A quick quiz. Think of your own favorite sport — the one you try to watch most often. How many sponsors of that sport can you name?

Now, for each sponsor you can remember, ask yourself these questions:

1. Apart from the fact that they sponsor this sport, what else do you know about them? Has the fact that they sponsored your favourite sport affected your view of them? Made you think of them more often? Kept their name and brand in your mind? Have you become “a raving fan” of their product(s)?
2. If you’ve purchased a product or service in their product category in the last twelve months, did you choose their brand? If so, was it (at least in part) because of their sponsorship? If not, why not?
3. Do they use the sponsorship as a means of interacting with you and/or keeping in touch?

In those three areas of questioning, we’ve pretty much encapsulated the core benefits that sponsors should be seeking from sponsorships:

• Brand & Product Awareness
• Direct Sales (or sales influence); or
• Customer Relationship building.

What Do Sponsors Want?
Research in early 2008 (the Eighth Annual IEG/Performance Research Sponsorship Decision-Makers Survey), drawing from 165 sponsorship decision-makers around the world provides some interesting insights into sponsorship.

The full report is available here if you’re interested, but these are the key findings:

Which category do you expect your company to be more involved with this year (2008)?

• 41% of the respondents cited Sports
• 27% Causes
• 27% Community Events
• 23% Online sponsorship
• 16% Entertainment
• 12% The Arts

And less?

• 26% Entertainment
• 20% Online sponsorship
• 21% The Arts
• 15% Community Events
• 12% Sports
• 10% Causes

How do you typically go about selecting a property to sponsor?

• 75% set strategy and then sought the right property
• 73% were approached directly by property owners.
• 28% received details about a sponsorship property from a sales agency
• 13% consult a sponsorship specialist to determine strategy

What percentage of your marketing budget is spent on sponsorship?

• 43% – 1-10% of the budget
• 26% – 11-20%
• 15% - 21-30%
• 7% – 31-40%
• 7% – 41-50%
• 3% – 51-75% of the budget

On top of the rights fees paid for your sponsorship, what is the ratio as to how much more your company typically spends on leveraging and activation?

• 17% – less than 1 to 1
• 48% – 1 to 1
• 14% – 2 to 1
• 12% – 3 to 1
• 9% – 4 to 1 or more

During the past 12 months, which of the following marketing communication channels have you used to leverage your sponsorship programs?

• 80% Traditional Advertising
• 77% Public Relations
• 71% Internal Communications
• 69% Hospitality
• 63% Internal Tie-Ins
• 62% Direct Marketing
• 60% Sampling On-Site
• 50% Business to Business
• 47% Sales Promotion Offers

In past years, less than 5% of effort was spent on Contests, Discounts, Displays, EMarketing, Experiential Activation or Promotional Giveaways

What do you consider the most valuable benefits to your organisation?

• 64% Category Exclusivity
• 54% On-Site Signage
• 45% Broadcast Ad opportunity
• 43% ID in property collateral materials
• 41% Title of Proprietary Area
• 39% Sponsor ID in Property’s Media Buy
• 38% presence on property website
• 36% Access to Property’s Database
• 31% right to use propertyy marks/logos
• 23% Access to Property-provided research

Which of the following do you typically analyze when making your sponsorship decision?

• 92% Demographics
• 82% Attendance
• 73% Fan passion/affinity
• 50% What your competition sponsors
• 49% Psychographics
• 49% Growth trends in property category
• 42% Interest in the property amongst trade/dealers
• 36% TV Ratings

The above data gives some useful insights if you’re planning to get involved in sponsorship. But (especially if you’re being constantly approached for sponsorship dollars) we reckon you need more. So we’ve come up with a tool to help you reach some useful and meaningful conclusions about prospective sponsorship proposals. We’ve even given it a snappy name:

Sponsorship Evaluation Checklist

We’ve put together a comprehensive 60-Step Checklist that leads you through the process of evaluating potential sponsors, whether for sports, arts, cause-related, online or community-interest properties.

Here’s a sampling of the issues you need to consider as part of any sponsorship assessment:

• Alignment of brand values: looking at the big picture, would being associated with this sponsorship send the right messages and make consumers more rabidly enthusiastic about your brand?
• Audience reach: even if the sponsorship property is a really good fit with your brand, does it reach enough people for the money?
• Sponsorship levels: will you be the top dog in this sponsorship, or at a lower (associate sponsor) level — and how does that impact on your ability to get noticed and leverage the sponsorship?
• Consumer profiling: what can the organisers tell you about the people who support this property (and how do they know)?
• Trends: is this property attracting more interest than ever, in a dwindling interest category or somewhere inbetween? What are the implications in associating your brand with such a property?
• Competitors: what are those pesky competitors of yours doing? Will sponsoring this property enable you to outdazzle their efforts or are you just playing me-too?
• Trade interest: what do your dealers think of this property? If you give them free tickets to the event, will they eagerly snap them up (and plead for more) or will they languish in a drawer?
• Sponsorship elements to consider: what’s on offer and which elements fit your marketing plan?
• Affordability: how much of your budget will this sponsorship consume, how much more to leverage it effectively and how does that compare to alternative promotional opportunities?
• Leveraging opportunities: sponsorship is only a small part of the process – what counts is how you leverage it. What does this sponsorship property offer?
• Visibility: is the event high-profile enough to be noticed by your prospective clients?
• Hospitality: what’s on offer by way of opportunities for you to bring along clients, prospects and/or the trade?
• Media coverage: will you be on the telly? If so, how you ensure that TV audiences will see your logo?
• Rights on offer: not to be picky or anything, but you need to make sure that the rights being offered to you can be delivered in reality (i.e. they’re available and haven’t been grabbed by others)
• Credentials: in similar vein, check out the credentials of the oganisation offering you the property. Are they official representatives or just trying to piggyback? Do they have the authority and ability to make the deal?
• Ambush marketing considerations: could your competitors sneak in and undercut your sponsorship with dirty ambush marketing tricks? We identify some of the possible angles you need to explore.
• Post-Event Evaluation: so how did it go? You need independent verification of the results, because the organisers will naturally be gungho.

There’s a whole lot more, but for that you’ll need the Checklist.

The Sponsorship Evaluation Checklist (provided as a download in PDF format) is yours for just $27. If you’re considering any sort of sponsorship, you absolutely need this Checklist. Click on this link for instant ordering via PayPal.

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Tags: arts, brand values, cause marketing, checklist, insights, investment, marketing plan, ROI, sales promotion, sponsorship, sponsorship evaluation, sports, tools, what sponsors want

Being only slightly tech-obsessed (though our wives might agree to differ), we haven’t paid too much attention so far to Google’s Android mobile phone offering. To be honest, we hadn’t even felt compelled to invest in the ubiquitous iPhone. Our excuse: a stated preference for style over substance. Actually, we probably weren’t cool enough.

Anyway now, courtesy AdMob, we’ve come across some fascinating/frightening statistics that suggest:

1. Android is becoming a serious contender
2. Smartphones are taking off faster than earlier data had led us to believe
3. Mobile apps are ‘the next big thing’ on the very small screen

First, take a look at this chart, comparing mobile data usage worldwide for the various operating systems.

Clearly Android has a long way to go to pick off Apple — but look at the tripling in Android’s worldwide operating system usage in just six months.

Secondly, some mobile application download numbers from a month earlier:

AdMob surveyed over 1,000 iPhone, iPod touch and Android users to find out more about their interaction and download behavior with apps.  Some highlights:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month
• More than 90 percent of Android and iPhone OS users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer
• Upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when users were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app
• iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users.
• Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month

In a separate post at BrandRepublic, AdMob’s Russell Buckley notes that:

We serve about 10 billion ads every month to mobile web publishers and app developers globally. This means that we can’t measure market share, but we can track handsets that are used more than they should be, to view mobile web pages and download and use apps.  We noticed very early on that iPhone was getting a disproportionate amount of share when measured like this and history is being repeated with Android.

What’s also great for mobile advertisers is that Android and iPhone both offer much more creative advertising formats and that their ease of use generally mean more interaction and higher click-through-rates. Consumers are engaging with marketers via the mobile channel in very large numbers and that trend is going to speed up with more Android handsets in the market.

Even allowing for the fact that Russell is in the mobile marketing business, the enthusiasm is contagious.

Which leads us to ask the question: how prepared are you for mobile marketing? [Forecaster/analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has already outed the Mobile Internet as one of The Big Trends of the next twelve months!]

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Tags: admob, Google, iPhone, mobile apps, mobile data, mobile device, mobile web, operating system, smartphones

Global ad agency giant Universal McCann recently described online video as this year’s digital darling.

That’s all very well, but that doesn’t make online video easy.

Jerry Bader of MRPwebmedia hit the nail on the head a few months back when he posed the question on LinkedIn:

“Web video is quickly becoming the must-have content presentation vehicle. Considering its increasing importance to online content delivery, what has stopped you: cost, concept, implementation, the right producer, or just don’t see the value?”

Here’s what we said at the time (and it’s as relevant as ever today):

Web video has definitely increased in importance as a content delivery mechanism (we leave it to others to debate its merits as a “must-have”). However if we are to consider using video as a professional option (rather than in the ‘boy bites dog’ fashion of YouTube), then there are a number of issues to address.

The first is content.

It’s one thing to write an essay or a document that reads well, a far more ambitious undertaking to provide the same information in video form. We are all conditioned to expect professional production values in videos thanks to decades of network television — to communicate via video we need to be similarly professional.

That means, in effect, providing compelling content in both audio and video format.

That, in turn, means a need for creativity in performance art, not just words. And skilled hands in the production of the video. And on-screen talent, lest we be judged amateurs based on our acting capabilities or lack thereof.

So, for example, an answer such as this represents thought and a relatively few minutes work on the keyboard. To provide an answer by way of a video would require:

• a scenario (Scene 1: Blogger thrust on camera, proves poor speaker. Cut to angry crowds. Scene 2: Blogger given media training. Scene 3: set built. Scene 4: Blogger to camera, in extreme closeup. Makeup artist rushes over to damp down sweating, cover up zits …. etc etc)

• a script
• a setting
• production facilities
• on-screen talent
• editing expertise
• blah blah

At this point, the payoff isn’t sufficient to warrant the resources and upskilling required.

We have to move beyond the mundane everyday communications, saving video for the big events. Or else agree not to judge a book by its video ….

Has YouTube lowered the bar?

No. Not for professional communications. If we see a baby biting his brother’s finger on YouTube (129 million views and counting), we may smile and consider it entertainment, but we don’t attribute any significant brand values to that event. Nor do we criticise the parent capturing the moment (not for his/her videographing skills, anyway). That’s not what’s important.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to promote your travel agency or sporting goods store online, you’ll be quickly branded amateurish if you don’t achieve the expected quality level for a ‘professional’ operation.

No problem if you’re trying to come across as folksy and down-to-earth, just one of the fellas. But those attributes seldom work, certainly not in big city businesses. Fail.

In summary: online video may be hot, but it ain’t easy (and probably isn’t cheap either).

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Tags: ad agency, ambitious undertaking, concept implementation, content presentation, creativity in performance, performance art, professional option, professional production values, Universal McCann, youtube

We hardly need to tell you that “This Is It” The Michael Jackson Movie launched last night with simultaneous premieres in 16 cities across the globe, but only for a two-week season.

Sony Pictures reportedly paid $60 million for the rights, and they’ve played every Ace in the Movie Marketing deck to ensure that they turn that initial investment into gold.

Time Magazine cites five pieces of marketing magic employed by Sony in their efforts to make this the movie event of the year:

1. The Two-Week Window
   One of Sony’s first marketing moves was to set a deadline for the film public, proclaiming that This Is It would play in theaters only for a two-week run. Can’t you just feel the sense of urgency? “It has event-ized this thing in a huge way,” marvels an industry exec. The prospect of an end date lit a fire under the devoted and even the Jackson-ambivalent.
2. The Advance Sales
   Sony made a hard push for advance ticket sales over and above what most movies command, with the same thrust and hype that live-concert sales get. The result has been impressive: since the Sept. 27 on-sale date, there have been reports of 1,600 advance sellouts.
3. The Quick Turnaround
   Although the frenzy over Jackson’s death has abated, there was a clear mandate to honor — some might say tap into — the international outpouring of grief. “It’s not about exploiting,” says Director Kenny Ortega. “Every corner of this planet, people were reaching out saying, ‘Show us something.’ “
4. The Mystery Factor
   The movie is one of the great secrets in Hollywood. Only a select group of insiders and family members has seen it, and certainly no critics have. Ortega chalks this up to Jackson’s need for opening-night magic. “It was always, Don’t ruin the secrets, don’t ruin the surprises,” says Ortega.
5. The Global Reach
   Perhaps only Michael Jackson could command premieres around the world, from the main event in Los Angeles to London to Seoul. All told, there will be 33 premieres, with 16 synched to begin at the same time and eight featuring a satellite feed showing red-carpet arrivals from the gala in Los Angeles.

So is it working?

The twittersphere has been going crazy since the first screenings started. Predictably, tweets have been either frenetically positive (@MiikoMentz Brilliant, beautiful, poetic and moving. I thoroughly enjoyed it.) or caustically negative (@WillSloanEsq Spent the evening at Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Dare I say that this sloppy, vaguely sleazy film is his perfect epigraph for Mr. Tabloid?). MJ always did polarise people.

Bloomberg is predicting that the movie and CD may generate as much as $400 million in sales worldwide as fans turn out to see and hear the last live performances of the late King of Pop — with around 90% of that revenue going to the singer’s estate, to be applied against the much publicised debts that the original live concert series was intended to repay.

Already fans are asking, nay demanding, to know when the DVD will be coming out. No doubt Sony will have a trick or two up their sleeves when it comes to releasing a whole series of DVD and BluRay releases. Think Special Editions, Extended Special Editions, Director’s Cuts, yada yada yada. After all, there are 120 hours of rehearsal footage with which to work.

Michael Jackson is no longer with us, but the marketing and merchandising machine thunders on.

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Tags: kenny ortega, King of Pop, Michael Jackson, sony pictures, This Is It, thisisit

Pat LaPointe, Managing Partner at MarketingNPV, provides chilling insights into how to deep-six your career in the latest Online Metrics Insider.

According to Pat, these are the five key questions that have been known to pop up in discussion with CEOs/CFOs, often short-circuiting otherwise brilliant marketing careers.

1. What are the specific goals for our marketing spending, and how should we expect to connect that spending to incremental revenue and/or margins?
2. What would be the short and long-term impacts on revenue and margins if we spent 20% more/less on marketing overall in the next 12 months?
3. Compared to relevant benchmarks (historical, competitive, and marketplace), how effective are we at transforming marketing investments into profit growth?
4. What are appropriate targets for improving our marketing leverage ($’s of profit per $ of marketing spend) in the next 1/3/5 year horizons, and what key initiatives are we counting on to get us there?
5. What are the priority questions we need to answer to inform our knowledge of the payback on marketing investments – and what are we doing to close those knowledge gaps?

How you answer these five questions will get you promoted, fired, or worse — marginalized.

So what should you do?

Pat provides specific, actionable, accountable recommendations.

If you’re a marketer, this is a must-read.

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Tags: initiatives, insights, marketer, marketing careers, pat lapointe

Deloitte was quoted last week by South Africa’s BizCommunity.com as reporting that “an average of 9% of all radio ads booked [on South African radio] are not broadcast as scheduled. Based on an estimated spend of R3 billion on radio advertising in 2008, this error equates to R270 million [USD $35.6 million] erosion of ad spend per annum.”

“Through our research and market testing of this concept, it’s become apparent to us that there are significant operational inefficiencies in radio and television broadcast where advertising campaigns are flighted incorrectly. The scope of errors which we verified were not aired at all, broadcast in the wrong time channel or flighted as scheduled but the wrong material was used,” commented Audine Brooks, business leader for Deloitte’s Advertising Broadcast Certification service.

In the last month, some of the Deloitte findings show:

• Client’s radio campaign ran at a 24% error rate – resultant compensation claim was thirty fold the related certification fee
• Another major advertiser’s radio activity consistently results in an 8% error rate, damaging the reach and frequency intended by its marketing strategy
• Another TV campaign ran at 5% error rate, R149k in value booked but not broadcast accurately.

This report was quickly questioned by commenters on the BizCommunity website, suggesting that the results were not representative of the industry as a whole; and it’s perhaps fair to question Deloitte’s motives in releasing the data, given that they seem to be offering a broadcast monitoring and certification service that would address any such problems in a timely fashion.

Nonetheless the whole story is a useful reminder of the transient character of the broadcast medium, and the need for proof of broadcast in some form.

If a radio station broadcasts in the forest and there’s no-one there, can they charge advertisers for the airtime?

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Tags: advertising campaigns, broadcast medium, compensation claim, operational inefficiencies, radio ads, radio advertising, radio airtime, South Africa, tv campaign

Like music videos?

Quite a few people do. Music videos and music-related content are easily YouTube’s most-popular single genre. TubeMogul did the numbers and concluded that the top five music labels alone control 64.52% of all of the views of YouTube’s top 50, and are the top five publishers of all time.

Source:TubeMogul

Now a massive chunk of that content is about to migrate to Vevo.

Vevo, the digital joint venture between two labels representing nearly 60% of the U.S. recorded music market — Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Entertainment (SME) — is due to launch in December. It will be powered by (but not owned by) YouTube.

EMI and Warner Music Group are also in discussion to allow Vevo to carry their content, possibly on a non-exclusive basis.

Here’s the pitch, according to the press release:

Music fans will be able to view professionally-created content from UMG’s and SME’s broad array of chart-topping artists through VEVO, the innovative online premium music video hub being built for consumers, advertisers and content owners that will blend the very best in top-notch music content with YouTube’s leading edge video technology and user community. The content will be made available on YouTube through a newly created VEVO channel, on VEVO.com, the service’s marquee destination site, and through a special VEVO branded embedded player. The service will also serve as a syndication platform for additional internet destination sites, expanding the reach of the VEVO brand across the worldwide web.

The Vevo offering is expected to include “professionally produced [high quality] music videos, concerts, original web series, artist-generated videos, and curated user-generated videos.”

What’s so special about Vevo?
Interscope-Geffen-A&M Chairman Jimmy Iovine painted the big picture in an interview earlier this month on paidContent.org:

“Vevo for the first time will give labels the ability to push out our product without having to go through radio or TV stations. Before, we had to make it, ship it and pray for a hit. Now, with Vevo, we can create the content, sell the ads, and even use the data to market new music to people alongside things they already like.”

For the first time in perhaps a decade, the music industry (love it or hate it) expects to regain online control of its content, at least in its original un-mashed, music video format. Control — that’s what makes Vevo such a big deal.

So far, reports suggest that Vevo will play nice and let consumers interact with the content in the same way they currently can on YouTube. It’s an undertaking that needs to honored, both in letter and in spirit, lest consumers backlash.

There are a number of (let’s be generous and call them unintended) side-effects of the Vevo-sization of music, however. There’s no word yet on whether indie musicians can post their own music videos on Vevo without having a Big Music corporate sponsor. We’d expect that particular door to be bolted shut, at least for now, which reduces the chances of serendipitous discovery of new talent by the public at large.

On the other hand, the corridors of YouTube will be curiously quiet without the constant thrum of Big Music. Could be a whole new chance for unrepped talent to tapdance down those empty corridors …

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Tags: content owners, high quality music videos, music content, music market, sony music entertainment, universal music group, vevo, video technology, youtube

Has geekdom come down to this — that we’re defined (or demeaned) by the presence or absence of an invite to participate in a software release?

Thus has it always been with Google.

Were you one of The Chosen Ones who received an early GMail invitation? No? Allow us to sneer, from our privileged position as one of those special GMailites (or cringe in shame when we reveal we were also amongst the unworthy back in the day).

Now it’s all happening again.

From a marketing perspective, we note, with a tiny gleam in our eyes, that consumers are frantically tweeting up favors, burning off their friends, in a desperate effort to receive a Google Wave invite. The going rate on eBay, as the Early Adopted cash in on their Most-Favored-By-Google status, seems to be around $80 to $100. And still the demand persists. With not an ad campaign in sight.

Meanwhile, Microsoft encourages its employees to invite their friends home to share the delights of Windows 7. With, it must be admitted, a bit of resistance and a certain amount of criticism along the way.

Guess it’s all in the brand image.

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Tags: ad campaign, brand image, cringe, ebay, gmail invitation, Google Wave, Microsoft, software release, Windows 7

We mentioned the Tourism Queensland promotion in our earlier article. The campaign continues to make news, although not always for the right reasons. On the positive side, the lucky applicant, Ben Southall was on Oprah last week.

On the not-so-bright side, Australia’s Brisbane Times reports on the aftermath:

The Best Job in the World marketing campaign for Tourism Queensland won the top newspaper advertising award at the weekend, confirming its status as the most awarded ad of the year globally.

Judges at the Caxton Newspaper Awards nominated the ad best in show, handing it the prestigious Quinlivan Black Award for the best newspaper ad of the year.

This brings to almost 40 the number of national and international awards won by the campaign, including three Grands Prix at Cannes, the Oscars of the ad industry, leading the agency behind the idea to claim that it could be the most awarded ad of all time.

The advertising idea of seeking a person to act as caretaker to the islands of the Great Barrier Reef for six months began its journey as a simple classified ad that ran in newspapers around the world. More than 40,000 media stories later it continues to resonate around the world.

Although it put the islands, and arguably Queensland, on the international tourism map, the Brisbane-based agency that came up with the idea, Sapient Nitro, no longer works for Tourism Queensland.

Instead, the state tourism authority handed its multimillion-dollar advertising account to another agency, which has since created a campaign centred on a take-off of the Monkees – complete with a reworked theme tune, Hey Hey It’s Queensland, which has been widely lambasted by the industry.

The irony was not lost on the audience at the Caxtons, who pondered aloud why the same client who bought a campaign that delivered it publicity worth $300 million on a budget of $1.7 million could also commission the latest campaign.

Indeed. Life’s a pitch. Sometimes you win.

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Tags: advertising idea, best ad in the world, international tourism, irony, marketing campaign, state tourism, tourism authority, Tourism Queensland, world marketing