Marketing research you need to know for 2027

0:09Welcome back to The Walk Podcast. I'm Anna Hamill. Today we're live from London at the IPA Effectiveness Conference where the industry's best and brightest minds share the marketing effectiveness research and insights that will shape the year ahead. In this episode, we'll be covering three new pieces of research fresh from the stage here at Shoreditch Town Hall. I'll be talking to Orlando Wood and Paul Simonet about their new research examining the creative routes to brand coherence. Next up, we'll be looking into some new research from Ubiquiti, Thinkbox and WPP Media examining how ad awareness unlocks everything else.

0:46And finally, we'll be covering one of the most exciting areas in marketing right now, sports marketing effectiveness. But before we get into it, here's a quick word from today's sponsor.

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1:29How do the most successful brands overcome the fragmentation of media and creative? According to System 1's Orlando Wood, the answer is creative coherence, because only a coherent brand will stand out in a fragmented world. And it's only by understanding what a coherent brand actually looks like that marketers can hope to build one. In his latest research, built on IPA data and in partnership with the Whole Brain marketer, He sets out how thinking about a brand as a living organism with a heart, face, voice and actions can help us toward more coherent brands worth paying more for. Orlando Wood and Paul Simonet, founder of The Whole Brain to Marketer, join me now.

2:10Welcome both of you to the podcast. Hello Anna, great to be here. Nice to see you. So I want to get straight into it. So for those who may be unfamiliar with the genesis of this work, can you explain a little bit about the motivations for understanding creative coherence and the specific methodology you worked on together? Orlando, I'll start with you. Yeah, sure. Well, look, I mean, the whole presentation today was called Brands on Top because I think brands are in trouble. You know, if you look at the sales of branded goods versus own label goods in supermarkets, own label has overtaken brands today.

2:43And I think you see this disruption of established brands everywhere. Cars too, you know, new car brands unheard of before are now accounting for 20 % of all new car sales in the UK. So how do we get brands back on top? And that's what the presentation was about. Because brands create a kind of pull through the whole system that puts the manufacturer in a stronger position with the retailer and also, of course reduces price sensitivity towards the brand and all those great things. So that's what I was talking about today. And I was keen to say that one of the problems I think we've faced in the last 20 years is that this pull has been eroded by fragmentation of creative.

3:28So creative looks very different today from the way it did. Gone are the characters and the narrative and all of those things. We've been a fragmentation of media. So we're spending much more money today than we did 20 years ago on what I described as shared meaning media. So that's like media that you know when you're seeing them, other people are seeing them too. So you've got to create this shared meaning across the population and we're not doing that anymore. And I think also brand, we're thinking about brands as simply shortcuts, mental shortcuts by assets. We're prioritizing assets over meaning making and that is a problem too.

4:05So I was setting out how a coherent brand, one that has a heart, a face, a voice and actions in the real world, and that all of these things help to serve the heart of the brand, is where we need to be going. And we did some wonderful work with Paul and the Whole Brain Marketeer, where Paul's LLM model looked at the strength of brands, the heart, face, voice and action of those brands, and we looked at shifts in coherence, so heart, face, voice and action for the IPA cases in the IPA database, and found that brands that got more coherent over time, like Cadbury's would be an example, or KFC or Yorkshire Tea, these are very coherent feeling brands.

4:47That sort of brand, that sort of shift, positive shift in coherence, links to things like reductions in price sensitivity, brand effects and all of those things. Yeah, really interesting stuff. Paul, how did you come at this? You've got an amazing data set to work with, obviously as Orlando outlined. what feels like quite a modern problem in marketing and something that we talk a lot about as Walkers, the idea of media fragmentation is putting new pressures on brands to create far more assets than they did previously. Perhaps as you indicated, they're losing a bit of a sense of that sense of direction and coherency across the brand.

5:23What does your LLM bring to this methodology? So the idea of trying to find a way to express brands in a holistic way was sort of where we started. And we sort of went back to thinking of psychology and brain science and how human beings infer personality and character in the real world, not in a marketing world. And this idea of heart, faith, voice, action is how we interpret character in general in the world. That's how we do it of each other. So what we did was we said, okay, let's take that model and apply it to, shall we say, the collective hive mind, herd mind of the internet? How do brands exist in people's memories?

6:07So we built an inquiry infrastructure using agents, using an LLM to essentially understand for any individual brand how the LLM was interpreting its heart, face, voice, hand actions in the real world, which was utterly fascinating. I've had the pleasure and privilege of working on things like, you know, Guinness and MasterCard and Lucozade and all sorts of brands with extremely strong characters. And we found it was very descriptive of the truth of those brands. And what we also found was when looking at the IPA cases, it was very interpretative of the shifts for the most successful commercial cases, so that those brands that look back into their heart, re-expressed it in communications with their voice, but also committed to new sorts of actions, whether it be Cadbury's or whether it be Yorkshire Tea or Guinness, actually were building increased commercial power compared to brands that were less coherent in terms of heart, faith, voice and action.

7:14So this is really important research, really, because it directly correlates with commercial outcomes. And that's something that in this economy is really challenging for some brands at the moment. So I think there's a lot that we can take out of this research and apply it. So let's dig into the detail. What are the key elements of a coherent brand? Orlando, I'll start with you. Well, I think it starts by thinking of a brand, as Paul says, almost as a person. I mean, they're not people, obviously, but a brand is a living memory or many living memories in people's heads. As I said, you know, the company doesn't really own, exactly own the brand because it is distributed across people's minds.

7:52And that reputation, if you like, a good reputation with a strong brand is what creates that pull. So if we think about them as having a heart, a face, a voice and actions, then I think it takes us to a different place from one we've been in. Because it ensures that, you know, we're thinking not just about advertising and advertising communications, but how we do things in the real world that manifest the brand's heart. So, you know, Red Bull did Flugtag events or we had Felix Baumgartner jumping from space to demonstrate the heart of this brand. And it's those sorts of actions in the real world that also, by the way, play to creators, too, because if you're briefing a creator, you know, you kind of need to have a strong sense of what your heart is and what you're about, you know.

8:38And as I said on stage, System One, my colleague Andrew Tindall has done work with creators to show how brand fit, you know, as he put it, is a really good way of ensuring success. And what's brand fit if it's not coherence with the heart of what the brand is about? And Jeremy Bulmore said, you know, actions are going to become more important in the real world over the years to come. That was 26 years ago or something. And he was right. So creating this sense of coherence allows for freshness in your communications as well. So I talked a bit about the history of Guinness advertising in the presentation.

9:19And if you look back at the many campaigns they've done over the last hundred years, you might be forgiven for thinking they've not been particularly consistent. But actually, everything they've done really is coherent and consistent to their character. so putting character first you know is how we can both be consistent in one sense but also be fresh and bring things out that you know re-express the heart each time and re-cohere if you like yeah that makes a lot of sense as well because a brand like guinness has been around for an incredibly long time it needs to constantly bring in new drinkers new generation coming in with different expectations around brands one of the brands you mentioned as well was cabri Paul, what's your take on that one from a coherent brand perspective?

10:05What's impressing you about that brand? I think going back to the Quaker roots and generosity, even thinking about why chocolate was important with the Quakers. Obviously, they were teetotalers and that chocolate was an acceptable stimulant drink that brought happiness and joy but was not alcoholic. So that's really the joy in that sort of the love of the product is in the generosity and the history of the Quakers. But also doing the stuff around Secret Santa is an action in the real world of generosity that goes into the roots of the brand, as in donate your word. So all of that, doing it in a very modern sense.

10:45And I think one of the things that we think about coherence is, yes, in one sense, it's a traditional idea for branding. but it couldn't be more modern in terms of how brands need to present themselves in the world. The requirements of coherence in an AI world, in an AI agent world, is completely essential. And what we believe is using heart, face, voice and action as an input into content and media planning and placement planning over time will actually create a more cohesive form of media investment, which will be both more efficient because it'll be less wasted, so there'll be less incoherent, and there will be more effective because it will be more pertinent and more powerful and more directed in a way that modern media fragmentation often isn't.

11:38I think that's really interesting because it seemed to directly tackle the idea of the two-audience problem, which is something we've been talking about at WALK a lot this year, emerging schools of thought around how marketers can reach out to humans. As you mentioned, Orlando, the whole history of marketing has always been about that. Over the last few years, we've now seen LLMs rising, AI search, all of that. Now marketers need to think about messages that connect with both audiences. How can coherent brands best serve both of those audiences simultaneously? Because surely the answer isn't creating a sea of assets for the LLMs and then, you know, beautiful storytelling-driven marketing for the human audience.

12:17There has to be somewhere in the middle, right? You need to optimise your production around your requirements in the context of heart, face, voice and action. And you need to maximise and optimise your channel delivery in the context of those as well. So Orlando was talking about creators within social. So creators can do a lot both in terms of face, but also representing your core story in a very modern way. So it can retell your heart. And that's what creators are good for because they are stories, really. Each of them has their own story. And so the adjacency of their story as a creator to yours as a brand is a really powerful mechanism to bring this thinking into modern channel management.

13:05Is there a best practice media plan here or is it going to be different for every brand? Well, that's one of the things that we want to do with the launching of the Brands on Top movement, really, is to come together with media planners as well as creatives and creative agencies to work out, you know, how does coherence really work and how do we make it work for us? I talked in the presentation about shared meaning media and the importance of shared meaning media to create this common sense of what the brand is. You know, if I see it, then someone else is seeing it. And we've all got this sort of shared idea of the thing.

13:41And that's what helps to create this pull. It's attractive to me. And I know it's attractive to other people, too. The other thing I wanted to say was that your question about LLMs, I think there are two ways in which this helps. First of all, it strengthens that pull with the consumer. So if you've got a coherent brand, you're just creating that pull so they don't have to go to an LLM in the first place to ask, you know, what should I do here? But the second thing it does is it has implications for the sort of marketing we make because it needs to be attractive. It needs to be rooted in the product, by the way, which is what LLMs will be looking for.

14:18And there needs to be a sort of depth to it, a depth as well as a coherence. A depth of meaning. Yeah, exactly. Depth of meaning, depth of memories that go with it. And that's really what LLMs are looking for. LLMs hate a vacuum. You know, they're looking for information. I was talking to Sir John Hegarty not long ago about LLMs and LLM search. And we were both sort of saying that actually it might cause people to go back to the sort of almost product demonstration advertising that BBH was so famous for, you know, that was really rooted in the product. because that's what will also help and work with LLM search as well.

14:57So your core product truth and making that attractive, depth of meaning, memory and coherence of all those things, I think is what we need to be aiming for. Sounds as though all roads lead back to brand equity, regardless of which audience you're targeting. Yeah, I think some of the earlier sessions today were talking about the strength, how important brands are. People recognise in the boardroom how important brands are as an asset, but they don't really know how to articulate it. I think, by the way, this is a very helpful model for the C-suite. Heartface voice actions are very easy to get very quickly.

15:30And if you understand that, then it's a really good model for marketers and strategists as well. And I think your point about brand equity is well made. And that's why we talk about brand character because there's lots of brand equity models out there like onions and keys and all sorts of things like that. But what we wanted to do, we wanted to provide something that we thought was psychologically coherent with how people infer character. Human beings infer character instantaneously. And that's why brands can be so powerful. And those inferences last. So the idea of heart, face, voice and action as an equity narrative, an equity structure, we think is incredibly simple, highly intuitive.

16:12and guides you to what inferences you're trying to create when you build brand communication. It's really interesting stuff. And I feel like we've just scratched the surface of this research and where it could potentially go. But where can our listeners find this research if they want to read more? They can go to the System 1 website. We have a landing page all about the movement, brands on top, search for that and how they can get involved as well. And the other thing to say is that we're not simply wanting to provide research or content. that we're actually trying to encourage people to get involved because we think that there's a lot of fantastic thinking out there, whether it be about attention or whether it be about surprise or whether it be about lots of littles.

16:56There's so much out there that probably needs brand coherent logic. And so we would like people to reach out and participate and say, we think we can help with how LLMs can work. We think that we can help with understanding how brands can evolve using surprise or brand experience to build brand equity outside of comms. And even the sort of art, the sort of street art piece was fascinating of itself. So, you know, the more people who say, yeah, I think we can contribute to more coherent brands, we'll put brands back on top. Sounds good. Watch this space. Orlando, Paul, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much, Anna.

17:35Thank you. Next up, we're diving into one of the most overlooked but potentially most powerful metrics in advertising, ad awareness. Abiquity, Thinkbox and WPP Media have spent most of the last year building the case for why ad awareness deserves a comeback, and not just as a vanity metric, but as a genuine driver of commercial outcomes. It perhaps sounds obvious, but people simply being aware of advertising is a key early signal that advertising is going to work. But this new study found that ad awareness is actually one of the most influential things a marketer can track. It is effectively an early warning system for how brand consideration is likely to change, giving a clear read on future advertising effectiveness.

18:21Nick Pettersma from Ibiquity, Anthony Jones from Thinkbox and Jane Christian from WPP Media join me now. Welcome to The Walk Podcast. Hello. Thanks very much. Good afternoon. Okay, I want to get into this research because it's incredibly interesting and it's bringing back something that has been in the ad industry for a long time, but has perhaps fallen out of favour a little bit. And that's ad awareness. So my first question is, why did it fall out of favour? And why is now the time to re-evaluate the role of ad effectiveness, Anthony? I mean, if you look at data, ad awareness as a metric has always been there.

18:56And if you trend it, looking at its use within the business, within academic journals, it's all trending upwards. People are using it as a term, using it as a metric. Up until about the mid-2000s, so 2007, 2008, when evidence seems to suggest that people have stopped using it and stopped referring it to so much as a metric, we try to understand why. And I think one of the key things is other metrics have become more interesting to the industry. Brand consideration, metrics more to do with clicks closer to sale. And so I think that as the industry has moved more and more of its focus on the last click, the last sale, the ad awareness metric has become less relevant in some people's minds.

19:41Really interesting. Are you able to explain a little bit about the difference between ad awareness and brand awareness? because brand awareness is something that we talk about a lot as marketers and the importance of that at the top of the funnel. But how is ad awareness different? Firstly, this project that we've done very clearly is looking at the ad awareness rather than brand awareness. And one of the reasons we're looking at it, in effect, that is, are people sort of consciously aware of an advertisement and all the things that within there in terms of what that ad gives, in terms of the brands, the opinions, in effect, all of the good stuff that advertising does to help people make decisions in the purchase journey and at the point of purchase.

20:22The beauty of ad awareness is it's pretty dynamic. A lot of metrics like brand awareness, consideration, intent to purchase are slow moving, possibly beyond the three or six month window that most people are tracking. Ad awareness is pretty dynamic. It moves in response to advertising and therefore it's something that if you understand what's happening and it's going in a direction non-optimal, you can do something about it. It's an early warning system. It's a gatekeeper to other metrics. And therefore, it's something we felt we probably needed to look at in today's media market. Frankly, the last big analysis was done about 15 to 20, 25 years ago.

21:00We feel the media market is so different now. It's about time to relook at the relevance of advertising awareness as a metric in the business. Absolutely. Media fragmentation is a huge change over the last 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of sense, Nick? It's just on the point of the ad awareness definition that we use. We quite like the YouGov flavor because the wording of the question on the survey is, have you seen an ad in the last two weeks? And that is something that makes it more dynamic and more easily linked to basically your media investment. Okay, that's really interesting. So talk me a little bit about the methodology.

21:32How did it all come together? Talk me through that. So we've sort of internally been thinking about this in two phases. The first phase is, can we make the case for ad awareness as a leading indicator for kind of successful brand outcomes. And we wanted to do that with as general an approach as possible. So what we did is we essentially used the whole, as much of the YouGov brand index database as we could get. We ended up with about 1 ,478 brands. We grouped it into 128 sectors to kind of really get the general pattern of kind of brand development and the role of ad awareness. That is what we've been referring to as phase one.

22:10It's a kind of media channel neutral project, which just basically makes the case that we should be looking at this a little bit more carefully. There was also the sort of latter half of the project, which maybe Jane can talk about. Yeah, I mean, this is not being released fully until next month. But the latter part of it is if we've proven and we have that ad awareness is a great metric that we should be tracking on the brands we work on, you need to know how to drive it. And obviously one big thing is the media levers that you can pull. So the second part of the study is going to be building time series models.

22:40I think we've got 84 brands looking at how media channel effectiveness differs at driving ad awareness and what all the rules to get that right are. Really interesting and very ambitious. It is quite an ambitious project that I think we started on maybe even six months ago. Yeah, it's been quite a big undertaking. It was nearly nine months ago we've had the first conversations about this. And in effect, this started from a number of us who'd all worked together on the Profitability 2 study a couple of years ago going, what else can we look at? And we had a germ of an idea here thinking that ad awareness was something that we could model.

23:14And it sort of snowballed from there into something that the more we get into it, the more interesting things we find that we think are directly applicable to pretty much every aspect of the advertising, media and marketing business. Good stuff. Let's get into some of the most important data. Ad Awareness accounts for 17 % of brand consideration, 6 % directly through mental availability, and another 11 % by shaping how people perceive your brand. Walk me through why these numbers are especially important and how these numbers build on what we already knew. Firstly, they're important because they're a credible whole of market estimate.

23:54We were very intentional about not wanting to overcomplicate things, the actual modeling framework we used has only got three kind of intermediate factors, value for money, quality of the goods and corporate reputation. In addition to the effect of ad awareness itself directly, the thing that is novel and new is the scope and scale of the study. So I think that is something that can create that proof point that, you know, we know how important it is. It's a little bit of a proxy for successful marketing. And we think that if that can be quantified, it will encourage more marketers to actually look at this in their kind of day-to-day work.

24:29Interesting. Any builds on that? Again, Nick might be the best place to talk about this, but we're not really showing this at the event today because it's more of our due diligence in the background. But we were conscious that people could go, yeah, add awareness, so what? Does that really lead through to a commercial dollar sign? So we've done work linking shifts in consideration through other metrics towards much harder work. And the good news is there does appear to be a very strong, positive relationship moving through the value chain there, which just reinforced our going in point that ad awareness was a gatekeeper to other things.

25:03If you can get ad awareness moving, other things will move further down the chain as well. That makes a lot of sense and was going to be my next question, actually. So what evidence supports describing awareness as a driver of consideration rather than merely a correlation? I mean, that's an excellent question. So it's the sort of thing that is kind of on the cutting room floor at the moment. It's work that we've done and is currently sitting in an appendix. The truth is, I think that the direction of causality is a really knotty problem. And I think there's pretty much a case that it goes equally strong in both directions.

25:35What we do find is there is evidence that a lot of the time it will be ad awareness that's driving the brand growth and the brand usage. But the truth is the causality runs in both directions. That's the fact of the matter. Jane, at WPP Media, you're working directly with brands every day who want more clarity on measurement. This is something I'm sure you're hearing every day. It's something we're also hearing every day at WALKS. So much demand for measurement clarity. How can brands figure this stuff out? Can ad awareness genuinely operate as a boardroom level KPI? And what decisions would it improve?

26:09Absolutely, yes. I mean, we're doing this podcast here today at the IPA Effectiveness Conference. And we've already seen a couple of presentations this morning that were pushing the importance of how brand activity is so important for brands. But the problem with it is, is that you don't get the immediate feedback that you do from performance media where you get clicks, etc. Whereas what we're positioning this metric as is a lead indicator that you can get, as Nick said, the definitions as you've seen in an ad within the last two weeks. And it's YouGov data as well, which you can get daily. And almost all brands in the UK are on here.

26:44So it is a great lead indicator of how a brand part of your activity is actually performing that you can get straight away. So you don't have to wait. Yes, you will wait maybe a year to get your MM results back to measure the campaign fully. But this will give you a really early read, which I think we're really lacking at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, we know how much C-suites love performance, lower funnel data. And that's part of the reason why ad awareness has potentially moved out of vogue. What would your advice be to clients who are trying to pitch their own boards for more investment around how this specific ad awareness metric can be used?

27:19What's the influencing argument there? I think we've proven on this massive scale of data across every sector that ad awareness drives consideration. It drives quality, value, reputation. And we've proven that that drives sales at a huge market level. so I think that is fantastically strong evidence to be able to to take to a board that should be universally acceptable across businesses and like I say it's a metric sometimes there can be a tendency to think well is can I track the metric often enough is it available I think and this is not a sales pitch for you God by any means but you have a study there that like I say most brands are on that makes it very easy to get hold of and just to use day-to-day and to for you to see you sell yourselves versus your competitors as well.

28:04Really interesting stuff. I want to jump into a little bit the difference between different product categories because it struck me as a really interesting part of this research. So in the quick service restaurant delivery category, for example, ad awareness accounts for 69 % of brand consideration. Just to go back, there was 17 % across the board as an average. Why does the relationship differ so much between different categories? That category is something that benefits from mental availability. You get the message when perhaps you're feeling a little bit hungry. It reminds you that the service is there.

28:35And I think you could probably contrast that with, for example, automotive. You're not going to see an ad and pop out and buy a new car on a Tuesday. It probably won't change your mind about the quality of a car overnight. So that kind of short-term direct impact is that much lower for categories like automotive. But definitely QSR is one where both, whether you're looking at it directly or via those other metrics, it's right there at the top of the table. Yeah, one of the things we possibly surprised us was the significant variance in the relevance and importance of ad awareness by category. A much broader range than I've seen in many, many studies over the years.

29:11It's one of the reasons why I'm always a bit sceptical about, you know, universal laws and principles of advertising when you look at sector by sector data and you just realise actually marketing works differently in different sectors. So it would have different mechanisms. Really interesting. What are the ramifications here for media buying and planning? Coming from the Thinkbox side, of course, you're working with TV. Is there a best practice around media planning to maximise ad awareness? What's your point of view? Firstly, yes, Thinkbox helped commission this study, but we're coming at this from very much a total market level at the moment.

29:44We're trying to look at the role and importance of advertising, the investment levels going into advertising. And I think we've proven that. And Jane said there's a sort of phase two coming down the line, which will launch in November, which will go into the details of the media mix. But there is some very clear indications, even without going into the specifics of MediaMix, that just by spending the same amount of money, but doing it in a different way, you can improve the ad awareness shifts that you're getting, which, as we've shown, should drive through to harder metrics at the end of the day.

30:14I can't divulge too much. Anthony will tell me off from stage two, but I can give you an idea of what we'll be coming out with. So we'll have the effectiveness of all the different channels in terms of the scale of impact that they drive on ad awareness, but also the efficiency. And it is always about balancing those two. We're going to cut the results by sector. So which channel mixes are suited better to sectors? And there are differences. and an interesting one's going to be looking at three age cohorts so we've done models of the under 34s the 35s to 49s and the over 50s and you see some really different big differences explainable differences but now quantified in which channels are most effective at driving ad awareness across those groups so there's going to be tons of really practical detail we'll be able to share and then I think the other part that's coming out to be super useful will be I reckon we're going to need to significantly rewrite the rules of effective frequency that we have across different channels, because there's a huge difference we're seeing in channels like the impact you get per impression from a channel.

31:15And I think we've got the rules quite wrong at the moment. So we're looking forward to sharing all that detail in the next month. And one of the things that we were able to do this time that we've not been able to in the past is to sort of segment social media a bit more. In the past, it's just social media as one amorphous whole. But as the amount of money going into there and the data sources we've used, we'll be able to give guidance on the performance of different types of social channels. Sounds really good. I think that this work is going to be so interesting for coalface marketers who have to look after media plans.

31:45If you look at the agenda of today's sessions, there's some themes that come up again and again. and if I can climb on my soapbox for two minutes. Cost-effectiveness of reach, how much it costs you to reach a significant portion of your market, attention, and creative impact. If you think about those three things, they're all kind of necessary but not individually sufficient conditions to drive ad awareness. If you get cost-effective reach but the format is rubbish, low attention, you scroll past it in a quarter of a second, you won't drive ad awareness. Even if you've got a higher quality impression and you're getting good reach, but the creative is bad, you essentially can't drive out awareness.

32:23You've got to get all three of those elements right, which is why I just think we should all be looking at this metric more often. We should be obsessed with it. Really good stuff. I know you mentioned phase two is coming, and we will wait with bated breath for more information on that. But in the meantime, where can our listeners find out more about the work that you're doing in this space? Well, we think it's so important. Whilst we are releasing phase two at an event in November, access thinkbox.tv to find out more about that. But between now and then, the teams from Thinkbox, WPP Media, Ubiquity and others will be basically trotting around, talking to advertisers, agencies internally within our own businesses.

32:58We think there's so much good stuff, important stuff here that we can't wait to get out there and talk to people about it because we think it's immediately, practically applicable and even more so in a few weeks when we've got the final set of data. Sounds fantastic. That's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for joining us on The Walk Podcast.

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34:00It's been a huge year for sports. There's few bigger opportunities for brands than having your name in lights at a major tournament or sponsoring a big name athlete. But with that reach often comes a big price tag and brands are carefully examining the effectiveness of sports sponsorship. Now new research seeks to bridge the gap between sponsorship and hard metrics. And on the IPA stage today we heard from three experts on how to overcome the effectiveness gap in sports marketing. And they join me now. Rory Natkeel is the founder of Boxcount and chair of the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum. Claire Humphreys is chief marketing officer at British Cycling, and Caitlin McCroy is Senior Sponsorship Manager at Sage.

34:43Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Hello. So your survey data indicated that only 40 % of respondents feel confident that sponsorships achieve tangible business results. That's things like sales, profit, market share. In your view, what are the biggest hurdles preventing marketing teams from demonstrating commercial terms? Where is that sponsorship gap really persisting? I think it's the root cause is because the sponsorship sector evolved around more of a talent agent model. So when it first emerged, the agencies that stepped in to serve the rights holders were Wasserman, CAA, IMG. They were talent agents because some of the athletes had talent agents.

35:25And so it made sense. And they are really incentivized to do the deal that gets the best value for their clients. But they're really not that concerned with what it then does for the business afterwards if you spend 10 million on my property and you don't make a success of it that's not really my problem as a talent agent and that was happening at the same time that account planning was emerging as a discipline in the 60s when this sort of happened and so they're part of the same industry but they diverged at that point and I think sponsorship was often the thing in the 80s and 90s that you did if you had a bit of money left over after tv and out of home and all the rest of your marketing budget so then you might do a bit of sponsorship or maybe the chairman supported Birmingham City and so he wanted to sponsor them or she and so less questions were asked of it and the sponsorship sector sort of emerged to serve those kind of needs nowadays it's being viewed as a much more central part of marketing media plans there's increased scrutiny and desire to demonstrate its value but the sort of expertise in the sector just isn't there really around how to measure it and so i think while there are some lessons that you can take from advertising because an average sponsorship is no more messy than really a big integrated multi-channel marketing campaign there just isn't that sort of I guess muscle memory within the sponsorship sector of how to do it how to use econometrics how to sort of layer different data sources to identify what's happening and and as a result you don't really see sponsorship showing up in the IPA effectiveness wards or really in the FEs that you know any of those kind of bodies and so I think it's to do with the foundations of the industry and a bit of the muscle memory of a lot of the practitioners within it.

36:53That makes a lot of sense and of course this isn't a small investment is it? Sponsorship is usually quite a large investment and it kind of surprises me that there's not a lot of transparency around the actual ROI on that. Was this data surprising to you in any way? Claire? No, there were no surprises when I saw the results. But what was really good was it sort of articulated something that you could feel for yourself when you're in the rights holder side. I do think within the rights holder marketing teams, a lot of people have gone into that sport because they were a fan of the sport or they participated in the sport themselves.

37:28So they're really passionate around that sport. They may not have worked in other commercial organisations, so they may not have been exposed or schooled in some of the techniques around measurement effectiveness that you may get, for example, if you work in a big brand or in an agency. And so often the questions around effectiveness aren't asked and they're definitely not debated. What you do get within rights holders are some real deep expertise and experts in activation for that particular sport. So they know their sport inside out and backwards and you get a lot of event management expertise.

38:05But when it comes to strategic planning and measurement, there is a bit of a skills gap. Caitlin, you're on the brand side and obviously with Sage and these type of engagements that you're having in the sports space. What conversations are you having internally around transparency, measurement and ROI? I think we've got quite an interesting model because we sit as one motion. So we're an interlock with our brand team. We're not competing with them and our budgets are kind of collaborative on what we work with, which strengthens kind of the work that we get to do in sponsorship. Because especially with the EFL and the partnership we've got there, it's got a commercial angle to it.

38:40we need to be increasing our market share within mature sole traders, within small businesses, and the EFL kind of fan base allows us to do that because there's 3.5 million of them within that and 1 million accountants who all need our software. So we all see it as an opportunity versus a is it this or that? It's how can we lean into EFL, EFL exposed audiences? How can we plan strategic media around it how can we create brand platforms and creative assets that speak to you when you're in fan mode and that speak to you when you're in kind of business mode Monday to Friday so I think from our perspective we are maybe a couple of steps ahead to some and my experience of being in kind of other brands and other agencies just because we're so laser focused on the job that we need to do for our ICP and sponsorship supports that.

39:33I mean one thing I would say is the point that we made when we saw in the report that brands that integrate sponsorship activity with the wider brand communications tend to be much more confident than it generates business results I think is exactly what Caitlin was talking about there is that once it becomes planned and activated like advertising it tends to get measured in the same way as advertising you get more confident that it's actually doing what you know an advertising campaign would do and so that's what leads to increased confidence in its effectiveness this. Totally agree. We're all measured on the same kind of brand preference, brand trust metrics, how we're closing the relevance gap.

40:06We've all got the same target. We might be speaking to slightly different people who have crossover audiences, but we're all saying, oh, is SAGE for me? Can I trust them? That's the job we're all doing. So we're all on the same page. Really interesting. So the research identifies three core practices that you've already touched on for driving sponsorship success. So just to set those out, setting clear commercial objectives, measuring commercial impact for renewal decisions, and integrating sponsorship into the broader brand communications as you mentioned, Brory. But, and this is a really shocking number to me when I saw this, fewer than one in five, just 17%, managed to get all of those three together simultaneously.

40:45That's a big problem, isn't it? I mean, how can marketing departments operationalize all three parts of those fundamentals to achieve the higher confidence levels that we see from top performers in the space? I mean, it's staggered me. It's not great. No, it's not, you know, sort of set a clear objective and then measure whether you've done it. I think the integration bit is slightly more of a concept to grapple with. It is specific to sponsorship because it can and often does sit in a silo in a different team that sits in a different part of the organization, often competing for budget. But the first two, I think, yeah, they're pretty basic effectiveness principles so i think there's something about how they get bought which is that they are often bought by a senior stakeholder and then handed to a sponsorship team to activate but the why they've been bought is not really clearly explained and so i've worked on several deals where and they were successful deals they're effective deals they did work for the business but we had to retrofit what they were meant to be doing after the deal had been done And often it's just like, well, this is a big opportunity to sponsor this big property.

41:46Let's take it because if not, our competitor will. And then there's a thing the team is left to sort of retrospectively answer what it did for the business. And then the measurement piece, again, it's tricky. It doesn't show up that easily in econometric models. You have to, you know, because a season-long sponsorship like the EFL isn't going to produce the same sort of spikes that a big TV burst would do. And so it might not show up in an econometric model. So there are some nuances into how you measure it. But yeah, it was a surprise to me that it was as rare as it is. And even amongst those confident, it doesn't happen the majority of the time.

42:16I mean, we will say that Sage have got all three in place. But yeah, it did surprise me as well. Claire, I could see you nodding through that. Has that been your experience at British Cycling Tours that sometimes it can kind of be maybe a bit disorganized across those three fundamentals? Yes, because within a rights holder, the commercial teams or the sales teams are separate to the marketing teams. When you have a good relationship, so head of sales, head of marketing, you work together on every single bid or proposal or pitch so that you can make sure that the important questions as in why would this brand do this?

42:51What ROI does this partnership deliver are part of the original pitch process. that doesn't always happen as commonplace in rights holders a sort of deal can get done and then it's as you say thrown over the fence and left to the teams to work out within this bundle of rights how do I actually make sense of it and how do I make sure that my client I'll deal with day-to-day which is the brand is getting an ROI and I can measure it and I can prove it so there's a lot of retrospective fitting into that equation. I think from a brand perspective as well we are constantly getting shifts in priority in terms of what are the commercial priorities what the business priority is so something that might have been fit for purpose at purchase versus when you activate it 12 months later might be slightly different legislation might have changed or your need to attract new business might have changed so I think that's something where you're constantly having to stay ahead and evolve and you need a really strong rights holder to be with you on that journey to say it was this it's now looking a bit like this what can we do and you pivot together it sounds as though sponsorship as well it can't really be just kind of a one-off thing if you want it to be effective it sounds as though those long-term relationships are really important Yeah, and a lot of the deals are long term as well.

44:14So they can be three to five years. And what was agreed three to five years ago, as you say, may no longer be relevant. And I think if there is a flexibility within the arrangement, so that rights can be renegotiated, activations can be shaped and changed. I mean, we've had some examples at British Cycling where the product didn't exist when it was negotiated or a price was put on it. And so you go through a total co-creation process together where you are hand in glove with the brand. Every decision is a joint one. And that's when you know you're going to get a really good result. It's more difficult to do it that way.

44:52There's meetings with lots of people in them. It feels at times that you're moving slower because you've always got two parties to consider. but it absolutely is the way forward I think to ensure that each party gets out of it what they need to get out of it and I would also say there's a long and a short in every partnership as well because when you look at the most successful partnerships we just gave the reference to Rolex and Wimbledon, Guinness and Rugby, Rebel and Extreme Sports, they last for decades and I know I always say to you know if you're going in as a brand if you're the CMO signing off on this partnership you should this should be something that you hand on to your successor ideally the the brand would still be doing this in 15, 20 years time, because that's when we can see that the real value comes and it becomes famously associated with the brand.

45:34But of course, across that timeframe, there are a number of different business challenges that it could be pointed towards. And if you've got a particular sales goal this year, you can definitely turn on different rights, activate in different ways that drive the sales. So I think you should always be thinking long term, we want to do this for as long as possible, because that's where the real value is going to be gained. But in the sort of short to medium term, we can pivot and change it. and use it to achieve different goals. There's a bit of flex there. There is flex, yeah. So as you kind of alluded to there, Rory sponsorship is so much more than just putting a logo on a shirt or a broadcast now, isn't it?

46:08It's everywhere, everything all at once. How can brand managers shift their partnerships or their thinking away from those basic inventory buys or siloed activations around the actual event toward consistent creative ideas? that emotional storytelling that we know builds long-term memory structures and drives marketing effectiveness so one thing that we did with the research is put forward a sponsorship effectiveness model that showed six stages stage one was that kind of classic inventory buy maybe it gives you supply rights you're the pouring you get the pouring rights at the stadium and you get your logo around the stadium and that's it at stage three is a creative platform where we say that the sponsorship is activated with a consistent creative idea that repeats now whether that's the same campaign running across all three seasons of a football deal rather than coming up with a one campaign for each season which can happen or it's again Rolex coming back with the Rolex hour at the Masters where it buys out all of the TV advertising the last hour of the Masters TV coverage and it's done that for several years now but it's just that that idea repeats and then I think from that point on the next stage is where distinctive brand asset systematic contribution to commercial performance and brand narrative there's a time-based duration to that but I think if you get that consistent creative idea or creative platform then it's a case of kind of repeating it and doing all the consistent things that we know that work and over time you can make it a core part of the brand narrative but that's where you should start.

47:32Sounds really good. Claire and Caitlin I want to come to you as my last question but what is the biggest thing that you've learned from engaging with partners in the sponsorship space? Obviously Claire you're on the sports side and Caitlin you're on the brand side so Claire can you kick us off I think when you first get to know a new brand partner asking for a meeting where you can sit and talk about their business you can understand what's important to them you ask them to take you through the brand plan and the measurement and the KPIs before you do anything else because then that shapes everything that you do from that point onwards and it's sort of madness to start without having that point of reference I think so yeah that's the biggest thing that I've learned and why I've also found is that you often just catch things halfway through and you say can we just go back to the the original question and did you are did you ask as to what we're trying to deliver here and if that question has been missed off then you always need to go back and do it again.

48:26Caitlin how about you? I think there's loads of stakeholders that make it success it's not just on the sponsorship team or your interlock with brand I think it's having a rights holder who is collaborative having an agency who understands what you're trying to get out of it or how quickly you can move or how far you can push it having a paid media team that knows the most effective channels that you should use based on who we're trying to talk to at that moment in time I think it's a got to be a melting pot of all of those for things to be the biggest success and I think taking the time kind of as Claire said to all get together and be like okay do we all agree great let's go you can then move at pace otherwise you're constantly sense checking everything or double checking did we did we speak to those people or have we signed that off or is that in line with brand campaign is anything else in market at that time that I should be aware of so I think it's you've got to take the time putting in hard work with the right people and listen to all of them as well I need to hear from the fellow current partner to say is this authentic will this land with funds do they care and then i also need to speak to our media team to say is that an efficient use of spend is that where they're sitting i'm not a expert in any of that but i need us all to kind of align and agree on it that's really good advice rory one more question for you where can our listeners find out more about this research and the work that you're also doing as part of the sponsorship effectiveness forum so the research is available now from the ipa website and it's called all to play for and the sponsorship effectiveness forum i mean you You can just Google us and you'll find us.

50:04We have a number of resources and we're about to launch some research into women's football sponsorship as well, which will be coming next month. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Thank you.

50:17That's all we have time for on The Walk podcast today. Thanks to all of our guests and the IPA for hosting us at the Annual Effectiveness Conference. For more detail on new research emerging from the IPA events, plus all of the IPA Effectiveness Award winners, be sure to check out walk.com. And follow the walk pod while you're at it. See you next time.