Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP510 Cause and Effect: The Sponsorship Effectiveness Revolution
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."
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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 Sid Lee 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 Akil. 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. Pleased 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 Becks Martin, who is director head of sponsorship governance strategy and planning for Barclays.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:We're gonna play a bit of that at the end. Before we get to that, I thought it it'd be useful just to set it up with a conversation with Rory Akil and we talk about the forum, his aspirations for it, but also. What the challenges are for sponsorship in the bum 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. First of all, Rory, you aren't from a sponsorship background. You are coming from somewhere else, that, I think is an interesting bit of this.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, I, I came to marketing from a, 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 he was involved in quite a lot of social media and that was a bit of a transferrable skill once I decided to get a, a proper job. I've always been trying to sort of. Improved my knowledge doing, asking for training when I could get it. I did some very good training with the A PG, the account planners group, I've read the long and short of it. I've read by Sharp. I've kind of studied from Mark Ritz and I'm kind of on top of that kind of conversation,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:It's interesting the source as you mentioned there, because I spent a bit of time, it's not about me, but I spent a bit of time a Haas, 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
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:at the ad agency and it wasn't someone I knew much about. And so I think part of the, the reason I'm flagging this is that. Field and Bennet 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, sold off. I've been it too,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:general that might be true. Do you think.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Well it's interesting then, then I got to Sid Lee which we then rebranded to Sid Lee Sport. And, and I, and yeah, I mean, that was my observation at least there, that, that, you know, Steven our CEOI mean he came a very much from an ops, hospitality management kind of background from having run infrared and stuff. But it was new. It was kind of.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:McDonald's, wasn't it?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, yeah. It was new to him and it was new to other people who maybe had been at more of a kind of CSM agency, you know, that kind of agency background. I think those who had worked more in maybe done quite a bit of sport, but, but you know, for at more integrated agencies, kind of new 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 spon 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, and then going to CO to sort of embed a strategic philosophy, I guess, to the agency. Um.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:this, term sponsorship effectiveness, which obviously is a, a sort of offshoot. Of advertising effectiveness, which is the sort of catchall phrase that, you know, those people that we just mentioned fall under that bracket. And main argument, again, we'll reference the live event that we did at Sid Lee Sport offices. There's a slight provocation and there is a question of. The effectiveness of sponsorship and you are getting to a point where you are saying, actually, what about a different direction or something? So the, tell me about what, just frame that for me, that bit of it.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:I guess the light bulb moment was there is no longer, 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 that I can go and read? So tell me how to do this as best as I can. There is none. There's a few bit 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. Collective body of evidence that the IPA has or that, that the other kind of error ambassador, they're looking at thousands of case studies in the aggregate to, to look at are there rules, are there general conclusions you can draw?
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:let's 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 vari. What, what is the source? Why is the IPA got much more interesting usable data than say the ESSA database or PON sport sponsorship? What, what's the why I guess is my question.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:And you can't go in there with reach. Engagement and say that that was a good campaign, that is what they call an intermediate effect and it doesn't count, basically.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Right.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:so that's the kind of IPA standard. I think there's just a technical thing about what you say. You are 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 dunno 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 allowed to use the data in that way.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: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 on, you know, you've got the rights holder selling a package and you know, to a brand 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 the, the sort of arbitrage. If you like, is to, obviously I want to get the rights for as cheap as I I can, whilst also building as much value as I can into those rights. So I will, I want to keep that knowledge secret. So I, I suspect Procter and Gamble know the effectiveness of their sponsorship, but they ain't telling Do you think that's true?'cause I'm not gonna put that in an award submission because then suddenly FIFA Uafa. Relevant marketing, whoever is selling those rights. Think. Oh, brilliant. Okay. So our price just gone. Went up.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Potentially I think the but the, that valuation of the deal that you just talked about is one of the big reasons that we don't. Like, you know, there's not that much knowledge about what happens after that's done. So all, if I think about all the energy and focus of the sector as far as not all of it, and I wanna caveat this. I know that there are people doing good measurement out there. So don't want'em 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, the player appearance? The, you know,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Right.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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. Marked 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, 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, 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 objectives. 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 being involved with that partner. So,'cause that's the other interesting thing with sponsorship is there's two brands at play. It's not just channel and advertiser. Okay.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: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 a, a lot. Of this around, and this is show my age, but when Coca-Cola went into the football league, remember when they first I saw, I've just seen the thing that the, the execution was brilliant'cause it, it meant the, the Coke logo with every club color. using this as a case study. And this is, I think probably in the naughty, 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. It doesn't matter. you've got like a. A halo effect there. And I remember that at the time being the football league Bli me, they've got Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is a 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 the that is. That's what you are getting at, isn't it? So the impact of a sponsor on rights holder.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, exactly. Or whether, or if you take a, a sponsorship from a government with, or a country or a government with a, with a questionable human rights record, you know, what impact does that have you on your brand? Does it, I mean, it may not. You know, there's a lot of fans out there who are quite happy to.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the other bit about, the other bit about that Rory, is interesting is that it sort of, it. You can't have it both ways. So as in the rights hold often says, look, the transference of values and it's quite often the other way round as well, isn't it? So it used to be so when FIFA was, you know, the bladder era, all of the corruption, blah, blah, blah. Was, was frontline news? Does that transfer to the sponsor? Does Coca-Cola get a hit? Take a hit for that? And quite often they would say, no, no, there's no transference. But then in the other, on the next page of the deck is. 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 the sponsor is held up as a sort of moral arbiter. So quite often journalists like me, when something goes wrong, you go in search of the sponsor to say, are you prepared to stand next to this, know, regime of the rights holder or so, you know, drugs or cheating or whatever it is. And the sponsor then has to answer that question
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:and underlying that journalistic sort of approach. Is exactly that transfer question, isn't it?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, but I think, I mean, going back to your point about the football league, I mean the, 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,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yes.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:sends a message out about your brand, that you must be reputable, trustable, you know, often acting bigger than you are. I was at a, the Festival of Marketing last week and Les Bonnet 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, 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. Signaling is, is a very, is a big key part of it all.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:You quite often get that with, crypto brands are looking at that, aren't they? They're saying, right, okay, let's let's buy a stadium. Because it's just so co 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.'cause the signal is trust.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, and, and cinch, you know, they were just suddenly everywhere, weren't they? So, oh, wow. Well, they must be massive, even though they may perhaps turned a profit at that point.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah. Yeah, Okay. So let's,, let's get to a sort of the utopia
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:what should happen, could happen. There's a call to action at the end of this, I think, which I always find exciting. I always like to, I always like to put something out to the 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 idea of, of this is.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:It's the idea is that it is 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.'cause 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
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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 does an having an athlete in your campaign do for your brand or not? When does. A sponsorship reach, reach, maximum profitability for a brand. And, is it able to deliver beyond reach and exposure and actually deliver profit and, and bottom line results? 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, one of the things that was said at the, the podcast recording was, you know, a a rising tide lifts all boats. So that kinda spirit.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. 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 Okay.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Mm-hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:what I think, but that's my starting position. And then. see it, the sort of argument go through outta the sponsorship office, outta 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. aligning incentives between a media agency and a sponsorship agency are really, really difficult. And I think that's, that's goes from every major network, but it's, everyone has got a case study of, the brand wants to be in cricket. get 50 K for. ECB sponsorship deal or whatever, that's our cut and there's an activation budget on top of that. We'll make work hard over three years to make some money out of that. The media rights say, I tell you what, put it on sky and we make 20% or 15 or 10, whatever the number is of the date. And it's just, it's quantum of, of the, the fee that the sponsorship
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Mm-hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:get and the person at the top of the network says, yeah, I get it. I understand it. I remember we had that meeting about sponsorship and I really, I'm really behind this. But then look at the check that I'm gonna about to get for the agency. So you can, you, 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 gonna, 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'cause I think we are at a moment. I think the ti 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.'cause 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 buyer. It's very valuable media inventory and the price of it is go, it seems to be going up and up. Something is happening. So it's good's 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
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, I think when it was probably just pure reach for the logo, it probably wasn't as effective. So at the point of which all it whatever was, is that you're around a, you were particularly now that the e before the E board, E boards could change during the game, you know, 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 this, once you were, once you had sponsors on the front. You know, that became, it was a good way for a brother, for example, to in enter the, the UK market or, you know, Canon people suddenly started to
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:a man city reference?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:See, I remember.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:yeah. Well, I've got,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:you see how powerful it is, Rory?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:yeah. So probably, you know, I think that started to play a role, but I guess for a long time it was literally just putting your logo on, on, in, in a, in a place that it could reach big exposure. But it probably, it didn't, unless you're on the front shirt, it probably wasn't that valuable compared to running a TV campaign. And so I think that legacy kind of, behavior and, and muscle memory in media agencies, that's probably how it became embedded
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:And
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:then.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:even my age isn't watching a, isn't watching a television, live television, you know, I haven't seen television since I watch Gogglebox on a Friday evening,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:that's about it.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:that's.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:and then I watch, you know, a Tottenham game.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:my, even me I'm not watching TV ads. So the effectiveness of TV ads must be plummeting, surely.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Not really. The, all the evidence still suggests is, I mean, and in, in cost per attentive second. So people are paying a lot more focus to attention now. Is very, very good value. And it can still reach 85% of. 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 billboards, but no TV still sort can definitely wash.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:per attentive second.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:we get very, very little attention on you. 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,'cause you can still pick up the logos and things, but.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:per second, attentive second of a the Spurs shirt must be enormous.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah. Yeah. And then 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, they're one of
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:of work to do here.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:the next time I list, you know, companies. 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, have 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 strains of thought to be brought just down through, okay, well what does that mean for sponsorship? That.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Why did, so it is interesting that, so that you've got all this one, 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?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:More going in. It's, it's, it's bigger than, it's bigger than out home. It's bigger than print. I think it's because that legacy of it being pure logo reach has not really been. That we haven't made that except hasn't made the chase for it being case, for it 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 chat conversation with a guy called Tom Roach who's over at Jellyfish. He is one of the. A very prominent person in the effectiveness debate. We had a good coffee the other day and, 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 then he still didn't know a lot about how sponsorship actually works. And I think that point at which he starts 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 there. All of the images are kind of captured and then they pop up in editorial the week after the, 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 we've 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're now the most successful beer brand in the uk. You know, so they are the, the almost the poster child for effective marketing praised. You know, around the world and they've integrated sponsorship right into the heart of it. So it'd 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 weight and, and be equated to tv. And and then also show you know, the best cases of, of it really, really working and being done well.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Quite often I think the 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 buy,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:dumb stupid sponsor sports sponsorship. That was always, there's a sort of inferiority complex indus industrywide toward the clever people of ad agency, the Rory Sutherlands of this world who. Talking about marketing in more, more broad sense. He has come, it's interesting, he's come much more closer to sponsorship. He's, I think he smells the sort of money it'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. I think there is a, there is that, I think there's been a sort of intellectual. Question deficit on the sponsorship side over over decades. And I think there's also another bit, which I sometimes think about, which is sponsorship is as a result of that, there is a sort of we are not just a stupid ad buy, you know, it's not the, 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, probably performs very well in comparison to TV ads now better than it ever has done. Argue that, well, I dunno. other bit is the, to get out of that whole of, it's a stupid ad, buy the sponsorship industry and the agencies have pushed it towards being a. It's really complicated because it makes it more, you know, it's a multi-headed hydra is a phrase that quite often get used. It's so, it can be all of these things. It can be the glue that brings everything together. And I think a lot of clients say, you know what? I'm gonna 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 gonna have to rethink every, you know,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:revitalizing and all of those things. So I think the complexity and the activation ball lake 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, fantastic case study. There aren't many case studies where, where the sports sponsorship is integral to a brilliant, creative idea.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:No, I, I think the well, the complexity. Lemme just think about that because there's a, there's a, a really good point to be made around objectives, and,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yes.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:is something that 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.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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, well, 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 you know, revenue growth, for example. Athletes, again, not great at generating brand effects, awareness, perception changes, but quite good at generating sales effects. So getting people to go and buy something,
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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 first place. But actually if you are.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Right.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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'cause 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. And I think. Sometimes what we see at City Sport is, is, is briefs coming in for pitches or you know, with, with every single objective under the sun, we want to raise awareness, change how people think about us. We wanna drive conversion. We want to keep our customers loyal. You know, well that's kind of four different, you might want four different sponsorships, but like, maybe try not to do it all through one, because that's gonna get very complicated. So
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Rory is a strategist.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:yeah, maybe.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:They need a sponsorship strategist. That's what they need.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Exactly. And that classic, you know, Michael Porter quote, strategy is what strategy is what you choose not to do. You know, it's what, what you not gonna do? Everybody can do everything, but what are you not gonna do and how are you gonna keep it focused? And that helps you tell a, a better story back to the business ultimately.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:You mentioned system one. I'm interested in them, but I, 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 the, there's part of an answer here. what's going on there?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Yeah, so econometrics, it's a pretty standard in big a, particularly in big advertisers. It's a way of statistical modeling to kind of look at all the factors in a, in a set of data that might be influenced a set of data
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: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, hear people talk about, you know, maths and magic and
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: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% of my advertising works. I just dunno which bit
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:which half. And there is a question there about from sponsorship's point of view.'cause 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 scratch, the real value is in olympism and the values, and so 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 just, it's trying to get loads of data points together to try and piece together a, you know, a coherent hole.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:It allows you to isolate what a particular thing has done. So, but it, it is always you basically, you create this big model and, 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 TVs back really solid exposure data. So it's quite easy to just, okay, we've got 10,000 10 million t what happened in region A. B or C. And it's hard to do that with ship because, because it's just so tricky to measure. Now we've been working with Charlie Dundas at G-G-S-I-Q and our system 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, et cetera, from any one deal and start to sort of be able to equate them to display impressions for example.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah, Just to point us towards the end here,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Mm-hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:There's a question here about there 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 is full of things of different sizes and shapes. And one 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. But gimme a sense. When you look at the push towards greater effectiveness and the, the understanding of sponsorship effectiveness, get a sense of who wins? Who loses from that information? I.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Yeah.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:in, in terms of, its a category that if I, if I find out something that's gonna, either I need that to benefit me and not anybody else, or it's gonna mean that I've got a strong negotiating position. I, 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, is is a benefit whether you are a, a non-lead football team or a Premier League football team or what, whatever 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 judgements. You've got a, you know, clear a 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, ev, everybody wins, I think, from having more information.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:Okay. That's good. Right, right. Final thing, we mentioned a call to action. What can people do? People who would've heard this, they'll have, they'd have heard the live event and they'll have heard this conversation. 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,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Mm-hmm.
Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner:what should they do? Could they do.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:They can follow the Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum on, 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 and North America. Anybody who feels like they have something to contribute to this conversation, then please do attend The first forum. Well be will be starting to, to. Outline the direction of travel and, and, and broaden it out beyond myself and, and Charlie and Becks 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 Rory Il. Now we are gonna just transfer and run a bit of the live event. As mentioned at the, uh, 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 Becks 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 Rory Akil, And as you are here at the end, there is a call to action. It's always thrilling, so if you've got thoughts and you wanna 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.
Stephen Hall, Sid Lee Sport:firstly a very warm welcome. My name is Steven Hall. I'm the CEO of Sidley Sport. Delighted you could all attend. I hope it's gonna be a thoroughly enjoyable session. Uh, 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 sponsor 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. So we could pull him in. And then Roy said, yeah, but we need someone. Heavyweight brand understands the world of sponsorship. Ah, I know Becks Martin from another organization I run called NNBR. So here they are. Uh, they're gonna explain all about, uh, sponsor effectiveness. Uh, they've just created sponsorship effectiveness forum, which I believe also Rory, you're gonna talk about. Have a wonderful session. Ask any questions. And uh, I'll pass over to the experts.
Sean Singleton: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 sick bed in Brighton. 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 who's recently joined the Unofficial 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, well, most importantly to me, like Richard and myself, she's a long suffering Spurs fan. So we've kept it, we've kept it coed. And also the other thing is she only found out she was doing this yesterday afternoon. So Richard's been planning this three months and she's had 24 hours. So please welcome Charlotte Thompson.
Charlotte Thomson:So as, uh, SHA and Steven said so well, we are here to, uh, 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 about econometric modeling for sponsorship
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:I mean, so an econometric model is a way of looking at the past data of the brand and, and taking into consideration all the media that you've bought and all the variables that 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,
Bex Martin: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 we're always just described will be an absolute game changer for sort of that upfront budget planning for the annual plans.
Charlie Dundas:Yeah, when you can get into that kind of granularity, you mentioned Rolex. We worked with them a lot in the past, and 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 Wimbledon, you're gonna 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 deal and pull out in the, in the newspaper, uh, engages with stuff on, you know, different other media channels and so on and so on and 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 and center within it.
Charlotte Thomson:Then that leads quite nicely on to the, the kind of centerpiece of today talking about the SEF launch. A Seth. Mm-hmm. We, we're going with it. I like it, but 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, you're doing it or what you're doing, but actually what tangible impacts do you think this is gonna have in the industry?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:I think, honestly, I would, 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, 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
Charlotte Thomson:studies did you tell me you were going through at the moment? I did
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport: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 to, to talk the same language, you know, because, you know, we are talking AV 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 essential to brand and media plans as it could be.
Charlotte Thomson:And we too, I think that that labor. Cost point entry is actually really key there.'cause 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'cause they will know their, their, that their sport better than anyone. Mm-hmm. 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 are they gonna sign a new player or go into your, or enter your award is, is really valuable. Yeah. So that can really like un hopefully unlock and help actually grow some of the smaller sports as well.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:Well, uh, alongside us is, is also Sarah 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, it may be and, 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, the merger of two companies and using it to kind of consolidate workforce is, or give people something to feel proud of after there've been a lot of layoffs 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 place. So in advertising you've just got channel and brand.
Charlie Dundas:Yeah, and I think the, uh, the ambition to get that knowledge and that capability into the hands of more people, and I think we often forget that, particularly in sponsor, unlike advertising, a lot of the things that people sponsor are not in London. They're not in urban centers. They're dotted all around the country. And often the talent who are working at those organizations are there to do more than one job. So they don't necessarily come blessed with all the knowledge that. That we're talking about here. So actually to democratize some of that and put it into the hands of those people such as they can, a sponsor doesn't need to be Barkley 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, not saying they're necessarily gonna see Wimbledon Rugby Club start leaning into econometric modeling, but the, uh, the, you never know. Well, exactly. It's getting cheaper by the way. But, 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, uh, is a lot easier than having to find new ones.
Bex Martin: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's, I think sponsorship industry sometimes can be guilty of being repetitive. So I think hopefully that will take us onto 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, um, this hopefully will, uh, unearth and, and provide some opportunity for. Okay,
Charlotte Thomson:great. And just before we open the follow up to questions, so this is your time wanting 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. Uh, so what's the first thing you would change if it would happen tomorrow? Or what would you ask everyone here and everyone listening to do?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:I'm gonna 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 gonna measure it. And that then should enable creativity should never be that data kills creative, 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, 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 gonna 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 of that. So I think I would say kind of look at your objectives rigorously. Um, that would be the thing to do tomorrow. Right
Charlotte Thomson:objectives go
Charlie Dundas:results the other end of the scale, I'd just like to see kind of more and more that information about what is actually achieved that businesses can share and put out there.'cause 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.
Bex Martin:Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think obviously those two things 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, and prove what it's driving from that point of view. Fab, thank you so much and I think we've
Charlotte Thomson:got time
Bex Martin:for
Charlotte Thomson:questions.
Sean Singleton:Yeah. Let's have some questions. So say your name and where you're from.
Andy, Gift of Kit:Yeah. Andy from, uh, gift of Kit. Um, there's been quite a lot of, um. Mentions about profitability and mar you know, how you're gonna, your ROI, et cetera. 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 gonna be a time when we can actually measure goodwill?
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:It said goodwill is a really interesting word. So there's a great study that was done in Ireland that it deliberately looked and actually they named fan Goodwill as a, as an output of sponsor sponsorship. So this is looking at, from a commercial perspective, what they've found is that if you link your brand to the property successfully, you see a 30% uplift in affinity and propensity to purchase. But if you generate fan goodwill, IE they believe that you are doing something good for the property or for their interaction with it. It more than doubles to 70%. 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 the, you know, show the lockup at the end. But that little unlock that can enhance how a fan enjoys or interacts with its club, with their club or could 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 gonna 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, so 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, and what was the level of investment that you put in together. So I guess it's that, and then the, the, the other 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.
Bex Martin:Yeah, I was just gonna, I was just 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 the parts I've suppose I've focused more on is,'cause actually that's, that is a big gap for us. But yeah, we've, we have got many things set up through, whether it's our Ipsos, uh, brand tracking around how we are driving positive change on that societal impact, whether it's numbers, participation, et cetera. You know, yeah, it's, it's very, I think to everything you've just said will continue to be more and more important as sponsorships evolve.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:And I think the other thing we talked about before is that a lot of this sounds very expensive, right? Brand trackers and econometric models and, but we were just talking about the fact that we are, you know, we, we do this ourselves in our own marketing as said, least bought. We have the Unofficial Partner partnership. We've got a small brand tracker. Is it the biggest sample size? No, we've got a, a bigger margin in a, a area than we would like, but we're operating on a budget. But we do know that our awareness has gone up and that, um, actually nine out 10 people who've heard of us, have heard of us because of the partnership. So, you know, we know it's done its job. You don't have to be perfect. You've just gotta have a go. Any good sport coach will tell you that what is measured will improve. And it's the same in your marketing as well.
Sean Singleton:Thanks for those kind words. I've got a question. Sean, from Unofficial Partner, have you got a call to action for the people in this room and the wider sports industry about this new forum? Seth,
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:follow Seth on LinkedIn. Um, yeah, follow Seth on LinkedIn. We will be, 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, um, yeah, please, if you are interested in donating your time, energy ideas, feel free. It's not an agency initiative. You know, we've been I've been quite careful to make sure that this is not, it's not a sly sport idea. Obviously I work here, we are here today. But, um, this is about everybody from across the industry and like Charlie said, a rising tide. Yeah,
Rosemary Sarginson:hi. Hi. This is more of a comment rather than a question. My name is Rosemary Sargents and 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. Um, 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 diff a difficulty because I would love to publish because as I say, I'm sitting on an archive of sponsorship campaigns dating back decades, uh, of the best, Barclays being one of them, um, campaigns. But they don't wish to share that, that data. Do they they win the awards?
Charlie Dundas:Yeah,
Rosemary Sarginson:we reward them. They come along fantastic. But if I, when I do go to them and say, please would you, can we publish this? They will edit it down to something that isn't necessary, as useful as it might be,
Charlie Dundas:and completely rosy. That, that is definitely the challenge. There's no doubt about it. And having, you know, 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 kinda 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, you know, it may or may not work in getting people to share, but that has to be the concept.
Bex Martin:I think also potentially if more people 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 our 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.
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:And I think, you know that, I mean there will always be brands that don't want to. Enter rewards. I, I don't think you'll see an added ass case study in the IPA database. I've worked with them for a long time. I know they just don't wanna share it. What Bennet and Field did, which was so good, was that it was, there was no, it was a few case studies given as examples from like McDonald's and Asda, but it was just the aggregate view, which was the, the beneficial thing. You know, 10% of cases had an ROI figure in there what was com, what was unique about them versus the other. So it's 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, so you can put them all into
Charlotte Thomson:your, uh, just add them to your pile there. I just, my, my late nights just
Rory Natkiel, Sid Lee Sport:got stretched out into Christmas. Yeah.
Charlotte Thomson:Uh, I think we've got another question over here.
Sean Jefferson:Hi there, Sean Jefferson. Hi. Hi, Sean. Uh, Sean Jefferson from Sport Value. Understandably, the conversation's 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?'cause that's often either undervalued or kind of like separated from the consumer'cause 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?
Charlie Dundas:Again, I think, you know, everything that Rory's talking about can be applied to that space. I guess the examples which, no, none of this is gonna sound new'cause it isn't, but. I've got friends who work at Gallagher sponsored 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 SNS or whoever it might be, and they could interact and engage and then they kind of roll through the Premiership final and the, 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 being invested into. So I think that's an example that is, again, as as old as the hills. And it works particularly well in insurance and rugby. I'm not trying to say it's new or different. Do they have places that they can try and track that they do? So when we were at u gov, we were tracking that for them to understand were they raising awareness and other metrics. Awareness is the easy one. You, we 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, kinda like cuts of people. And to get kind of significant segments and being able to then get good information out'em 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 gonna cut the mustard in someone like Gallagher trying to find that evidence. So. I dunno. There's a good answer Sean. I think the real the number of it comes down to right back at 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 gonna 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. There's gotta 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 10 years, whatever it might have been in sponsoring Premiership rugby.
Bex Martin:It's a great question by the way'cause 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 Wimbledon, over 1400 of our top clients and it's how can we talk about that and the impact that that's having without obviously a, B, C coming into force and all the other, um, given we are a financial services, bland, anti-corruption, et cetera 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.