Is your sponsorship proposal DOA?

Some information just came across my laptop suggesting the average sponsorship proposal meets only 45% of brand needs. That’s a pretty unfortunate figure.

Imagine buying things and being more unhappy than happy with just about every purchase option? Not only frustrating that you can’t find much you like, but also painful, as with so few choices the price for what does meet your needs will invariably cost more and more.

Even with all this information technology and instant communication we have available to us today, most sponsorship proposals are DOA. It’s not really that surprising. But seeing some real numbers put to previously anecdotal evidence is sobering nonetheless.

Is this just how it is? Will more and more money be spent on fewer properties, and will these ...

Smaller properties may be a sponsor's best friend

Anybody who has worked in an agency that recommends sponsorships to brand clients -- especially those that get paid commissions on them -- has seen it. Anybody who has worked for a brand has lived it. The “bigger is better, let’s get a big national property and leverage it locally” mentality reigns supreme in sponsorship marketing.

It’s easier for a brand, and much easier for an agency to tell the client to do an NFL or NASCAR sponsorship for $10 million per year (give or take a million), and say to the client “that will be $1 million (or so) for us, please,” than to really work hard to find perfect sponsorship fits and brilliant activations for the client. I mean seriously, how hard is it to put together some cool ads, maybe a sweepstakes to win a trip to the Super Bowl, or be...

Mike's take on IEG's new online sourcebook

When markets lack competition, consumers are harmed. The unchallenged competitor faces no countervailing force to keep prices down and keep customer service value up. In this situation there is no opportunity for a competing viewpoint that may serve a market more efficiently, to take root. Worse, without competition in a market, innovation is stifled. On the flip side, new ideas – even ones that that go against conventional wisdom – can ultimately lead to much greater choices and services to the market, and often times be the catalyst for economic growth for an entire market or economy.

Just look at the PC market with Microsoft as the dominant force before the Internet. If Microsoft had its way, we’d still be installing software locally on our desktops. The Internet, as we know ...

You know the old adage: A job worth doing is worth doing well. When it comes to spending money on sponsorship, this isn’t always the case.
Case in point - and for proof - this week’s Sports Sponsorship Symposium. As usual, there is talk about how we need better ROI and measurement, media is not enough any more, yadda, yadda, yadda. How many years in a row are we going to hear these complaints until buying decisions and implementation methodologies are changed to deliver results that make the high priests of sponsorship stop decrying how it isn’t working well enough for them? I mean seriously, the same people (in the same positions at least) bought into the media measurement methodology, pioneered by companies like Joyce Julius, as a holistic way to measure sponsorship value and ...

Give us your ideas, we'll give you free Premium Pitch.

As of this post, we've done some heavy lifting in an effort to make this part of SponsorPitch more of a resource, than a run of the mill blog. We are continually seeking to aggregate ideas, both here and across the web, that create valued and shared insights for sponsorship professionals.

It has been about four months since I started writing posts for SponsorPitch. My posts to date have been wide ranging in topic, all in an effort to try to determine what issues and ideas readers of this blog find compelling and interesting.

By far the topic that elicited the most reaction so far was a post done about standardizing information in the sponsorship marketplace. It really stirred emotions and got people chiming in from several different perspectives. The intent here is to be ju...

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...

When I worked for Ad Agency FCB San Francisco, it didn’t take me very long to realize what the ad business was all about, and how, generally speaking, the client was simply subsidizing four different businesses while kind of hoping the agency’s work would somehow impact its bottom line.

As I understood it…
1) The ad agency gets hired to produce creative (ads). 2) The agency or an outside media planner does the media planning and buying to distribute the ads for public consumption. 3) Broadcasters and media companies get paid to place or broadcast the ads. And finally, 4) a rating agency like Neilsen gets paid to find out how many people are possibly exposed to the media carrying the ad, a proxy for how many people might have consumed the ad and its message.

The ad agency’s...

Today I just saw probably my “dozenth, plus” example of an erstwhile effort to put information about sponsorship opportunities online in the last decade. IEG, Sponsorwise, SponsorPitch, Sponsorium, SponsorDirect, Sponsorhaus, Magnetic Alliance, SponsorAnything, SponsorPark, Plumm, Groupable, Sponsorscape, Crosspartner, Sponsorfolio, and probably a few I can’t remember, have been joined by Sportdriven.

If one were to follow simple economic theory, the fact so many of these enterprises have sprung up, and the fact a few of them have even made a couple bucks, suggests there is a market for these types of Internet services.
Could there be more market validation than the above list?
Sure, each of those names above took or are taking their own unique approaches, but the bottom l...

The big news this week was the SEC’s release of its new media policy. This should not be confused with its “new media” policy. No, the SEC took steps to ensure it didn’t really have a “new media” policy, by essentially recoiling into the comfort zone that is the status quo, with its new media policy. Namely, it wants to protect the interests of its media partners and their advertisers, by adhering to the quaint concept of big rights fees for major sports properties. It doesn’t want anyone to reproduce, rebroadcast, or re-sell not only game footage produced by broadcast rights holders, but it wants to prohibit any fan in the stands from disseminating any description or images from the games to anybody via any device.

The irony is thick here. Think about it. These media partners...