Last Generation Sponsorship Redux”.)
It could be…
The list could go on and on, but are generally comprised of one or the other of amplifying the best stuff or ameliorating the worst stuff about a fan experience. Negotiate for, and deliver, these benefits to your customers and fans, and your brand becomes a welcome part of the experience. That’s a lot more than signage will ever get you.
If fans love an experience, they love it even more if they’ve had some influence on it. Try to find something that your brand can take control of, and then hand that control to customers and fans. An example from a few years ago was when Pepsi asked fans to vote on the songs a major Canadian band would play at halftime of the Grey Cup (the grand final of the Canadian Football League).
Can you crowdsource the programming of a stage? Do a people’s choice award? Let people nominate the charity or program a donation will go to? There are so many options!
Not only will this enhance the experience for fans – that third “win” – but it will open up your promotional period, as you could be running the voting/crowdsourcing for months before an event, season, or program kicks off. You could also use this to make your sponsorship look bigger and more impactful than it “should”. While bigger sponsors are being super-loud and visible, you’re doing something meaningful for fans during a big run-up to the property.
Content is king. We’ve all heard that before. And “durable content” is even better; that is, content that is relevant and lives on well after the property that generated it. Make it episodic, and you’ve hit the jackpot! The bonus for us is that sponsorship is a mother lode of content.
There is the property itself – the festival, the game, the cause, the museum, etc – and plenty of information about that, but that’s usually easy for people to access. What’s much more desirable is access to exclusive content – the stuff people don’t generally see or know. You can negotiate access to it – such as sourcing weekly blog posts by the team captain. Or you can create it – such as doing a YouTube series providing tips for curating an artistic home from a gallery curator.
Personally, I’m a big fan of creating content, as you can be more creative and responsive to what your target markets and fans want to know or see. But this still often requires access to the right people, which brings me to…
When we think of athlete or celebrity appearances, we generally think of the big, name-brand people doing meet-and-greets. That’s all well and good, but it’s also been done to death. It’s time to think about appearances more broadly…
For more on this, see “How to Make the Most of Athlete and Other Celebrity Appearances“.
Getting access to inner-sanctum-type experiences, places, or people can be very effective for a lot of reasons…
The access you need will depend on what you want to do with it, but you should be negotiating for at least some of this.
This has been part of a negotiation package for a long time, but generally consists of some huge prize – backstage at a concert, for instance – that anchors a sales promotion where lots of people enter, but only one person wins. Bo-ringggg.
The trend now is to use that one what-money-can’t-buy experience as the pivot point for something much bigger.
It’s no longer, “SMS to win a backstage pass to every mainstage band at Splendour in the Grass”. Now, you could get people to submit two minute videos of themselves interviewing a (fake) band. These are shared in your social media, with a shortlist chosen based on social media feedback of the best, funniest, most insightful, etc. The winner would be chosen by a vote, and then would be charged with conducting two-minute video interviews with all of the bands as soon as they come off stage, creating content that could live on for years.
Beers in the skybox… yada yada yada… Everyone and his dog has had beers in some corporate suite at some time or another. You can do it, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but let’s face it, it’s not that special.
If you have clients that really deserve or expect something special, you need to think more creatively about how you can deliver it…
These days, hospitality isn’t necessarily about a luxury experience, it’s about a special experience – something very few people will ever do. That could happen at a major concert sound check or in a soup kitchen. Again, the key word is “special”.
Above, I’ve listed some of my very favourite and most useful benefits, but in order to take this sort of thinking forward, you may have to change your organisational approach to sponsorship. There are many, many ways to do this, but two of the most powerful are listed below.
I’m a big fan of putting together a sponsorship stakeholder group – people from around your company who can use sponsorship to make what they do more powerful and effective. One of the best ways you can use this group is to plan leverage around your sponsorships, and the absolute best time to do that is before you negotiate the sponsorship.
If you know how you’re going to use the sponsorship – how brand marketing and sales and social media and HR and others will leverage it – you will know exactly what benefits to negotiate for, and there is every chance a lot of them will come from the list above.
If you need a process for putting together that team and developing those leverage plans, the whole thing is outlined in The Corporate Sponsorship Toolkit.
Sponsorship sits perfectly at the intersection of analysis, strategy, and creativity, and yet, so many people involved in corporate sponsorship are primarily administrators!
Once you embrace those three roles – and particularly the creative part – the entire way you see your job will change. You are basically giving yourself permission to have more fun and see sponsorship with more scope, so long as you put in the proper analytic and strategic rigour. I did this for myself fifteen or so years ago, and you should too. (Plus, it was a great excuse for me to stop wearing suits. I’m a creative, after all… hahaha!)
Can’t reclassify? At least try to add some elements of being a “creative” to your job description. Can’t even do that? Reclassify it in your head. Put a sign at your desk that says, “Stand back! Creative at work.” Whatever it takes, you need to think of your job differently.
Holy dooley, that turned into an epic post. I do hope it helps you think more broadly about what does and doesn’t have the most value to your brand in a sponsorship negotiation.
You may be interested in my latest white paper, “Disruptive Sponsorship: Like Disruptive Marketing, Only Better“. I’ve also got self-paced, online sponsorship training courses for both sponsors and rightsholders. Get the details and links to course outlines and reviews here.
If you need additional assistance with your sponsorship portfolio, I offer sponsorship consulting and strategy sessions, sponsorship training, and sponsorship coaching. I also offer a comprehensive Sponsorship Systems Design service for large, diverse, and decentralised organisations.
Please feel free to drop me a line to discuss.
© Kim Skildum-Reid. All rights reserved. To enquire about republishing or distribution, please see the blog and white paper reprints page.