Will Other Online Companies Follow in the Sponsorship Footsteps of AOL and GoDaddy.com?
Posted: 2/18/2010 4:15:52 PM by
Carrie Urban Kapraun | with 1 comments
An AOL press release from earlier this week about AOL’s sponsorship of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week spurred a thought. I wanted to better understand what online companies such as AOL, Google and YouTube are sponsoring and why online companies aren’t more active in corporate sponsorship.
I did some quick research and looked at online companies that have been active since 2008. Some of the more active online companies are AOL, GoDaddy.com, Yahoo!, Google, AutoTrader.com and CarFax.com. Since 2008, some of the larger corporate sponsorships are/were AOL’s partnership with NASCAR, GoDaddy.com’s partnerships with JR Motorsports and Hendrick Motorsports; GoDaddy.com’s partnership with Andretti Green Racing; AutoTrader’s partnership with the NBA; and Jobing.com’s naming rights of the Phoenix Coyotes arena; all reported to be in the low to mid-seven figures. However, based on my research, a majority of online property partnerships are below the mid-six figures. It also became apparent that online companies are most active in professional sports (as is the case with sponsorship overall), with a small amount of activity around fair/festivals, industry-related organizations and some nonprofit organizations.
I think a big challenge with this category is that the business models and hence business and marketing objectives among online companies vary significantly. From a sponsee’s perspective I think it would be challenging to understand the nuances of these companies. For example, is a company’s primary source of revenue advertiser driven, is it subscriber based or is it another model? Further, given the different models, how can sponsorship play a role?
I would imagine that Yahoo!’s marketing/sponsorship objectives and target audience are very different from GoDaddy.com’s and AOL’s objectives. For GoDaddy.com I would assume that they are interested in building awareness and gaining internet domain registrations. For Yahoo! it seems that they are more interested in access to content, similar to a media property. Additionally, maybe a company like AOL is trying to rebrand itself by associating with fashionable and current properties. This would lead me to believe that the properties that they sponsor and the leveraging of those properties are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Is it possible that properties and online companies are still trying to figure out how to make sponsorship work for both parties? As we spend more of our lives online, how will these online companies reach us offline? How has NASCAR and some other professional sports tapped into several online companies? Finally, moving forward will online company categories be more narrowly defined, will a property have multiple online-based companies as sponsors?
I would like to hear from properties that have either successfully partnered with or unsuccessfully pitched an online company. Is the above mentioned challenge a barrier to obtaining an online company as a sponsor? Is there another barrier that I haven’t touched on? If you were successful, what was the key to that success?
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Filed under: nonprofit, research, sports, NASCAR