Many Takeaways from my Professional Sports Special Interest Group Discussion
Posted: 3/22/2010 4:16:01 PM by
Jon Kander | with 0 comments
I had the pleasure of co-leading a discussion amongst many of the IEG Conference’s sports-centric properties, sponsors and agencies with my coworker, Larry Albus. There was a diverse range of conversation topics that included developing new revenue streams, emerging categories, cause-based partnerships and effectively measuring a sponsorship’s ROI.
With regards to new revenue streams, the discussion centered largely around the NFL teams incorporating corporate sponsors on their practice jerseys and practice facilities. One of the issues with those platforms was the difficulty in building awareness and getting eyeballs for those sponsors. One category that was able to avoid this issue was news & media sponsors, who could guarantee practice coverage for their sponsored team. Another common sponsor of practice facilities are hospitals and rehabilitation centers. These companies business is endemic to the purposes of a practice (e.g., rehab, preparing the team to participate in the weekend’s game). A specific example, the Methodist Training Center partnered with the Houston Texans as the practice facility naming rights sponsor.
One of the emerging categories that many attendees from the property side mentioned were wireless service providers, all of which are trying to promote their new 4G platforms. The biggest example was Verizon that recently signed a $720 million deal with the NFL. In addition, Verizon and AT&T have been competing to gain a foothold in the New York market through each company’s corporate sponsorship of the new Jets/Giants stadium and New York Yankees stadium, respectively. Also, insurance agencies have been using sponsorship to gain one-on-one touch points with property’s fans. A final emerging category is investment companies, such as e-Trade. From a global perspective, several F1 teams have partnered with investment companies. A specific example discussed in the session is the Mercedes GP Petronas F1 team’s partnership with Aabar Investments.
Several different cause-based initiatives were discussed. Many teams use their own community initiatives as well as league-wide sponsorships to incorporate their sponsors. This gives team sponsors a chance to give back to their community in a meaningful way and demonstrate goodwill. Other sponsors leverage their own cause marketing partnership with their sponsorships. I tweeted about this yesterday, but a great example is Bank of America’s “Hits for Hunger” promotion during the MLB All-Star Game. BOA donates $5,000 for every hit during the All-Star game to Feeding America. This gives BOA a national platform to promote its partnership with Feeding America in a relevant, meaningful way.
A final topic that was touched upon was how to effectively measure a sponsorship’s ROI. As discussed in this morning’s session, there is no cookie-cutter method to properly measure a sponsorship’s return. In order to effectively measure a sponsorship’s return, the brand and property need to work together on the front end of an agreement to determine what the overall objectives are, what activation platforms would be effective in helping the brand meet those objectives, and what metrics will be used to measure the effectiveness of the sponsorship against each objective. In addition, measuring a sponsorship’s return requires measuring against a brand’s objectives on the front end of the relationship. For example, if a company’s objective is to raise brand awareness, it will need to understand what awareness it has initially in order to know whether its sponsorship and activation platforms have moved the needle and if so, how much.
This morning’s professional sports special interest group was a great session that was filled with many takeaways. I would like to thank every one who attended and helped provide such great discussion and content. I hope all of the attendees were able to take away as much from the conversation/session as I did.
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Filed under: IEG 2010