Sponsorpitch did a poll last week asking people to vote on the best activation of a sponsorship at the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament. While I am not going to argue that it wasn't a cool and creative idea to make a plane out of tennis balls (I was impressed), is that really activation? Or activation as good as it can be? To me, the ball plane is a tactical creative execution. Calling it activation is kind of a misnomer, but maybe I am splitting hairs.
In my humble view, activation or leveraging requires property rights obtained by the sponsor in exchange for money/in-kind trade to the property, to be transferred to a consumer in exchange for cooperation with the sponsor in some way. Placing ad messages on a property’s media, to me, is just a ad buy, and frankly, it isn’t even wha...
Go ahead, go ahead! By now, regular Sponsorpitch blog readers already know my opening line, so here it is again: As usual, Mike Munson is 100% right. Mike, I really think the problem is a very, very simple one: too few creative people exist in the sponsorship world, both on the property side and on the brand side. Now when I say "creative," yes, a plane made out of tennis balls is creative from an artistic/aesthetic/cool perspective, but the kind of creativity I'm identifying as an important quality here relates to CREATING VALUE. Properties often aren't creative enough to add value to their partnering brands' sponsorship, and brands often aren't creative enough to leverage their properties to the max. Since I used the phrase "add value" in the previous sentence, let me differentiate and contextualize it, too, just like I did the word "creative" beforehand. Yes, we all like to get something for free every now and again. One of the things I love most about NCAA championship sporting events is the cool swag that a fan can find at sponsor exhibits in the fan zones. And brands like to get that kind of free stuff, too. In Louisiana, they use the French word "lagniappe," which means "something extra." But "added value" in this sense should mean less about freebies and extras, and mean more instead about the lagniappe of maximizing sponsorship effectiveness. The sponsorship staff members of a property need to dwell on it day and night, meet about it, talk about it, hold challenges to generate it, read, read, read, travel to other entertainment/sport properties to poach ideas, conduct meaningful phenomenological research, and staff themselves as closely to a 1-to-1 property rep-to-sponsoring brand ratio as possible so that they almost become a double agent, so to speak, but one intent on improving conditions between the two parties rather than undermining both. Same goes for brands. Hope this will provide lagniappe for thought to someone!
Great post, Mike. And I also agree with Ben: increasingly, successful sponsors will be those who have deemed to have 'added value' to the visitor experience.
Properties should be moving away from the 'win/win' level of thinking and more toward 'win/win/win'; i.e. approaching sponsorship from our guests'/consumers' point of view, and asking 'how can they benefit from this deal?'
Take Sony's sponsorship at Arsenal FC, where club-level guests were given PSP's to use during a game, upon which they could access instant replays, match facts and highlight packages. That's activation, and I bet gave Sony significant cut-through vis-à-vis the clubs' other sponsors. Plus, they used it for market research purposes, to guage whether the service could be something they could charge for (it was).
For brands the value of sponsorship lies not simply in the media-exposure benefits often packaged in which the deal, but rather in the potential to interact directly with consumers at an event/stadium/concert etc.