says “LOL, I don’t like EA these days (“Quantity not quality”), but this is a brilliant ad.”

I’m sure every brand would like such positive comments from both current and past customers.

By Malph Minns on August 28th, 2008

Tags: Brand marketing, Digital marketing, Golf, Sponsorship, Tiger Woods

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They say one man is never bigger than the sport but there was one conversation that I heard many times over up at Royal Birkdale last week from the hospitality tents to the media centre – will we (media, sponsors, PR agencies & spectators) miss Tiger Woods?

Initial evidence would seem to suggest the answer lies in what side of the Atlantic you’re on. A nervous American TV executive told me that their viewing figures would ‘drop off a cliff’ while Woods kept his knee up at home. Evidence from previous tournaments would seem to back him up – US audiences regularly suffer a fifty percent drop when Woods is not involved at the top of a leaderboard.

Over here it was a different story though with an impressive though unofficial, over-night peak on BBC of 4.7 million watching Harrington collect his second consecutive Claret Jug. This was down on last year’s peak of 5.7 million BUT this figure was far larger than either of the previous years – when Woods was the winner. In addition, the story of a resurgent Greg Norman kept the pages and airtime filled and injected The Open with some much needed romance (and glamour from the new Mrs Norman). The galleries weren’t affected either with over 200,000 through the gates over the four days despite the inclement conditions making it the sixth highest attended in Open history.

Initial evidence is that the UK audience was not at all affected by the loss of Tiger – indeed it raised the hopes of a local winner. The more difficult question, that only the next few months will tell for the American TV exec, will be the longer term affect this will have on US audiences (the economic driver of the sport) and critically The Ryder Cup in a few months.

By Dominic Curran on July 23rd, 2008

Tags: Golf, Public relations, Television audiences, Tiger Woods

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