2025 AU-NZ Sponsorship Workshops Announced

Meaning is sponsorship’s superpower! With so much focus on AI, data, and other emerging and rapidly improving technologies, the challenge for sponsors and rightsholders alike is how to embrace the new tech and media landscape, while preserving what makes sponsorship such a powerful marketing tool. Optimising your sponsorship results means… Read More


What Artificial Intelligence Really Thinks of Sponsorship

A few days ago, I did a few updates on my white paper, Disruptive Sponsorship. One of the things that needed updating was the AI sponsorship poem that had been in there. It was from early days of artificial intelligence, it was pretty bad, and I thought Chat GPT could… Read More


Rightsholders: 7 Questions that will Transform Your Sponsorship Results

Being successful at selling and retaining sponsorship requires a sophisticated approach, a number of critical skills, and a replicable process. My blog, white papers, and books are chock full of advice covering all of that. But sometimes, what a sponsorship team needs more than anything else are good prompts – … Read More


The Limitations of Data-Driven Marketing and Sponsorship

Data is a huge thing in marketing. From big data forecasting to person-level customer journeys, attribution models to unified marketing measurement, conversation volume to sentiment ratio, marketing has never been so thoroughly analysed. And that’s mostly a great thing. Unless it comes at the expense of empathy, creativity, and out-of-the-box… Read More


New Podcast: For the Love of Sponsorship

A couple of months ago, I sat down for an interview about sponsorship with charming Irishman, Stephen Bradshaw, from the fantastic podcast, What Makes You Tick? We covered LOTS of ground on sponsorship: Changes in the sponsorship landscape, technology and sponsorship, data-driven marketing, strategy tips, advice for newcomers, and much… Read More


Sponsorship Selection for Smart Sponsors

Sponsorship is a lot of work. Getting a sponsorship from go-ahead to delivering measurable results against your objectives requires effort, creativity, money, buy-in, and teamwork, and all of this is happening while the clock is ticking toward the end of the contract. For a good sponsorship, the results are 100%… Read More


Do You Need a Sponsorship Expert for Your Podcast?

Over the years, I’ve been on a lot of podcasts talking about sponsorship. I’ve been on podcasts for brand marketers and rightsholders; podcasts for CMOs, festival organisers, fundraisers, sports, the arts, local government, filmmakers, and more. It’s fun, I love doing them, and I want to do more! (I wish… Read More


What Is the Real Driver for Sponsorship Leverage?

I talk a lot about sponsorship leverage, but it’s so critically important to sponsorship results that it warrants a lot of attention. Leverage is what a sponsor does with a sponsorship to turn the opportunity they’ve got into the results against objectives they need. And while leverage is a sponsor’s… Read More


Rightsholders’ Guide to Using AI for Sponsorship

“Can I use artificial intelligence to write my sponsorship proposals?” I’m hearing this question a lot. And the answer is that you CAN use AI to write a proposal, but it’s not going to be good. But while I’m not a fan of trying to use AI to write entire… Read More


“But Sponsorship Leverage Costs Money!”

For years, I’ve had the same protest at sponsor workshops. I go through the benefits of sponsorship leverage and a bunch of case studies, and the creative juices are flowing. Then someone either complains that leverage is all well and good, but it costs money, or asks me how they… Read More


The Sponsorship Consistency Conundrum for CMOs

You’re the Chief Marketing Officer of a large multinational, or a Group Marketing Manager, overseeing multiple major brands. Whatever your title, you’re a senior executive looking at millions of dollars being invested in corporate sponsorship across your company, and you know there are problems. Some of the decisions appear to… Read More


Why You Should Never Use a Scorecard to Assess Sponsorships

If you read this blog with any frequency, it won’t come as any surprise that I have a few sponsorship-related pet peeves. One of my biggest issues on the sponsor side is using scorecards to assess sponsorship opportunities. The scorecard process generally looks something like this. You’ve got a scorecard… Read More