New Stories in the Context of Sponsorship
Posted: 11/14/2011 1:02:14 PM by
Lesa Ukman | with 0 comments
In his new book, The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose says storytelling is central to human existence: “Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is common to every known culture. That it involves a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener — an exchange we learn to negotiate in infancy.”
As evidence of our innate desire for stories, Rose cites a landmark study in which 34 people were shown a short film with two triangles and a circle moving across the screen plus a stationary rectangle, and asked what was happening in it. Only one participant saw the film for what it was: geometric shapes moving across a plane. Everyone else came up with narratives attributing emotions and intentions to the shapes, such as seeing the triangles as two men fighting and the circle as a woman trying to escape the bigger, bullying triangle. So powerful is our impulse to detect story patterns that we see them even when they are not there, concluded study co-leader, Fritz Heider.
Stories have long played an important role in sponsorship, but there is much uncharted terrain.
Story tensions. In the context of sponsorship, tensions around stories have arisen when a sponsor wants to go in one direction and the sponsee in another. For example, when adidas became a sponsor of New Zealand’s storied All Blacks rugby team, the brand’s initial creative celebrated the All Blacks’ winning record. The team nixed the creative because it told the wrong story. Winning wasn’t what All Blacks fans loved about the team but rather that players gave 110 percent every time they played.
This conflict also played out in the joint presentation between Gatorade president Sarah Robb O’Hagan and NFL CMO Mark Waller at the 2011 IEG Sponsorship Conference. With a new, higher-performing formula to promote, O’Hagan wanted to use NFL-themed creative showing Gatorade replenishing players at the end of a brutal game. But, in the midst of concerns over concussions, the NFL did not want its players portrayed as brute warriors in need of recovery.
Transmedia. As the information web has transformed into the participatory social web, the stories that sponsors and rightsholders put out are dwarfed by those created about them by fans and followers. Done well, these stories deepen bonds with customers and build brand value. The question for sponsors and rightsholders is how to let audiences in.
Speakers at Leap: How Top Brands Are Transforming Sponsorship—the 2012 IEG Sponsorship Conference—are leading the way in using new ways of storytelling to enhance their partnerships and forge stronger and deeper connections with consumers.
For example, Coca-Cola’s senior vice president of integrated marketing Wendy Clark—who views sponsorship as the tent pegs and poles of brand stories—is turning Coke partnerships into immersive transmedia franchises that deliver hundreds of hours of content and audience interaction on a massive scale.
Around the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Clark and her team identified celebration as the core of the story. Armed with that insight, they mined the event’s history to find the best goal celebration-- Cameroon star Roger Milla’s dance after scoring in the Italy ’90 World Cup—and used footage of it in their ads, inviting consumers to share their own celebrations on Coca-Cola’s YouTube channel.
Music was the driver of the celebration story. Coke issued an RFP for a song good enough to entice stadiums full of soccer fans to sing along. Somali-born hip-hop artist K’naan and his Wavin’ Flag song, which K’naan remixed in 20 languages with duets with local musicians—became the anthem of World Cup. Coke was never mentioned, but the five note Open Happiness jingle at the end of the track was the red thread to the brand.
Other parts of the story included an 83-country trophy tour, a permanent legacy—supporting fresh drinking water to African schools via a partnership with RAIN—and a documentary seen by 32 million fans on Coca-Cola widgets. Coke started with a month-long competition among 32 teams, built out a community with multiple ways for fans to participate and amplified the Open Happiness message at every touch point.
The campaign ultimately was seen by more than 64 percent of the world’s population. Amping up storytelling, bringing access to fans, making it share-worthy across every channel and linking it to brand strategy boosted volume sales of drinks in Coke's largest markets an average of six percent, according to Clark.
Future posts will look at other examples of the intersection between sponsorship and storytelling. In the meantime, I hope you will share your thoughts, questions and comments on the topic.
Read more blog posts
Filed under: IEG conference, trends, activation