Over the years, I’ve been involved in several lively discussions about the value of online sponsorship submission forms. The response has been divided, to say the least. The advocates cite two main reasons: It allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of properties. It is a faster way of vetting sponsorships than… Read More
This is a question I’ve had with increasing frequency the past few years from (usually) larger rightsholders. Most of them have been breaking up the roles, and they’re wondering if it’s in their best interest to keep doing it. And the answer is… sort of. Selling sponsorship is different than… Read More
Sponsors around the world are becoming preoccupied with data acquisition – to the point where it is a primary goal of many sponsorship strategies. This is a big mistake. I’m not saying data acquisition is a bad thing – far from it. Adding to, and rounding out, your databases is… Read More
You’ve got a sponsor interested in your property. You must have done a few things right, and congratulations for that. Unfortunately, “interested” does not equal “contract”, and the path from one to the other can be anything but a straight line. It’s pretty typical that there is a bit of… Read More
“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