In short
Sponsorship effectiveness in sports marketing—how to prove sponsorship works, measure impact beyond reach, and why an “effectiveness revolution” is needed. The episode also introduces the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum (SEF) and shares live-event discussion on econometrics and benchmarks.
Guests (backgrounds)
Rory Nakil, Chief Strategy Officer at Sidley Sport; previously a professional DJ/musician and worked in ad/media agencies (including Havas). Charlie Dundas, co-founder of GSIQ, research/data specialist. Rebecca Bex Martin, Director/Head of sponsorship governance, strategy and planning at Barclays. Charlotte Thompson, host (stepped in due to Richard Gillis’s illness). Stephen Hall, CEO of Sidley Sport. (Also referenced: Sarah Kendall, Football Association.)
Key claims
Sponsorship lacks a collective evidence base comparable to IPA advertising effectiveness research. Industry focus is often on pricing/exposure, not business outcomes. Sponsorship should be evaluated using “brand effects, business effects, sales effects, intermediate effects, behavioral effects,” and incorporated into econometric models.
Notable examples
Coca-Cola sponsoring the Football League and “halo”/signal effects; Guinness integrating rugby sponsorship into brand narrative; Rolex compounding effects around Wimbledon; crypto brands buying stadiums for “realness/trust” signaling.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOSetting the Stage for Sponsorship Effectiveness
0:45 to 2:11
A discussion on the importance and challenges of proving sponsorship effectiveness.
Rory Nakheel's Background and Insights
2:11 to 4:13
Interview segment with Rory Nakheel discussing his unique background and perspectives on marketing.
The Lack of Sponsorship Effectiveness Data
4:13 to 6:10
A conversation about the absence of comprehensive data on sponsorship effectiveness and its implications.
“And your main argument, again, we'll reference the live event that we did at Sidley Sport Offices.”
Commercial Aspects of Sponsorship Deals
6:10 to 10:29
Exploring the negotiations and knowledge gaps in sponsorship deals and their outcomes.
“And within that, you've obviously got the price negotiation.”
Impact of Sponsorship on Rights Holders
10:29 to 12:43
Discussion on how sponsorship affects both brands and rights holders, including moral implications.
“So, because that's the other interesting thing with sponsorship is that there's two brands at play.”
Brand Signaling and Trust through Sponsorship
12:43 to 14:00
Examining how sponsorships can signal brand trust and reputation to consumers.
“And the sponsor is held up as a sort of moral arbiter.”
The Utopia of Sponsorship
14:00 to 16:40
Discussing the ideal future of sponsorship and knowledge sharing in the industry.
Media Agencies and Sponsorship Dynamics
16:40 to 23:00
Exploring the challenges of aligning media and sponsorship agencies' incentives.
“And I think sponsorship is a very effective marketing platform.”
Complexities of Effective Sponsorship
23:00 to 27:20
Understanding the intricacies and challenges of effective sponsorship marketing.
Strategic Sponsorship Activation
27:20 to 28:00
The importance of defining clear objectives for sponsorship activation.
Show all 22 chapters
Understanding Sponsorship Effectiveness
28:00 to 29:40
Learn about the different types of effects sponsorships can achieve and the importance of clear objectives.
“And I think sometimes what we see at Sidley Sport is briefs coming in for pitches or with every single objective under the sun.”
The Role of Econometrics in Sponsorship
29:40 to 31:30
Explore how econometrics can help measure sponsorship effectiveness and the challenges involved.
The Dynamics of Sponsorship Value
31:30 to 35:00
Discussion on the increasing wealth of elite rights holders and the implications for all stakeholders in sponsorship.
“It's full of things of different sizes and shapes.”
Engaging with the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum
35:00 to 36:00
Information on how people can participate in the sponsorship effectiveness forum and contribute to the conversation.
Measuring Sports Sponsorship Effectiveness
38:10 to 42:01
Discussion on using econometric modeling and data to assess the effectiveness of sports sponsorships.
“But the good news is we haven't got a replacement.”
The Role of Sponsorship in Media Plans
42:01 to 45:06
Learn how sponsorship can be central to media strategies and its unique benefits.
“Sarah talked about the merger of two companies and using it to kind of consolidate the workforces or give people something to feel proud of after there's been a lot of layoffs.”
Objectives and Creativity in Sponsorship
45:06 to 46:22
Explore how clear objectives can enhance creativity and effectiveness in sponsorship.
“unearth and provide some opportunity for.”
Community Impact and Measuring Goodwill
46:22 to 47:10
Discuss the importance of measuring community impact and goodwill in sponsorship.
The Challenge of Measuring Social Impact
47:10 to 49:53
Understand the difficulties and methodologies in measuring social impact in sponsorship.
“There's a great study that was done in Ireland that deliberately looked, and actually they named fan goodwill as an output of sponsorship.”
B2B Trends in Sponsorship Effectiveness
49:53 to 56:00
Examine the trends and challenges in measuring B2B sponsorship effectiveness.
“i think the other thing we talked about before is that a lot of this sounds very expensive right brand trackers and econometric models.”
Understanding Sponsorship Effectiveness
56:00 to 57:56
Exploring the challenges and strategies for measuring sponsorship effectiveness in B2B contexts.
Navigating Financial Services Sponsorships
57:56 to 58:27
Discussing the complexities of reporting on sponsorship success in the financial sector.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Rebecca Martin:Hello, welcome to Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. I'm Richard Gillis. Today we're talking about sponsorship and specifically the arguments surrounding its effectiveness as a marketing platform for brands. In the second part of the podcast, you'll hear some clips from a live event that we held at Sidley Sports Offices in London called Cause and Effect. Why sponsorship needs an effectiveness revolution. So the questions are big ones. Does it work? How do we prove it works? And what does it do specifically? for sponsors of sport these are all critical arguments in the landscape for marketing because sponsorship is forever trying to make its case in and amongst other forms of marketing for brand budgets these aren't new questions by any means but they've been given a new spin by the launch of the sponsorship effectiveness forum which we talk about in some detail with rory nakil who is one of its principal architects and is also chief strategy officer of sidley sport so we did the live event I say we I wasn't there I woke up on the morning of the event with a thing called labyrinthitis I've subsequently found out that's what it's called anyway I don't recommend it I've been moaning about it for about three weeks plays your head makes you dizzy and I couldn't turn up so we are hugely indebted to Charlotte Thompson who stepped in heroically at the last minute to host our evening at Sidley sports offices so huge thanks to Charlotte the other people on the panel which you'll hear later are Charlie Dundas co-founder of GSIQ and Rebecca Bex Martin who is director head of sponsorship governance strategy and planning for Barclays we're going to play a bit of that at the end before we get to that I thought it'd be useful just to set it up with a conversation with Rory Nakheel and we talk about the forum his aspirations for it but also what the challenges are for sponsorship in the bun fight do we call it that for marketing budget anyway a lot of detail here i will come back at the end of this first bit and reintroduce the live event hope you enjoy it
2:11Rebecca Martin:first of all rory you aren't from a sponsorship background you're coming from somewhere else
2:17Charlotte Thomson:that I think is an interesting bit of this so yeah I I came to marketing from well marketing in the first place from a bit of an odd place I was I was a professional DJ and musician for the first sort of well 10 years out of union so about the age of 32 but because of that obviously was involved in quite a lot of social media and that was a bit of a transferable skill once I decided to get a proper job I've always been trying to sort of improve my knowledge doing asking for training when I could get it I did some very good training with the APG the account planners group I've read the long and short of it I've read Brian Sharp kind of studied from Mark Ritz and I'm kind of on top of that kind of conversation it's interesting the sources you
2:59Rebecca Martin:mentioned there because I spent a bit of time it's not about me but I spent a bit of time at Havas an ad agency with a media agency and you know that's with a sponsorship and bit in the middle of it part of it and it was quite interesting how prominent those sources that you mentioned byron sharp it was on everyone's desk at the ad agency and it wasn't someone i knew much about and so i think part of the reason i'm flagging this is that field and binnett stuff the long and short all of that is a part of the conversation in the advertising creative side it has been much less so in the sponsorship side and people will be listening and saying you know sod off i've been reading it too but i think in general that might be true do you think well it's
3:46Charlotte Thomson:interesting then i got to sidley which we then re-rounded to sidley sport and and yeah i mean that was my observation at least there that that you know steven our ceo i mean he came up very much from an ops hospitality management kind of background having run infrared and stuff but it was new it was kind of mcdonald's wasn't it steven hall yeah it was new to him and it was new to other people who maybe have been at more of a kind of csm agents you know that kind of agency background i think those who had worked more and maybe done quite a bit of sport but but you know for more integrated agencies kind of knew of it but i you know even my experience in agencies to this day like knowledge of it is quite mixed and maybe it'll be the strategists that do know quite a lot about it but once you get to the account managers or the creatives it's only sort of only semi-engaged with and so it's mixed I think across the industry it's not just that sponsorship is but that that was definitely my kind of world and perspective in my approach to strategy which was obviously my remit as coming in as head of strategy and then going to CSO to sort of embed a strategic philosophy I guess to the agency.
4:56Rebecca Martin:So you've got this term sponsorship effectiveness which obviously is a sort of offshoot of advertising effectiveness, which is the sort of catch-all phrase that, you know, those people that we just mentioned would fall under that bracket. And your main argument, again, we'll reference the live event that we did at Sidley Sport Offices. There's a slight provocation and there is a question of the effectiveness of sponsorship. And you're getting to a point where you're saying, actually, what about a different direction or something? so tell me about what just frame that for me that bit of it i guess the light bulb moment was there
5:33Charlotte Thomson:is no long and the short of it for sponsorship so when me as a new person obviously a bit of an imposter syndrome where's the manual i can go and read tell me how to do this as best as i can there is none there's a few articles on walk here or there there's a bit of research you know some people have been doing some relatively good research but there isn't that kind of collective body of evidence that the ipa has or that the other kind of error ambassador looking at thousands of case studies in the aggregate to look at are there rules are there general conclusions you can
6:06Rebecca Martin:draw just pause on that for a second because i think that's an interesting point so the ipa as far as i understand it is derived case studies that come through award submissions or what is the source why is the ipa got much more interesting usable data than say the essa database or sponsor sports sponsorship what what's the why i guess is my question
6:30Charlotte Thomson:so i think one of the things with the ipa is that the barrier to winning an award is quite high you have to prove that it was the advertising that did whatever you're saying it did yeah and you can't go in there with reach and engagement and say that that was a good campaign that is what they call an intermediate effect and it doesn't count basically um so that's the kind of ipa standard i think there's just a technical thing about what you say you're allowing the case study data to be used for when you submit it so i believe that the ipa are you know it's a bit more you know you are entering into a database that can then be analyzed and used for further research and i don't know if you tick that disclaimer when you go into other awards as well so i think there are other award bodies who are sitting out there on on big databases but they're just not technically
7:28Rebecca Martin:allowed to use the data in that way so somewhere the client in sponsorship so i always think about when it comes to sponsorship is the commercial aspect of sponsorship sales you've got someone You've got the rights holder selling a package to a brand. And within that, you've obviously got the price negotiation. And if I am Coca-Cola, HSBC, Volkswagen, whatever, I am working very hard to protect. But the sort of arbitrage, if you like, is to obviously I want to get the rights for as cheap as I can, whilst also building as much value as I can into those rights. So I want to keep that knowledge secret.
8:14Rebecca Martin:So I suspect Procter & Gamble know the effectiveness of their sponsorship, but they ain't telling anyone. Do you think that's true? Because I'm not going to put that in an award submission because then suddenly FIFA, UEFA, relevant marketing, whoever is selling those rights, think, oh, brilliant. Okay, so our price just went up.
8:34Charlotte Thomson:Potentially. i think the but the valuation of the deal that you just talked about is one of the big reasons that we don't look you know there's not that much knowledge about what happens after that's done so or if i think about all the energy and focus of the sector as far as not all of it i want to caveat this i know that there are people doing good measurement out there they don't want them to get annoyed but the large focus if you look at big data providers if you look at a lot of the tech it's about how do we value the deal how do we price this thing what's it worth to be front of shirt or on the sleeve and and not as much focus on okay and then what and then what happened to your brand and business over those three years and actually what is the true value of the player appearance the you know not just in terms of exposure and i think it's always priced up in terms of exposure but actually what do they do as market advertising and communication tactics for your brand so does having a player in my or you know three players from birmingham city in my advert take you know do anything for my brand well actually the advertising wisdom says that celebrities in your ads often don't do anything for your for the effectiveness of the ad my own you know we've done some initial research that that may well be true in sponsorship as well because actually those players are often sponsoring or endorsed by lots of other brands they're appearing in lots of before you know so they may not do a lot for your brand they may help you shift products and then that goes back to your your objective so i think a lot of focus has been on pricing the deal and not that much focus on analyzing what it then does for the for the sponsor and at the bottom line what does it actually do for your brand or your business and then also actually the interesting thing is no analysis of what it does for the rights holder of being involved with that partner.
10:30Charlotte Thomson:So, because that's the other interesting thing with sponsorship is that there's two brands at play. It's not just a channel and an advertiser.
10:36Rebecca Martin:That's interesting. So quite often it sort of falls under that bracket of the company we keep, doesn't it? So there is a sort of, there is a halo. I remember there was a lot of this around, and this is showing my age, but when Coca-Cola went into the Football League, do you remember when they first, I've just seen the thing, the execution was brilliant because it meant the Coke logo with every club colour. Just using this as a case study. And this is, I think, probably in the noughties. So, you know, it's a long time ago. But it's been copied since. I saw it recently actually pop up again, another iteration of it and people claiming, you know, that wasn't the initial one, blah, blah, blah, blah.
11:14Rebecca Martin:It doesn't matter. But you've got like a halo effect there. And I remember that at the time being the Football League. Blimey, they've got Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is a famous world famous one of the probably the most famous brand in the world and they're choosing to sponsor the football league there was a sort of uplift and I never saw any or much in the way of what the impact of
11:37Charlotte Thomson:that is that's what you're getting at isn't it so the impact of a sponsor on the rights holder yeah exactly or whether you're if you take a sponsorship from a government with or a country or a government with a with a questionable human rights record you know what the impacts that have your and your brand does it i mean it may not you know there's a lot of fans out there who are quite happy to take the money but um but the other bit about the other bit about that rory is interesting is
12:03Rebecca Martin:that it's sort of it you can't have it both ways so as in the right side often says look the transference of values and it's quite often the other way around as well isn't it so it used to be so when fifa was you know the blatter era all of the corruption blah blah blah was it was frontline news does that transfer to the sponsor does coca-cola get a hit take a hit for that yeah and quite often they would say no no there's no transference but then in the other the next page of the deck is look at this enormous image you know transference and values transference from rights holder to sponsor so again it's sort of and it's vice versa it's quite interesting you mentioned the other way because i'm trying to think of an example where because quite often And the sponsor is held up as a sort of moral arbiter.
12:52So quite often journalists like me, when something goes wrong,
12:56Rebecca Martin:you go in search of the sponsor to say, are you prepared to stand next to this regime of the rights holder or drugs or cheating or whatever it is? And the sponsor then has to answer that question. And underlying that journalistic sort of approach is exactly that transfer question, isn't it?
13:17Charlotte Thomson:Yeah. but I think I mean going back to your point about the football league I mean that you know there's a really we know and this is some of the stuff from advertising we know that actually one of the benefits of a brand going on to tv is that it looks like a big brand thing to do and that signal just by the media that you choose sends a message out about your brand that you must be reputable trustable you know often acting bigger than you are I was at the festival of marketing last week and Les Brinette was talking about this that that thing of acting just a little bit bigger than you are as a brand enables you to sort of grow into that sort of space so you know and that can be true of the sponsors that you attract but it also can be true of the things that you sponsor so that kind of yes signaling is is a very is a big key part of it all you quite often get that
14:06Rebecca Martin:with crypto brands are looking at that aren't they they're saying well okay let's let's buy a stadium because it's just so you know concrete in the metaphorical and literal sense that actually it makes us real look we've got an enormous amount of money trust us it's like banks used to be in you know the biggest buildings on the high street because the signal is trust yeah and since you
14:29Charlotte Thomson:know they were just suddenly everywhere weren't they so oh wow well they must be massive even though they may have something turned to profit at that point yeah yeah okay so let's let's get
14:38Rebecca Martin:to a sort of the utopia yeah of what should happen could happen what do we there's a call to action at the end of this i think do i always find exciting i always like to i always like to put something out to the audience to see if there's any response at all i kick them like a you know like old tires i kick them into into action but let's just talk about what the forum or the
15:00Charlotte Thomson:idea of this is it's the idea is that it's to create that culture of knowledge sharing and evidence-based research that exists within advertising but for sponsorship and to essentially get everybody together who is thinking about this or who is who has got something to contribute to help to define best practice understand what's out there what is publicly available because a lot of the time you know i'm sort of unearthing reports from 2018 that i've never seen before and i don't think there's like a it's almost like a knowledge bank and and i think from all of that be able to build up okay a picture of what do we collectively as a sector know now and then what might we need to go and explore further you know i think that i could list a few questions off the top of my head you know what is the optimal rights to activation budget what effect doesn't having an athlete in your campaign do for your brand or not when does a sponsorship reach maximum profitability for a brand and is it able to deliver beyond reach and exposure and actually deliver profit and bottom line results in the best case studies that we've analyzed some very good results there so we know that it can but but then how do you go about proving that so so putting those questions out there and trying to answer them as a kind of as a sector in the spirit of kind of collaboration we talked of one of the things that was said at the podcast recording was you know a rising tide lifts all boats so that the spirit yeah yeah okay great
16:39Rebecca Martin:Right. So I'm now thinking of, let's talk about media agencies, because I think there's a sort of interesting dynamic here, because whenever I have this conversation, I always think I understand it. I get it. And I think sponsorship is a very effective marketing platform. OK, who cares what I think? But that's my starting position. and then i see the sort of argument go through out of the sponsorship office out of the sports marketing office in a in an ad network you know company and it then goes into the media sales room and it starts to fall apart and quite often the reason for that is purely incentives so aligning incentives between a media agency and a sponsorship agency are really really difficult and And I think that goes from every major network.
17:32Rebecca Martin:But everyone has got a case study of the brand wants to be in cricket. We get 50K for an ECB sponsorship deal or whatever. That's our cut. And there's an activation budget on top of that. We'll work hard over three years to make some money out of that. The media rights say, I tell you what, let's put it on Sky and we make 20 % or 15 % or 10%, whatever the number is of the date. And it's just quantum of the fee that the sponsorship people get. and the person at the top of the network says yeah i get it i understand it i know when we had that meeting about sponsorship and i'm really i'm really behind this but then look at the check that i'm going to about to get for the agency so you can you know that's the sort of that feels like a bit of the real world puzzle for sponsorship has always been to try and work beyond that now i'm just going to before i let you in there's a sort of the caveat is the client appears to really like sponsorship and it's growing at a time where the the old advertising media arguments are more problematic because of the way we watch sport so just unpick this for me because i think we're at a moment i think the tight your timing is quite interesting because actually if you look at the american market there's there's a lot of money going towards sponsorship and it depends on how you define sponsorship because actually quite often people it's like a you know oh it's just a media buy that's quite often people what people say but yeah it is a media buy it's very valuable media inventory and the price of it is go it seems to be going up and up so something is happening so it's goods happening despite what media agencies have always been trying to do which is i think calm it down in comparison to their traditional media advertising inventory yeah i think when it
19:13Charlotte Thomson:was probably just pure reach for the logo it probably wasn't as effective either so at the point of which all it whatever was is that you're around uh you were particularly now that the led where for the le board le boards could change during when they were fixed you know i think you had for probably decades and decades of it not being that effective because i mean i think once once you had sponsors on the front of shirts in the 80s, it was a good way for Brother, for example, to enter the UK market or Canon. People suddenly started to...
19:50Rebecca Martin:Is that a Man City reference? Yeah. See, I remember.
19:55Charlotte Thomson:Yeah.
19:56Rebecca Martin:You see how powerful it is, Rory.
19:57Charlotte Thomson:Yeah. So probably, I think that started to play a role. But I guess for a long time, it was literally just putting your logo in a place that it could reach big exposure. but it probably didn't unless you're on the front of shirt it probably wasn't that valuable compared to running a tv campaign and so i think that legacy kind of behavior and muscle memory in media agencies that's probably how it became embedded and now
20:21Rebecca Martin:someone even my age isn't watching it isn't watching a television live television you know i haven't seen television i watched gogglebox on a friday evening and that's about it and then i watch you know a tottenham game so my my even me i'm not watching tv ads so the effectiveness of
20:39Charlotte Thomson:tv ads must be plummeting surely not really the all the evidence still suggests it is i mean and toss it cost per attentive second so people are paying a lot more focus to attention now it's very very good value and it can still reach 85 percent of you know 16 to 24 year olds in a week so it's still a very actually out of home is probably the most effective broad reach channel now because you just can't avoid it if you're living your life you know you will see billboard
21:07Rebecca Martin:but no tv still can definitely cost per attentive second yeah we get very very little attention on
21:15Charlotte Thomson:social is more of a low attention environment tv you get you have got more of people's attention when they are watching there's some research showing that even if you forward through the ads they play a bit of a role so because you can still pick up the logos and things but the
21:30Rebecca Martin:attention per second attentive second of a of the spurs shirt must be enormous yeah yeah and then
21:38Charlotte Thomson:that's another so there's a great there's a good agency called lumen who've been leading the charge on attention research but they've not looked at sponsorship either that's their one a lot of work to do here the next time you know companies like companies like system one who've done loads of great research into into they're doing a lot of work into out of home at the moment having come from looking at tv have done i've not looked at sponsorship they're associated with a guy called orlando wood who's looking at the cost of dull advertising which is where we were aligning to with our sponsorship tumbleweed there's lots of strands of thought to be brought just down through
22:17Rebecca Martin:okay well what does that mean for sponsorship why did so it's interesting that so that you've got all this work and again it's interesting system one and lumen why they're not focusing on sponsorship does that tell us something about where how much money is going into sponsorship relative to other media why is it that more's going in it's it's great it's bigger than it's
22:37Charlotte Thomson:bigger than out of home it's bigger than i think it's because that legacy of it being pure logo reach has not really been that we haven't made that except it hasn't made the chase for being case for being more of that in the way in the kind of way that they've made the case for advertising which is with these flagship reports which are then you know promoted and discussed and debated you know endlessly and that really raises the profile of them and so once you start talking to i had a good conversation with a guy called tom roach who's over at jellyfish and he's one of a very prominent person in the effectiveness debate we had a good coffee the other day and you know as i talked to him more and more about it he was like oh this is actually really interesting i hadn't really thought about that but he still didn't know a lot about how sponsorship actually works and i think that point at which you start to say well actually you know pretty much gives you first dibs on the tv advertising around the full live sport you have you know you're into social media they're all of the images are kind of captured and then they pop up in editorial or the week after you know it allows brands to get into conversations around topics that you would not normally do particularly in social media now and actually when you look at the best case studies like something like a brand like guinness with made with more who've made their rugby sponsorship absolutely integral to their brand narrative and it's an incredibly sophisticated piece of integration and sponsorship into their bigger brand advertising and they are now the most successful beer brand in the uk you know so they are the almost the poster child for effective marketing praised you know around the world and they've integrated sponsorship right into the hearts of it so we'll be trying to sort of build up an evidence basis of all the data we can gather to show what it can do for brands and that it can punch it you know hold you know punch its own way and be equated to tv and and then also show you know the best cases of it really
24:38Rebecca Martin:really working and being done well quite often i think complexity so there's two things one is i think the sponsorship industry and agencies going back 25 30 years have been taught this media it's just a media by the dumb stupid sponsor sport sponsorship that was always there's a sort of inferiority complex industry industry wide toward the clever people of ad agency the rory sutherlands of this world who are talking about marketing in more more broad sense he has come it's interesting he's come much more closer to sponsorship he's much because he i think he smells the sort of money he's moving towards this sector so he's appearing at leaders he's going to various talks to us he's been on our podcast he doesn't know anything about sport but he does see where the money is going and so he's sort of articulating and pointing his arguments more towards sport and he's a you know he's pro sport but I think there is a there is that I think there's been a sort of intellectual question deficit on the sponsorship side over year over decades and I think there's also another bit which I sometimes think about which is that sponsorship is as a result of that there is a sort of we're not just a stupid ad buy you know it's not the football shirt is quite often seen as a sort of relic of a former age and it's irrelevant but increasingly i think to my brother case study there of man city and my my under i think it's it probably performs very well in comparison to tv ads now better than it ever has done argue that i don't know the other bit is the to get out of that hole of it's a stupid ad buy the sponsorship industry and the agencies have pushed it towards being up it's really complicated because it makes it more you know it's a multi headed hydro is a phrase that quite often is get used it's so it can be all of these things can be the glue that brings everything together and i think a lot of clients say you know what i'm going to be cmo for three years fuck that for a game of soldiers i'm going to just do a fantastic campaign and i don't want to be saddled with a sports sponsorship that i'm going to have to rethink every you know revitalizing and all of those things so i think the complexity and the activation ball ache puts a lot of clients off by comparison to the the big idea and it's and it's interesting you mentioned guinness because i think actually that's a it's a fantastic case study there aren't many case studies where where the sports sponsorship is integral to a brilliant
Read the full transcript
27:11Charlotte Thomson:creative idea no i i think the well the complexity let me just think about that because there's a there's a really good point to be made around objectives and and this is something i came back to on the podcast recording which is being very very clear as a marketer about why you're going into sponsorship and what you wanted to achieve for your business and then really being quite ruthlessly strategic about how you activate it then in order to achieve that so we've just we're about to we will publish some research in in november that's looked at the media sort of channel selection for 92 different sponsorship activations and we've seen that actually you know events and experiential are very very good at achieving what the ipa would call behavioral effects word of mouth participation downloads that kind of stuff not so good at business effects so you know profit margin revenue growth for example athletes again not great at generating brand effects so awareness perception changes but quite good at generating sales effects so getting people to go and buy something yeah and i think there's a yes it's a multi-headed beast if you don't really know exactly why you're doing it in the first place but actually if you are right a buttoned up effective marketer that knows what the business goal is for the year how marketing will change that because of the analysis that you've done is it that actually you're trying to change what people think about your brand or is it because not enough people know about it and then when you pick the right the right property to sponsor actually using the right combination channels and to achieve a very, very specific goal.
28:58Charlotte Thomson:And I think sometimes what we see at Sidley Sport is briefs coming in for pitches or with every single objective under the sun. We want to raise awareness, change how people think about us. We want to drive conversion. We want to keep our customers loyal. Well, that's kind of four different... You might want four different sponsorships, but maybe try not to do it all through one because that's going to get very complicated.
29:23Rebecca Martin:What they need, Rory, is a strategist. yeah sponsorship strategist that's what they need exactly and that classic you know michael
29:31Charlotte Thomson:porto quote strategy is what strategy is what you choose not to do you know what you're not going to do everybody can do everything but what are you not going to do and how you're going to keep it focused and that helps you tell a better story back to the business ultimately you mentioned
29:45Rebecca Martin:system one i'm interested in them but i'm also interested in the idea of econometrics what does that do for this where are we with that obviously not a new thing econometrics i'm talking about but it feels like there is this part of an answer here what what's going on there yeah so econometrics
30:04Charlotte Thomson:it's pretty standard in big particularly in big advertisers it's a way of statistical modeling to kind of look at all the factors in a set of data that might be influences a set of data
30:15Rebecca Martin:there is a question about intangible i think somewhere in here in terms of what we can measure what we can't measure and what we possibly don't want to measure there is the idea there's the sort of magic bit and you quite often see here people talk about you know maths and magic and they're trying to balance these two things about certainty and doubt whatever however we couch it it's saying the same thing that actually there is it's the old revlon quote about you know 50 percent of my advertising works i just don't know which bit which half and there is a question there about from sponsorship's point of view because it feels like there's enormous amounts of intangible value back to our sort of transference of values and rights holders the olympics it has to be commoditized into a rights package for someone to be able to buy it but actually that's just scratching at the value the script the real value is in olympism and the values and so i think there's something there that sport is wrestling with because again it's something that is inherently valuable but they can't put a number on it it's sort of what data can't measure question and econometrics is a sort of bridge to that question i think it's it's trying to get loads of data points together to try and piece together a you know a coherent whole but it allows you to isolate what a thing
31:38Charlotte Thomson:the thing has done so but it is always you basically create this big model and then you go okay well what happened to sales when we turned our tv campaign on or not and what and but you can also point it at what happened to brand brand attribute a in our brand tracker when we turn the tv advertising on but it's been for various reasons not that easy to incorporate sponsorship into econometric models in the past i think partly because they were in the sponsorship was almost introduced as an environmental factor rather than media channel in itself because it's you know tv stations can give you tvrs back but you can really solid exposure data so it's quite easy to just okay we've got 10 000 10 million tvrs what happened in region a b or c it's hard to do that because it's just so tricky to measure now that we've been working with charlie dundas at gsiq and our system at your agency kepler to look at this because his software makes it a lot more cost effective to really get on top of the amount of exposure that you would get across broadcast social etc from any one deal and start to sort of be able to equate them to display impressions for
32:54Rebecca Martin:example yeah just to point us towards the end here there's a question here about who wins who loses because quite often people talk about, you know, in these sort of abstract nouns of, you know, the sports sponsorship market or the rights holders. It's full of things of different sizes and shapes. And one inarguable trend is the bigger getting bigger. The top of the market, the elite rights holder, the elite global rights holders are becoming disproportionately more wealthy. It's the squeeze middle that everyone is worried about. And however, that's defined in whatever country and in whatever marketplace.
33:31Rebecca Martin:But give me a sense when you look at the push towards greater effectiveness and the understanding of sponsorship effectiveness. Do you get a sense of who wins, who loses from that information?
33:43Charlotte Thomson:I don't think anybody loses. And I think that points to one of the reasons why this hasn't happened, which is that sense of sponsorship being a bit more zero sum in terms of a category that if I find out something, that's going to either I need that to benefit me and not anybody else, or it's going to mean that I've got a strong negotiating position. because I think that ultimately, you know, as a rights holder, being able to explain to your sponsors how to most efficiently achieve their goals and being able to prove your demonstration and understanding and your knowledge of how to do that is a benefit whether you are a non-league football team or a Premier League football team or whatever.
34:31Charlotte Thomson:it may be that every all rights holders have been undervaluing their rights but that's probably that may be because actually sponsorship is delivering a lot more for brands than they ever really realized so that's good news for the brands and if you're a cmo you've got much more information on which to base your judgments you've got a you know clearer picture of what sponsorship can do for you and if you're a sponsorship director at a brand you've got a case to go and get more investment and to secure more more rights next season so i think in all of those cases everybody wins i think from having more information okay that's good right right final thing we mentioned
35:08Rebecca Martin:a call to action what can people do people will have heard this they'll have they'll have heard the live event and they'll have heard this conversation i think yeah they're onto something here i want to join in i want to get involved i want i've got an opinion what other than messaging me what should they do could they do they can follow the sponsorship effectiveness forum on
35:31Charlotte Thomson:on linkedin we'll be announcing our very first forum very soon and we'll be publishing our first piece of research very soon as well so please give us a follow and do attend we're looking for people from agencies rights holders brands from across europe and north america anybody who feels like they have something to contribute to this conversation then please do attend the first forum will be will be starting to to outline the direction of travel and and and broaden it out beyond myself and and charlie and bex and sarah so please do get involved and obviously if you've got any questions about any of this then then give us a call at sid lee sport as well okay so that was
36:08Rebecca Martin:rory nakil now we're gonna just transfer and run a bit of the live event as mentioned at the beginning of the podcast our guests you'll hear are first of all you hear stephen hall who is chief executive of Sid Lee Sport who gives a brief introduction you'll hear Sean Singleton of Unofficial Partner ignore him Charlotte Thompson again hero then you also have the guest Rebecca Bex Martin who is director head of sponsorship governance strategy and planning for Barclays and then you have Charlie Dundas who is the founder of GSIQ research company and you have and as you're here at the end there is a call to action it's always thrilling so if you've got thoughts and you want to contribute to the new sponsorship effectiveness forum or sef then get in touch with rory details are available in the show notes to this podcast first a very warm
37:07Charlie Dundas:welcome my name is stephen hall i'm the ceo of sidley sport delighted you could all attend i hope it's going to be a thoroughly enjoyable session. Firstly, a big thank you to our partners and then thank you to our panelists. My background was McDonald's and I thought I knew a lot about sponsorship and then I met Rory, certainly from a data point of view. But Rory said to me, I think we should put together like a sponsorship effectiveness team. Do something around sponsorship effectiveness. And he goes, any ideas? I said, I've got this guy I know called Charlie Dundas. He's like shit hot on data and stuff.
37:39Charlie Dundas:So we could pull him in. And then Rory said, yeah but we need someone who heavyweight brand understands the world of sponsorship oh i know bex martin from another organization i run called nmbr so here they are and they're going to explain all about uh sponsorship effectiveness uh they've just created sponsorship effectiveness forum which i believe also rory you're going to talk about have a wonderful session ask any questions and uh i'll pass over to the experts i'm only here to share the good news and the bad news. I'll start with the bad news. Richard Gillis is unwell. He's on his sickbed in Brighton.
38:16Charlie Dundas:But the good news is we haven't got a replacement. We've got an upgrade. We've got someone who actually has worked in sports sponsorship on rights holder side, agency and recently media. And also a person has recently joined the Unafuture Partner family as one of the new co-hosts of our sister podcast, Expected Goals, about the business of women's football. If you don't listen to it, you should. And most importantly, or most importantly to me, like Richard and myself, she's a long-suffering Spurs fan. So we've kept it, we've kept it coise. And also the other thing is she only found out she was doing this yesterday afternoon.
38:52Charlie Dundas:So Richard's been planning this for three months and she's had 24 hours. So please welcome Charlotte Thompson.
38:59Rory:So as Sean and Stephen said so well, we're here to talk about a subject that has no doubt kept us all up at night at one stage or another what is the best way to measure the effectiveness of sports sponsorship and when we were catching up yesterday you were talking to me
39:12Charlotte Thomson:about econometric modeling for sponsorship i mean so an econometric model is a way of looking at the past data of the brand and taking into consideration all the media that you've bought and all the variables you can possibly put into what's going on in a customer's life and looking at your sales data or any particular metric in the business that you want to and understanding did a particular channel advertising media channel drive that drive it or not so it can kind of tell you what your tv ad did versus your radio and what happened to profit or whatever when you added radio radio to the mix now the challenge has always been adding how to incorporate sponsorship into that
39:50Rory:it really helps with like the budgeting side of things as well so knowing again obviously where i'm very lucky we we do have nice healthy budgets but trying to sort of have some sort of formula or equations be like right well how much should we carve out put in here obviously yes we've got some form of data and insights to base that on but i think that what roy's just described will be an absolute game changer for sort of that upfront budget planning for the annual plans yeah when you
40:16Charlie Dundas:can get into that kind of granularity you mentioned rolex we worked with them a lot in the past they actually got to the point of trying to understand the compounding effect of the advertising they bought around the things they sponsored so if you watch wimble then you're going to see the rolex clocks there it's almost unavoidable but then if you also buy extra media in whatever channel how much more impact does that have you know so what is it that means that the person who kind of in old money buys the pull out in the newspaper engages with stuff on you know different other media channels and so on so on so on actually the compounding effect was huge in terms of what it did for them so they knew it's worthwhile spending that extra money to achieve the goals and the ambitions they had but it started from we are synonymous with Wimbledon or anything else they sponsored because our brand is front in the center within it and that leads quite nice onto the kind
41:01Rory:of centerpiece of today talking about the seph launch of seph we're going with it i like it we're making an executive decision that that's what we're going with um you've got a really specific goal to establish benchmarks for effectiveness within the sponsorship category we've talked a lot about why you're doing or what you're doing but actually what tangible impacts do you think this is going to have in the industry?
41:24Charlotte Thomson:I think honestly what I want to do is to start to speak the same language as the IPA so we can talk about sponsorship in the same terms so I have you know the work that I've been doing is is coding them as brand effects business effects sales effects intermediate effects and behavioral effects and how many
41:44Rory:studies did you tell me you were going through at the moment?
41:46Charlotte Thomson:I did 92 case studies it was a big crank yeah i did this long time in the making my nice neat csv file that i've got now but it's just to talk the same language you know because you know we're talking a ve and exposure and and they're talking profit and it just it doesn't match up i think they misunderstand what sponsorship can do and that's why it's not as central to random media plans as it could be i mean i think
42:12Rory:that that low cost point entry is actually really key there because actually what we don't want this to be is just the big players getting bigger and actually the smaller players still struggling with having to defend their sponsorship budgets or try and get you know from from the rights holder side try and get sponsorships in the first place uh and we were talking before about actually that value of they'll probably have a load of data because they will know their their sport better than anyone and actually being able to give that to you is super valuable but then for them to be able to say we've won this award without having to worry about how you know they're going to sign a player or go into your or enter your award is really valuable so that can really like unhofully unlock and help actually grow some of the smaller sports as well well alongside us is also sarah
42:54Charlotte Thomson:kendall who from the football association is here today who's also one of the founding members and she raised a really good point the other day which is um that for sponsorship it may be and probably it's almost certainly true that sponsorship is good for lots of other things that advertising isn't good for you know and so actually there may be a whole range of objectives out there that businesses want to achieve that you just can't do with advertising. Sarah talked about the merger of two companies and using it to kind of consolidate the workforces or give people something to feel proud of after there's been a lot of layoffs.
43:21Charlotte Thomson:Or maybe when you're going into a new market, there are things that sponsorship can do that advertising can't. And also there's an interesting, unique aspect to it. There's two brands at play. So in advertising, you've just got channel and brand.
43:32Charlie Dundas:Yeah, and I think the ambition to get that knowledge and that capability into the hands of more people. And I think we often forget that, particularly in sponsorship, unlike advertising, a lot of the things that people sponsor are not in London. They're not in urban centres. They're dotted all around the country. And often the talent who are working at those organisations are there to do more than one job. So they don't necessarily come blessed with all the knowledge that we're talking about here. So actually to democratise some of that and put it into the hands of those people such that they can.
44:00Charlie Dundas:Sponsorship doesn't need to be Berkeley sponsoring the Premier League. It can be your local insurance company sponsoring the local rugby club. You know, it can, it's the same thing, just on a different scale. So if you can give people some best practice ideas, I'm not saying they're necessarily going to see Wimbledon Rugby Club start leaning into econometric modelling, but... You never know. Well, exactly. It's getting cheaper, by the way. But, you know, I do think there is something to be said for actually getting that information into the hands of more people and allowing them to do a better job, because ultimately if you do a good job with your sponsors, then they stick around and keeping them is a lot easier than having to find new ones.
44:34Rory:I mean, I think obviously all of that, And then for us, it will massively help with the deals we construct with our partners, I think, being able to really demonstrate the things that are working, the things that aren't and making those more tailored packages to effectively then challenge our agencies and our partners to push the boundaries on some of the work that I think sponsorship industry sometimes can be guilty of being repetitive. so I think hopefully that will take us on to the to the next level and I mean there's a we're at the tip of the iceberg so I think there's probably a whole host of things that this hopefully will unearth and provide some opportunity for.
45:10Rory:Great and just before we open the floor up to questions so this is your time warning for you all to start thinking last question quite a classic question but I think you've made it really clear that sponsorship needs this effectiveness revolution so what's the first thing you could change if it would happen tomorrow what would you ask everyone
45:23Charlotte Thomson:here and everyone listening to do i'm going to go back to the objectives thing i think it all starts there because that is that it makes everybody clear about why you're doing what you're doing and how you're going to measure it and that then should enable creativity should never be that data kills creativity it should enable the kind of creative ideas that you come up with it should enable creative risk taking as well actually a lot of the most effective marketers are very confident in taking creative risks because they know that that's what pays off you know ultimately you need to get noticed you need to people need to remember that it's you whatever communication you put out there and if it just looks the same as everybody else you're not going to get there so a lot of the work that we do with with clients is kind of objective setting workshops and using frameworks that we've got to it sometimes feels daunting to go oh you know or what's the overall revenue target of the business and how do you fit into that but it's possible and actually if you know that that's what the business is trying to do everything needs to be in service at that so i think i would say kind of look at your objectives rigorously um that would be the
46:21Rory:thing to do tomorrow right objectives go results the other end of the scale i just like to see kind
46:27Charlie Dundas:of more and more that information about what is actually achieved that businesses can share and put out there because ultimately everyone wants to know that what they are trying to sell or buy but particularly sell is actually delivering a benefit to that business that makes it worthwhile doing so i think if we could get more results shared by the brands that sponsor then it would help everyone to believe more in what they're doing yeah i think obviously those two things
46:50Rory:combined but for me it's more of the bottom end of the funnel metrics and being able to really demonstrate the profitability without getting to the crux of you know we're in business and sponsorship for a reason so it's more being able to demonstrate and improve what it's driving from that point of view fab thank you so much and i think we've got time for questions yeah let's have some questions so say your name and where you're from yeah andy from a gift of kit
47:15Charlie Dundas:um there's been quite a lot of um mentions about profitability and my you know how you're going to your roi etc but also so many brands these days are also concentrating on community purpose social impact i work for a social you know gift of kit is a grassroots company is there going to be a time when we can actually measure goodwill.
47:44Charlotte Thomson:Goodwill is a really interesting word. There's a great study that was done in Ireland that deliberately looked, and actually they named fan goodwill as an output of sponsorship. So this was looking at, from a commercial perspective, what they found is that if you link your brand to the property successfully, you see a 30 % uplift in affinity and propensity to purchase. If you generate fan goodwill, i.e. they believe that you are doing something good for the property or for their interaction with it it more than doubles to 70 percent and i see that's where a lot of brands fall down is that they're happy to link it and do some comms that put that you know show the lock up at the end but that little unlock that can enhance how a fan enjoys or interacts with its club with their club or just clearly benefits the sport you know or the or the club is really really important and actually a massive commercial unlock we'd love to that that was a small number of cases in Ireland again exactly we'd love to look at that and interestingly there are going to be cases where it is just a pure CSR play that's a lot of the reasons and we're interestingly what we're looking at is is cases that have achieved their objectives and gone beyond them now if it's a social if it's a social impact one then then great you know we still want to know how you did it what channels did you use you know in what order and what was the level of investment that you put in to get there so I guess it's that and then the other the classic example you know this girl can for example brilliant effectiveness case study they also did a very good job of putting a financial number to the kind of societal impact that they had as well so i think there's those are various areas to look at yeah i was just gonna i'll just
49:18Rory:add i mean obviously we are heavily involved in many community programs and the reason i suppose i haven't spoken about that as much today is i feel like we've we have got quite a good process around how we demonstrate that success whereas parts i suppose i've focused more on is because actually that's that is a big gap for us but yeah we have we have got many things set up through whether it's our ipsos uh brand tracking about how we are driving positive change on that societal impact whether it's numbers participation etc you know yeah it's very i think to everything you've just said will continue to be more and more important as sponsorships evolve
49:53Charlotte Thomson:i think the other thing we talked about before is that a lot of this sounds very expensive right brand trackers and econometric models. But we were just talking about the fact that we do this ourselves in our own marketing as Sidley Sport. We have the unofficial partnership. We've got a small brand tracker. Is it the biggest sample size? No. We've got a bigger margin in an area than we would like. But we're operating on a budget. But we do know that our awareness has gone up and that actually 9 out of 10 people who've heard of us have heard of us because of the partnership. So we know it's done its job.
50:25Charlotte Thomson:You don't have to be perfect. You've just got to have a go. So any good sport coach will tell you that what is measured will improve. And it's the same in your marketing as well.
50:35Charlie Dundas:Thanks for those kind words. I've got a question. Sean from Unafugee Partner. Have you got a call to action for the people in this room and the wider sports industry about this new forum, Seth?
50:46Charlotte Thomson:Follow Seth on LinkedIn. Yeah, follow Seth on LinkedIn. The idea is to have quarterly forums, hopefully in person, but we've already got, you know, already speaking to people in the US as well. So there's global interest in this. And yeah, please, if you're interested in donating your time, energy, ideas, feel free. It's not an agency initiative. You know, I've been quite careful to make sure that this is not, it's not a Sidley sport idea. Obviously, I work here. We're here today. But this is about everybody from across the industry. And like Charlie said, a rising tide. Yeah.
51:18Rory:Hi, this is more of a comment rather than a question. My name is Rosemary Sargenson. I run the UK Sponsorship Awards and have done for more years than I'd like to admit. and our byline is rewarding effectiveness. So we've been doing this for rather a long time, 32 years, and we sit on thousands of campaigns. Unfortunately, when people submit their campaigns, they mostly state that they don't wish to share that information. So I think that will be a difficulty because I would love to publish because, as I say, I'm sitting on an archive of sponsorship campaigns dating back decades. of the best, Barclays being one of them, campaigns, but they don't wish to share that data.
52:04Rory:They win the awards. We reward them. They come along fantastic. But if I do go to them and say, please, would you, can we publish this? They will edit it down to something that isn't necessarily as useful as it might be.
52:18Charlie Dundas:Completely, Rosie. That is definitely the challenge. There's no doubt about it. And having been involved a couple of times and sat on some of those judging panels, you sort of see some of the submissions and the ones that win are always the ones that include the vast the better data more data and and not just kind of like fairly spurious stuff and that is the challenge there's no doubt about it but i think by kind of trying to explain to the industry that it's not stealing information from each other it's actually trying to improve how sponsorship works generally who knows it may or may not work no no no it's a great point by the way and it's you know it may or may not work in getting people
52:54Rory:to share but that has to be the concept i think also potentially if more people are willing to even just share the challenge as a as an organization as a brand what are our challenges what are our priorities what are objectives even that without having to go into the crux of some of the previous either successes or or not just getting an understanding of what is sponsorship trying to achieve for you and getting and that that hopefully also will help be able to pull together okay well how can we actually prove and measure that so there potentially might be a bit of a fine balance around yeah that conversation and i think you know that i mean there will always
53:31Charlotte Thomson:be brands that don't want to enter awards i don't think you'll see an adidas case study in the ipa database i've worked with them for a long time i know they just don't want to share it what binet and field did which was so good was that it was there was no there was a few case studies given as examples from like mcdonald's and asda but it was just the aggregate view which was the beneficial thing you know 10 of cases had an roi figure in there what was common what was unique about them versus yeah this was more like the aggregate view that is of real real benefit so i would love to talk about your thousands of case studies as well you'll put them all into your pile i'm just my late nights have just got stretched out into christmas i think we've
54:11Charlie Dundas:got another question over here hi there sean jefferson hi sean jefferson from sport value understandably the conversation has been mostly about kind of consumer marketing but touched a little bit on sales and you know colleagues and and so on and community but have you seen or what are you seeing in terms of the trends of measuring the effectiveness of the b2b play because that's often either undervalued or kind of if you like separated from the consumer because it sits in marketing but can be the most valuable and sometimes the reason why the chairman ceo thinks we should keep doing this so what are you seeing in that sort of area again i think you know everything that rory's talking about can be applied to that space i guess the examples which none of this is going to sound new because it isn't but got friends who work at gallagher response of premiership rugby for a long time they use that locally when they bought all the insurance companies they bought around the uk to give a rallying point so that people go to a local community club largely obviously a sale or a saracens or whoever it might be and they could interact and engage and then they kind of roll through the premiership final and the big hotel in the south stand is full of gallagher insurance brokers with their clients having a good time so there's building pride in the gallagher brand when it's probably been previously called something else and then showing those people there's an environment that they're invested into so i think that's an example that is again is as old as the hills and it works particularly well in insurance in rugby, I'm not trying to say it's new or different.
55:36Charlie Dundas:Do they have places that they can try and track that? They do. So when we were at YouGov, we were tracking that for them to understand, were they raising awareness and other metrics? Awareness is the easy one you always fall back on amongst some really difficult to reach audience segments, you know, B2B decision makers and SMEs over, you know, 10 million pounds a year in revenue kind of thing, and then other stratas. So the problem you get is that who are you trying to kind of reach in B2B? And sometimes it can be very fine or very thin kind of like cuts of people and to get kind of significant segments and being able to then get good information out of them can be difficult so it requires a little bit of time requires effort requires a bit of budget to kind of get to that robust data as Rory said what you're doing for yourselves with silly sport that's not going to cut the mustard in someone like Gallagher trying to find that evidence so I don't know there's a good answer Sean I think the real the nub of it comes down to right back to what Rory said if you know your objective is to try and drive a b2b return whether that is in the insurance sector as i've just described make sure you're going to put in place and invest properly in the metrics to kind of get that information back rather than just simply kind of go well there's lots of people in this room having a good time that feels okay it's got to be more to it than that so gallagher as an example definitely are investing to a degree in information that will help them go to the board and say this is why we're continuing after now nine or ten years whatever it might have been a sponsoring
56:54Rory:premiership rugby it's a great question by the way because it's something that we are hot on at the moment around obviously you know we've got lords we've got wimbledon we host at over 1400 of our top clients and it's how can we talk about that and the impact that that's having without obviously abc coming into force and all the other um given we're a financial services bland anti-corruption etc it's a really hard topic to approach and we want to report on it we want to be able to demonstrate the success of these partnerships um obviously deepening and strengthening those client relationships but we've got to be incredibly careful with how we position it internally um so again i think depending upon the sort of category you're in you'll be able to report on it differently but it certainly is a really hot topic at the moment our side so welcome to any ideas if anyone has got anybody in specific financial services brand would be great
58:25Thank you.
From the publisher
We went to the London offices of Sid Lee Sport to host Cause and Effect: Why sponsorship needs an effectiveness revolution.
A live recording featuring industry professionals from across the sport sponsorship marketplace, who came together in front of an invited VIP audience to ask some big questions as sport's role as a marketing platform for brands.
Taking part were:
Hosting the event was Charlotte Thomson, founder of The One10 Collective and formerly head of women's football at Copa90.
Joining Charlotte on stage were Charlie Dundas (GSIQ), Rebecca Martin (Barclays/ESA), and Rory Natkiel (Sid Lee Sport) as founding board members of the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum, a not-for-profit, cross-industry platform dedicated to raising the standard of sponsorship effectiveness.
"By building benchmarks, sharing case studies, and challenging old assumptions, our mission is to help sponsorship achieve its true potential and claim its rightful place at the heart of brand building. This is just the start. Over the months ahead we’ll be publishing research, hosting events, and creating the tools the industry needs to move beyond exposure metrics and prove the real impact of sponsorship."
Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartner
We publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday.
These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport.
Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here.
Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app.
If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.