from podcast to vodcast

Is podcasting already out of date for brand owners?

The growth of broadband platforms has heralded something of a boom time for the creative industry and has allowed content providers like the BBC to extend their brands online and build a direct relationship with the audience and consumer.

I recently downloaded the BBC’s iPlayer that allows me to download some of my favourite programmes to my computer if I’ve missed them on the telly (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer). And of course I can listen again to the Today programme or its best bits by downloading a specially edited podcast of the show.

Radio One DJ Chris Moyles is a podcast evangelist and regularly encourages his audience to download his latest shows, as does the ‘king of podcasts’ Ricky Gervais. Both have generated loyal audiences for their content.

It seems simple enough. Get hold of an iPod or other MP3 player, download the software onto your computer, copy the download podcast file to your player and off you go.

Brand owners haven’t been slow to get in on the act either.

Many have experimented in podcasting since the explosion of iPod sales in 2004 and predicted that podcasting would grow into a powerful broadcast medium suitable for brand communication.

For example, BA has created a series of podcasts giving tips on how to get a good nights’ sleep, the AA has launched a series of podcasts explaining how to carry out basic car maintenance and Arla Foods have recently launched recipe podcasts to support the re-launch of their feta cheese product in the UK.

On the face of it, this sounds like these brand owners have evolved a digital strategy that’s keeping pace with how audience and customer segments now prefer to receive their information and entertainment.

Except that like fashion, audience and consumer tastes are fickle and can change in the time it takes to download your brilliantly entertaining new radio commercial.

According to research conducted by BMRB last year, 24% of respondents questioned said they would download a podcast in the following 12 months, yet only 19% of respondents questioned this year said that they would.

Part of the reason is that we’ve all become confused, say the researchers.

The term podcast has developed into a catch-all phrase that could include downloading, streaming, subscribing and even vodcasting.

Then there’s the phenomenon of ‘podcast inertia’ where users often subscribe to a series of podcast downloads and may listen to the first couple of episodes and then stop. Unless there’s genuinely new content only available via a podcast then its unlikely to attract a big audience, say the researchers.

It’s clear that brand owners have a long way to go in exploiting the full potential of the medium in a more creative and engaging way rather than simply running adverts in the vain hope they’ll be downloaded. Re-worked radio ads isn’t the future.

Podcasts are also notoriously difficult to measure as podcasting is less transparent than other forms of online media usage which can be directly assessed. The industry will have to invent new ways of tracking audience behaviour if it’s to stand a chance of turning podcasting into an art form.

So is podcasting becoming irrelevant as a brand communication tool?

Well, not yet.

Brand owners need to start to evolve the use of podcasting as a modern brand communication channel that lifts its head above re-working advertising commercials.

Brand owners like the AA, BA and Arla Foods who’ve already started to become innovative ‘podcasters’ are in a good position to extend their activities to include sponsorship of a show or stream of content that can help create a more enduring relationship with audience and customer segments.

For the majority of brand owners looking to jump onto the podcasting bandwagon, it may be too late!

By the time they’ve mastered the technique, the audience will have moved onto downloading videos that can be played out on the next generation of video-enabled iPods.

In which case, forget podcasting. And get vodcasting!

battery power

‘Battery Power’

Free mobile calls and texts in return for receiving brand owners’ messages is set to become a predominant brandcasting model of the future, predicts Ardi Kolah

While user generated content (UGC) and its impact on brand communication has occupied a fair amount of marketing media coverage lately, the next wave of consumer communication has only just begun.

Later this year, users in the UK will have the chance to make free phone calls and texts on their mobiles.

That sounds like an offer too good to be true. And of course there’s a catch.

Subscribers will need to opt-in to receive brands’ messages.

On the face of it, this looks like a fair compromise.

However, critics are sceptical that the ‘free rewards in return for advertising’ model won’t work as users will soon get fed up being bombarded with junk mail and offers they’ve no interest in. That’s been the experience to date.

But this hasn’t dissuaded City investors in looking for new ways to use mobile technology to reach 16-24 year-olds with a greater degree of accuracy and fluency than has been done at present.

According to telecom industry analysts, advertising and marketing on mobile phones is set to become the next marketing phenomenon – worth $6 billion a year within the next five years.

And this will take place against the background of a shrinking market for traditional voice services that have become so commoditised that they’ve dropped from the bottom of the value chain.

For example, Skype already allows millions of users to make free calls anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before technology allows you to do this from your mobile.

So the recent announcement by Blyk – the pan-European free mobile phone operator that’ll launch its service in the UK this summer – is evidence of ‘battery power’ in the marketing mix.

“For decades, marketers have been dreaming of a medium that has the distribution effect of broadcast, targeting capabilities of direct marketing and interactivity of the internet. And now it’s here,” claims Ala-Pietila, founder of Blyk.

What’s interesting is that Coca-Cola, Buena Vista, L’Oreal Paris, Yell.com and StepStone have been the first brand owners to sign up to use the Blyk network (provided by Orange).

They’ve been seduced by the prospect of reaching consumers in real time, creating innovative content that will allow dialogue as well as being able to closely match the needs and interests of the customer segment.

And it’s likely that these brand owners won’t stop at advertising but will create campaigns around ‘mobisodes’ as well as offering branded-downloadable content such as music, games and other entertainment – for free.

And of course it’s measurable – allowing a deeper level of behavioural data to be captured.

Provided these brand owners engage rather than antagonise these customer segments then the future’s bright for Blyk’s new service.

And it could make paying your phone bill a much less painful experience.

Ardi Kolah is a sponsorship practitioner and works with a range of brand owners to maximise the return on investment from sponsorship. He can be contacted on mobile 077100 77941 or ardi@kolah.com

an experiment in armchair sponsorship

An experiment in armchair sponsorship

Ardi Kolah explores the thinking of a furniture retailer that’s following in the footsteps of a chocolate manufacturer.

In October broadcast sponsorship history will be made as furniture retailer Harvey’s takes over from Cadbury’s as broadcast sponsor of the nation’s favourite TV soap, Coronation Street.

At first glance you’re left wondering why Harvey’s rather than some other well known household name is in the frame?

Given that Coronation Street continues to dominate the viewing figures as the nation’s most watched TV show with a 46% share of viewing, you would’ve thought that there’d been a queue of more high-profile sponsors knocking at the door of ITV’s Brand Partnership Department.

Cadbury’s association with the show spanned a decade and yet the current deal, rumoured to be worth £10m a year is only for two years.

This may be indicative of several factors – for example, a higher profile brand owner didn’t step forward or if it did it didn’t want to write a big cheque to acquire the broadcast sponsorship rights.

Or alternatively, there wasn’t ever a long queue of sponsors waiting to acquire this jewel in ITV’s crown.

The absence of a higher profile advertiser may also reflect the nervousness of some brand owners to use TV as a channel to build trust with the audience in light of recent scandals that have shaken the public’s confidence in the medium.

However, this is unlikely to have been a factor in the current deal with ITV despite its phone-in problems.

At the end of the day, the broadcast sponsorship deal looks like a clever media buy.

Already an advertiser on ITV1 and 2, the new deal with ITV now expands Harvey’s brand awareness across all interactive platforms, including mobile and the broadband section on itv.com as well as off-air merchandising and licensing.

Clearly, Harvey’s has done its sums and thinks it will get a decent return on its media investment.

But the deal still leaves open the question as to whether Harvey’s will stick with the show in the long run like Cadbury’s.

According to Harvey’s spokesperson “the Coronation Street viewer is a perfect fit for our shopper and working on a two year basis provides us with the opportunity to put research benchmarks into place to understand the effectiveness of this deal longer term.”

If we subtract the PR spin, what this means is that “it’s a good media buy that’ll help raise our brand awareness and we’ll need some convincing to continue with this strategy if this has been achieved at the end of the two-year deal.”

It’s hard to imagine that this deal is anything but a media buy rather than sponsorship in its widest sense.

Sponsorship is much more than simply the alignment of demographic or psychographic data.

Where sponsorship is proven to work well is where it builds a deeper connection and dialogue between the brand owner, the property and the audience– and the relationship between the brand owner and the property is both relevant and natural in the eyes of the audience.

It’s also interesting to note that consumers don’t buy armchairs with the same frequency as they do bars of chocolate!

On this basis, there’s bound to be media wastage in terms of those viewers who’ve already bought their sofas from Harvey’s or its high street rivals and won’t be ‘tuning in’ to change them – no matter how seductive the message.

In any event, these same consumers have probably purchased their living room suites on HP and interest free terms that lock them into contracts for a very long time.

Clearly, Harvey’s is hoping that it can make itself just as famous as Coronation Street to become the ‘UK’s favourite retailer’ in order to attract new customers into its stores.

So where does this leave our understanding of sponsorship?

If deals like this become the norm, then the net effect will be to reduce broadcast sponsorship to the status of nothing more than a media buy.

And over time, the public will begin to regard ‘sponsorship’ as little more than another word for advertising - which of course as you and I know, it isn’t.

Ardi Kolah is a brand communication and sponsorship consultant. He can be reached on +44 (0)20 7 323 1587 email ardi@kolah.com

adventures in brandcasting

Adventures in Brandcasting

Ardi Kolah investigates why InterContinental is embarking on a global acoustic programme that will be music to the ears of its customers

Most major brand owners aren't strangers in the use of music. In fact, name me one TV advert that doesn't use a music sound track. See what I mean?

Music in this context is used to help achieve attention, interest, desire and action.

But the use of sound in a branding context is something different and admittedly not that well understood by the vast majority of brand marketers.

However, all that's set to change in the wake of this latest adventure in brandcasting.

InterContinental - owners of the Holiday Inn, Staybridge Suites, Crowne Plaza and Indigo brands - has just announced it’s about to embark on a 'global acoustic programme' that will be rolled out across its vast hotel and resorts empire.

The key difference between this and the use of music in advertising is that InterContinental wants to create interest in its hotel and leisure brands rather than in the music per se.

In other words, InterContinental isn't trying to discover the next Babylon Zoo, a band made famous as a result of its 'Spaceman' track used in the Levis 501 TV commercials in the 90’s.

Research by InterContinental shows that if you're a frequent business traveller, it's the differences at the margin that make a huge difference between staying at one hotel compared with another.

This perspective also holds true in other markets where product differentiation has all but evaporated as products and services become homogenised.

In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, Andy Cosslett, CEO, InterContinental hit it on the head when he remarked: "You have to sort of deconsolidate, strip down all the things we do in hotels and go and ask why. Why do we do that? Why do we play the 'Girl from Ipanema' when no one in the bar is over the age of 40? Why do we have to tow that pianist out?"

It's true to say that InterContinental has had a bumpy ride of late in the highly competitive hotel and leisure market but the outlook for future growth of the Group is very positive and it's this that's driving InterContinental to re-consider the whole 'brand experience' that it's delivering to millions of customers around the world.

InterContinental has chosen to work with UK-based Sound Strategies (www.sound-strategies.co.uk) that specialise in combining the disciplines of corporate analysis, marketing, sonic relevance and musicology to create a sound strategy that's unique for the brand owner.

"InterContinental’s commitment to the project has been extremely solid and over a period of time it'll expect to see some tangible results. The sound architecture is already under construction and will be ready for roll out in 2008," explains Michael Spencer, managing director, Sound Strategies, although he's not giving the game away in terms of what customers are likely to hear in the hotel lobby or in the washrooms.

Well, not yet anyway!

As part of the research programme, Sound Strategies has run a test which it developed from its work with brand teams across other industry sectors.

"It involves identifying the brand from its associated music alone and the TV and radio commercials from which it's taken are usually considered the best of all time for their use of music.

"Interestingly, the average recognition of a brand from its music is around 5/40 with the highest score normally around 9/40. In one workshop, a creative director didn't even recall the music from his own TV commercial!" observes Spencer.

Clearly, InterContinental will want to avoid such poor results and will expect a much higher prompted and unprompted recall from its target market and customer segments in terms of the sound or music that it uses in its business.

"The sound or music must be integral to the brand and not just an add-on or dressing," warns Spencer.

If this can be achieved, then there's evidence it can lift the human spirit, change mood, cause closer association with the brand and reinforce the messages delivered in words as well as in pictures.

This may sound like an over-claim but as a result of advances in neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, researchers are fast understanding how music can create or affect mood, how it acts upon the memory, and quite simply how it can make you feel good!

So where does this latest adventure in brandcasting leave sponsors?

Given that music is used across a range of sponsorship activation - not just in advertising but in exhibitions, on websites, in podcasts, in telecommunications, in-stores and other public areas - sponsors must now consider their sound strategies much more carefully rather than relying on a catchy pop tune that doesn't actually say much about the brand or aid long-term recall and memorability.

Instead, sponsors must consider their sonic footprint amongst the audiences that they seek to connect with.

sponsorship 2.0

Marketers need to migrate to Sponsorship 2.0 as an effective way of reaching market and customer segments says Ardi Kolah

Although sponsorship is still a relatively new brand communication and marketing discipline compared with say more established marketing tools and techniques, such as advertising, direct mail and even public relations, it isn’t some mysterious art form. It’s not alchemy. Rather, it’s a serious business and marketing discipline that can and should be carried out according to sound business principles.

And given that literally billions of dollars are spent every year on sponsorship it’s surprising to say the least that it’s only taught within other marketing and public relations syllabuses rather than having a recognised diploma in its own right.

This hasn’t stopped brand owners getting involved in sponsorship. But sponsorship practice isn’t like a walk in the park. It’s getting harder not easier to engage with audience and customer segments – they are much more media savvy and get bored much more easily.

As a result, we need to re-wire our understanding of sponsorship to stand a chance of success in engaging with these audiences.

Reason for rapid growth in sponsorship compared with advertising

So what’s driving consideration of sponsorship within the marketing mix?

It comes down to two main drivers:

· Fragmentation of media

· Fragmentation of audience.

We can’t assume that putting all our eggs in one basket, for example, TV advertising, will guarantee that we’ll reach the audience and customer segments we want to influence in terms of brand preference and affect purchasing behaviour. It won’t.

Recent research by WPP-owned GroupM in the US indicates that the old interruption model isn’t working as well as it used to.

Fig.1: Comparative rates of growth in advertising, sales promotion and sponsorship in N America (2004-7)

Source: GroupM (2007)

It should be remembered that sponsorship represents just 8 percent of the total spend on advertising globally, so talk of the death of advertising is perhaps a tad premature.

An additional complication in observing what’s actually happening in brand marketing and communication is that marketers are a highly secretive lot when it comes to talking about the price paid for the acquisition of rights or indeed what return on investment was achieved as a result of the sponsorship programme for fear of divulging sensitive information to their competitors, other rights holders and other sponsors!

As a result, the sponsorship industry has a touch of ‘smoke and mirrors’ about it because rights holders tend to hide behind the shroud of confidentiality in order to justify the high level of rights fees they want new sponsors to pay without feeling the need to justify this publicly.

And of course the other problem is that there’s no standard ‘rate card’ as there is in advertising or an agreed metric for calculating the value of sponsorship which also compounds the ‘mystery’ of making sponsorship work.

However, more astute brand owners won’t accept the word of a rights holder without some form of rational justification and independent verification as to the value of tangible and intangible rights before putting their hands in their pockets.

Despite this level of secrecy within the industry, global expenditure on sponsorship is rocketing.

According to IEG, a whopping $37.7 billion will be spent on sponsorship globally in 2007, an 11.9 percent increase over $33.7 billion spent in 2006.

In contrast, ZenithOptimedia predict total global advertising expenditure will increase at a more modest rate, at 5 percent to hit $448 billion in 2007, up $22 billion from 2006. Ironically, most of the growth in TV advertising is attributed to the activation of sponsorship around the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008! That said, marketers have shifted record amounts of advertising expenditure online and in 2007 is expected to top $31 billion – nearly a 30 percent increase compared with 2006.

One of the reasons for the surge in internet advertising is its ability to reach a connected audience. For example, according to New Paradigm, 77 percent of the world's online 16- 29 year olds would rather live without TV than the internet and in China, 87% of young people choose the internet over TV.

As a result, marketers are also turning their attention to using interactive channels such as broadband, mobile as well as digital games as core components of their sponsorship activation programmes.

Turbulence for sponsors

But it would be wrong to assume that this is plain sailing. Far from it. Over the next 25 years marketers will need to navigate through the Four Forces for Change that will have a significant impact on brand marketing and communication activities for years to come.

Fig 2: Four Forces for Change

Although these forces for change already exist today, collectively they’ll have a much greater impact on the fundamental development of marketing and sponsorship in the future.

And as Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock accurately predicted over a quarter of a century before, these changes have personal, psychological, as well as sociological consequences.

As a result, the brand owner as well as the rights holder must keep under constant review communication and marketing activities in order to take advantage of these Forces for Change.

Globalisation

A brand owner will move increasingly from supply to demand-side, driven by satisfying the needs and requirements of its customers and consumers. In the manufacturing-based economies of the past, brand owners focused on producing goods and services first and then marketing them to customer segments as opposed to putting the customer at the centre of the business process and providing what the customer wanted as a driver for the business.

But even if this ‘outside-in’ focus can be achieved, brand owners will continue to be under intense pressure as the global movement of people, goods and services, intellectual property and capital becomes less restricted, generating intense competition in their chosen markets.

It therefore follows that brand building in the future will be very different to the way it was done even 10 years ago.

Sponsorship may well become the de facto brand marketing and communication platform, particularly since it can help to initiate dialogue with customers, allowing marketers to get closer to these valuable segments.

For example, Vodafone was able to build its global brand in under ten years by understanding the power of sponsorship to pull customer segments to its brand as a result of its high profile sponsorship investments in F1 (Ferrari), cricket (England), football (Manchester United) and music (Vodafone Live Music).

Behaviour

At the same time as brands become more global, customers are becoming better informed and much more demanding. The balance of power between brands and customers has shifted to the point that customers now judge all the actions and omissions of brands in the communication process.

Sponsorship can provide an opportunity for two-way communication and customer feed-back which didn’t exist with traditional one-way advertising. Sponsorship operates on two modes – transmit and receive and it’s the receive mode that is gaining in importance in the communication process.

The other advantage of taking this approach is that it helps to build trust with the brand owner – essential when it’s looking to activate its sponsorship investment.

For example, as a result of its sponsorship of Manchester City FC, Thomas Cook was able to create a suite of travel products under the banner ‘City Travel Club’ aimed specifically at the Manchester City fans.

These changes go well beyond the ability of a brand owner to integrate its sponsorship and marketing activities.

Ultimately, the brand owner must seek to collaborate with its customers in the development of new products and services and sponsorship will exert considerable influence over this process where it brings these two realms of understanding closer together.

For example, during the FIFA World Cup Germany 06, adidas, MTV and Xbox 360 formed a global alliance focused on the World Cup which included sponsorship, in-store activities and cross-promotions. Audiences had a direct involvement in the content of the sponsorship programme as well as new product development for all three brand owners that included new games as well as programming on MTV and adidas merchandise.

Permission

The continuing explosion and fragmentation of media will lead to further fragmentation of audiences – requiring the brand owner to seek permission (consent) to communicate with a particular group or ‘community of interest’.

At the same time, the ability of these audiences to screen-out messages will be more sophisticated than at present.

For example, in the future children and young people will be much more media and marketing savvy - and at an increasingly young age. Current laws and regulations that seek to protect this group from advertising and sponsorship activities will appear out of step as children and young people learn to be their own ‘internal censors’ more than they do at present.

Therefore, the brand owner will need to earn the right or the permission to communicate rather than take this right for granted as it does at present.

And in order to gain such permission, the brand owner will need to demonstrate it can be trusted – placing a higher premium on effective brand communication in this challenging competitive landscape.

The net result is there is going to be more, rather than less, opportunities for non-traditional advertising such as sports sponsorship where this can engender a closer relationship between the brand owner and its customers and consumers.

Technology

Without doubt, many of the Forces for Change in terms of globalisation, permission-based marketing and the fragmentation of media have been enabled by technology.

Software tools currently have the power to unlock identities, addresses, purchasing habits and intimate information of customers and reach them through emerging channels such as iPods, broadband, 3G mobile devices and gaming platforms.

However, in wanting to make increasing use of these ‘transmit’ channels, the brand owner must also have a ‘license to operate’. Such permission is only available where it has earned the trust and confidence of the audience.

And building that trust and confidence is getting much harder – which is where sponsorship comes in.

Sponsorship 2.0

Sponsorship 2.0 is the next step-change in our thinking about sponsorship as part of the marketing mix.

Sponsorship 2.0 is about turning traditional sponsorship into a collaborative marketing platform, creating a climate of trust and confidence with the audience where the sales of a sponsor’s products or services is more likely to take place than not.

This may sound straight forward but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Take for example the recent broadcast sponsorship of ITV’s flagship soap Coronation Street.

Harveys Furniture and Coronation Street

Harveys is perhaps less well known than previous incumbent Cadbury’s that had been the show’s sponsor in the proceeding decade. So a key sponsorship challenge for Harveys was to shift this level of awareness of the previous sponsor and direct the interest to its own brand.

Disappointingly, it’s response was to create an animation sequence of a few ornaments in the break bumpers. And even though there's a mobile short code on the screen and even a spot of data capture via a couple of 'Corrie' competitions on Harveys' website, no-one knows that they are there.

The result of not fully activating the broadcast opportunity is that its made the brand almost invisible in my view - a bumper blur, a mere cue to retune to Corrie consciousness. There’s no real attempt to engage with the audience let alone build a dialogue with it.

Compare this with Nokia’s previous broadcast sponsorship of ITV’s X-Factor and the difference is breathtaking.

Nokia and X-Factor

Despite being market leader, in 2006 Nokia faced intense competition from cheaper imports at the lower end of the market and growth in existing challenger brands at the top end of the market coupled with an onslaught of networks bringing out their own mobile devices.

By its own admission the constant push of incremental innovation across the handset market made it difficult for it to sustain any product/technology advantage in the medium-long term. As a result, Nokia was starting to lose market share in the UK, with changes in preference at the leader end of the market starting to influence the wider market. This created two conflicting objectives:

• Driving longer-term brand aspiration with leading-edge youth as well as
• Driving mass market brand appeal and sales.

In response, Nokia decided that it wouldn’t focus all its resources at the leader-end of the market given that there was an immediate requirement to also target the wider market and therefore adopted a dual-targeting strategy: mainstream market activities had to deliver no detrimental impact on leading edge youth brand preference and at the same time Nokia looked to engage in discrete targeting of the leading-edge youth segment.

Nokia’s mainstream UK market activity was broadcast sponsorship of the highly popular X-Factor talent reality show that regularly pulls in over 10m viewers a week with a huge presence on ITV1 and ITV2 over an 18-week period spread over four months.

Research was also conducted to investigate the impact on more leading edge youth groups and to test market reactions to TV bumpers and mobile product selection.

The X-Factor was activated in two ways:

• On screen – promoting the association through commercials, broadcast sponsorship and brand integration
• Off-screen – connecting to the consumer through customer promotions and point of sale executions.

Entertaining TV bumpers were created along the theme ‘Nokia Giving You the X Factor’, Carphone Warehouse in-store promotions featured an exclusive X-Factor 3220 packaged handset with preloaded content (X-Factor ring tone, screen saver and cut-out covers) as well as prizes and promotions, an interactive site accessible through the red button throughout the programme allowed viewers to access all of ITV’s additional content about the X-Factor, and a microsite for X-Factor fans (Club Nokia) was created which assisted in data capture.

Results:

• For several Nokia handset models, sales doubled as a result of the interactive broadcast sponsorship
• Significant sales uplift across all models
• Brand preference with target audience increased by five percentage points
• Over 2m broadcast TV interactions and 20,000 competition entrants and opt-ins
• Viewers spent on average of 4 minutes on Nokia’s DAL
• Over 82,000 visits to Nokia micro site and over 15,000 competition entrants
• Estimated total media value in excess of $26m, representing a substantial return on investment (actual costs of the sponsorship programme have been kept confidential by Nokia).

Clearly the relevance of the Nokia brand for X-Factor fans made this broadcast sponsorship probably one of the most effective in UK commercial television history.

“What these two very different approaches illustrate is that there seems to be a degree of confusion amongst sponsors between managing a response and trying to initiate a relationship.

“On screen short-codes or iTV red buttons are only channels. They were novel once but they aren’t reasons to engage or calls to action. Remember the days when you had to have a website just because everyone else did? Well, it’s the same problem, but different technology.

“On the face of it, we seem to have been presented with a range of doors through which Harveys would like us to enter its ‘brand world’. But why would we? There aren’t any windows so we can see what delights await us on the inside. And without any windows the doors may as well be locked,” observes Andrew McMorran, partner at QM, a new style brand marketing and sponsorship agency that advocates Sponsorship 2.0.

A good sponsorship today isn’t just a chance to borrow someone else’s audience for a while. It’s an opportunity for the brand owner to create its own:

02 – at its venue 02 (formerly the Millennium Dome), the mobile phone operator operates VIP Barcoding to gain access to the exclusive O2 Blue room for its customers and displays user-generated content on big screens at live events as well as providing ‘Bluetooth Stations’ at the venue to assist in social networking between its customers.

Adidas – as part of its sponsorship of the FIFA World Cup Germany 2006, adidas created a mobile portal in order to recruit, involve and engage both core (12-24 year old football fans) and broad target groups (all sports fans). Fans were offered exclusive content for players including Beckham, Ballack and Vieira as well as free downloadable wallpapers, videos, ringtones, goal alerts and World Cup results as well as prizes for competitions. The sponsorship promotion resulted in 1.5m unique user visits and over 25% of visitors downloaded adidas branded content.

Sprint – for the past 15 years Sprint has been the official partner of the US Ski and Snowboard Association and in 2007 launched an SMS-based promotion to drive consumers to Sprint tents at ski resorts in the US, kicking off with the Winter Sports Festival in Aspen, Colorado. Skiers were given free bottles of sunscreen in the mornings and chap sticks in the afternoon, both bearing the promotion’s details and response shortcode. By texting the shortcode, consumers received mobile coupons, redeemable at Sprint tents for prizes. The sponsorship programme was one of the most successful in capturing CRM data.

Measurement

As part of re-wiring our understanding of sponsorship, marketers need to apply two ‘tests’ in the contemplation of sponsorship – will it deliver a return on objectives (ROO) and a return on investment (ROI)? Should any sponsorship programme fails these two ‘tests’ then we should seriously consider whether we should invest in it or continue to re-invest in it.

Return on Objectives (ROO)

ROO requires us to undertake analysis in terms of whether the property type (sports, arts and culture, broadcast, education, environment or any other) is a basic fit with our brand communication, marketing and sales objectives; whether it’s feasible in our time frame; and whether it can be used to drive customer loyalty as well as customer acquisition.

Should it tick all the right boxes, then the next challenge is how to bring the investment in the sponsorship property alive. The creative quotient of any sponsorship programme is its vital ingredient.

Increasingly, we’re living in a world where consumers have everything that they need. Wardrobes full of clothes, kitchens full of appliances and garden sheds crammed full of stuff that they can’t squeeze into the cupboards at home. Yet still they want more! The newest, coolest, the best. A basic human need, like hunger and shelter, which consumers constantly seek to satisfy in new ways.

So how do we connect with this thirst for more? Well, this is where research can help. We need to see what everyone has seen but think what nobody else has thought.

In the sponsorship industry, we’re constantly seeking ways to add value beyond the product or service we’re trying to sell.

This can be boiled down into three individual but linked components:

• Enriching the brand value proposition
• Extending the brand experience
• Enhancing the customer benefits delivered by the product/service.

Great sponsorship is about combining sponsorship discipline in terms of ROO with creativity to unleash innovation where it really matters most. To create difference and engage people in world where it often seems that all the best ideas have already been taken. And the bar is increasingly getting higher, not lower. We need new ideas for new sponsorship solutions. We need new ideas to exploit existing markets and customer segments better. And we need new ideas to do it more effectively.

But all of this turns to dust unless sponsorship delivers a return on investment (ROI).

This shouldn’t be an afterthought or self-justification process. This has to be part of our sponsorship mindset. And if it isn’t, then it should be.

Return on Investment (ROI)

As marketers become increasingly accountable for the money invested in sponsorship, we need to be clear how sponsorship delivers the goods. And of course this varies between sponsors but fundamentally it comes back to having measurable objectives.

Accurately measuring which parts of a sponsorship campaign have delivered the greatest impact requires commitment from the brand owner and the rights holder to obtain the necessary data and a commitment from both parties to analyse the sponsorship programme in an open and honest way. Thomas Cook is a rare example of that happening in practice.

Effective measurement and evaluation is more to do with impact and less to do with output – although it’s essential that outputs are measured in order to feed financial, brand equity, semiotic and econometric models.

The final outcome should be a 360-degree view of the sponsorship programme, from the start of the planning process to the end results achieved.

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, the ability for brand owners to decipher and make sense of vast amounts of marketing data is becoming a critical success factor and a source of competitive advantage.

Only with access to the right granularity of data can a comprehensive sponsorship analysis be performed. And only through a rigorous approach to measurement and evaluation can a brand owner channel the necessary resources and investment to the areas delivering the greatest return on its sponsorship investment.

Ardi Kolah’s new book Sponsorship Works: A Brand Marketer’s Casebook is available from SportBusiness (www.sportbusiness.com). Price £149.