Are sponsors wasting their marketing budget on the wrong properties?

Do all brands make well informed decisions about the properties they sponsor? Are they really sponsoring the most suitable properties for their needs? We’re not convinced.

The challenge for brands is to evaluate all the opportunities that exist in the market is a gargantuan task. By our reckoning there’s over eighty sports, arts, and entertainment genres and tens of thousands of properties available to sponsor. Sifting through all of that to identify the wheat from the chaff is a long, arduous, time consuming, and expensive process.

However, the great news is we have a solution!

The current situation is brands are inundated with unsolicited sponsorship proposals from rights owners who use a scatter gun approach to their target outreach. As a result, many brands who are in market to sponsor a property are reacting to what is sent to them rather than looking holistically at the whole market. If it catches the brands eye and the timing is right, then a deal gets done. Does it mean the brand is certain that sponsorship of Property X is their best fit and the best value in relation to their audience, their objectives, their brand value values and their geographical priorities? The risk is because they’ve not done enough due diligence on the all the other options in the market, they may be sponsoring a property that is not optimal to their requirements. Secondly, even if it is a suitable fit, they may be overpaying because they have not benchmarked the price versus similar properties in the market.

A more considered approach to sponsorship property selection by brands is for their agency to do the leg work for them to scope what is in the market. However, this requires access to good quality audience information, data and insight to inform this process and it certainly requires assimilating different sources of data together to get to a shortlist for the brands consideration. Many agencies don’t have access to this data, so they are often presenting properties they are familiar with or, dare I say it, the rights owners they represent. To use restaurant parlance, the brand has been asked to choose from a limited fixed price menu rather than the extensive, full a la carte menu. 

We have a neat solution that will superpower our sponsorship consultancy and planning services for our clients that we call Discover.  We are certain this will make a transformational difference to the way brands choose what they sponsor. 

We have been partnering with a tech company to develop a groundbreaking property search tool which enables us to help brands navigate over eighty genres and thousands of properties across the sports, arts and entertainment sponsorship market globally. It draws data from several sources to identify the most suitable properties based on the brands audience, sponsorship objectives, brand values and geographical priorities.  

Our approach has always been to take a holistic view of the sponsorship market when we consult for brands. Developing their sponsorship strategy to get to a clear sponsorship brief and then using that brief to guide us to the genres and properties that answer that. However, what we can do now is a deep dive into all the genres that are available and look in granular detail at the properties within the genre, for example football, to identify the properties that will have the biggest impact.