“What proportion of our sponsorship portfolio should be made up of sports, arts, community events, etc?” “How much should we spend on leverage for an $X sponsorship?” “What should our target ROI be for this sponsorship?” I get questions like this all the time. In fact, I’ve had every one… Read More
A while back, there was a social media stir about an over-the-top rejection letter sent to 900 candidates for a job in the IT industry. Thousands of people complained about the tone and wordiness, and there was a great deal of how-dare-they attitude on display. To an extent, I agree.… Read More
I’ve been doing sponsorship a very long time, and I’ve seen the growth of best practice through four very distinct generations. When we finally got to this generation, Last Generation Sponsorship, it was like a thousand gigawatt light bulb went off over the head of our industry. It was a… Read More
Rejection sucks. We all hate it, and it’s even worse when we don’t see it coming. But, there are a few signs that rightsholders consistently miss, when selling sponsorship, that could tell them that a sponsor just isn’t that into them. So, brace yourself for the cold, hard truth about… Read More
If you were a fly on the wall of my office, you would have been wondering why I was yelling at my computer screen last week. I had seen that question on LinkedIn, and I wasn’t actually yelling. I was pleading – pleading with the writer not to use PowerPoint,… Read More
I was recently involved as an expert witness in a case involving sponsorship broker remuneration. As I reeled through all of the ways a broker can be compensated, and the various factors that go into determining the remuneration level, I realised that I hadn’t addressed this subject in my blog… Read More
“We’re projecting attendance of over 17,000. With your $20,000 sponsorship, that means you can reach all of them for just over a dollar each.” “We anticipate our project will get over a million and a half impressions. At $50,000, your sponsorship costs less than four cents per impression!” To a… Read More
I get a lot of unsolicited emails – okay, spam – trying to sell me sponsorship. Leaving to the side the fact that I’m not a sponsor, I’m often on the other side of the planet, my name isn’t “Dear Sir/Madam”, and the twenty-five other things wrong with this approach,… Read More
I meet a lot of sponsors, and something that strikes me with alarming frequency is the fact that so many of them are quite aware of what best practice sponsorship is about, and the benefits of doing it, but have taken few, if any, steps to elevate their sponsorship approach… Read More
After writing my recent blog, How to Increase Sponsorship Revenue: Getting Creative with Benefits, I realised that there was a great way to visually convey the power of creative benefits, ended up with the infographic below. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to a full-sized, PDF version. This is… Read More
A while back, I stumbled across a post by Oxfam, showcasing the best performers in their Behind the Brands Scorecard. That is, in and of itself, really interesting and should be read, but they also created an immensely useful infographic for understanding what companies own what brands in the consumer… Read More
I tell rightsholders all the time, “Don’t approach the company, approach the brand”. The underlying principle is that companies will generally have one brand that is clearly the best fit for a sponsorship opportunity. This is true for sponsors, as well, and most sponsors have embraced brand sponsorship as the… Read More