Del Wilber is the president of MVP Group, a sports, entertainment, and event marketing firm. MVP brokered Olympus' sponsorship of the U.S. Open tennis tournament and Fashion Week, and the partnership between Office Depot and the Trump Organization's golf championship at the Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles.
How do you match sponsors with events?
The bottom line is fit. A sponsorship is a delivery vehicle, and the real strategic issue is, what is the sponsor's objective? Given the objective, how do they want to measure the results compared to the objective? And into that goes a lot of issues: It could be a seasonality issue, a demographic issue, a prestige issue, a publicity issue. It could be a business-driving issue where you could actually track sales against a sponsorship opportunity.
How do you calculate the dollar amount a company gets out of sponsoring an event like the U.S. Open?
here are organizations that track the time that signage is on television, and once you know how many minutes during a broadcast there's been signage exposure, you can determine the value you want to place against a 30-second ad. Obviously, 30 seconds of signage doesn't have the same value as a 30-second TV commercial because there's no product message. But it's worth more than zero, so you pick a place in between.
How do you make sure that both the event and the sponsor get what they want out the partnership?
Ninety-nine percent of the time this issue gets ignored or overlooked. [A sponsorship will be a success] if you accept that a mutually beneficial relationship will produce the best cumulative result for everyone. And that attitude dictates a working style that is collaborative and collegial as opposed to confrontational or dictatorial. More often than not, you find relationships that aren't very collegial or collaborative.
Is that because it just wasn't a good fit?
It's a lack of sensitivity. Too often, the people with the money take the position that they're putting the money up, so should get whatever they want. And the people with the event sometimes take an attitude that says, "This is about the event, not the sponsor." The ones that meet in the middle are the ones that really work well. It's really a marriage: Everybody has to give once in a while.
What are some other common pitfalls?
Underspending on the activation side is a common flaw. The easiest example is the Olympic Games. Once you pay your $40 to $50 million to be a worldwide sponsor, so far you've only gotten the use of the rings. So the question is: How much are you going to spend to tell people [you're a sponsor]? If you underspend in that area, you risk flushing the money you spent on the [sponsorship rights] in the first place.
—Suzanne Ito
Posted 06.13.05
This story originally appeared in the April/May 2005 issue of the BiZBash Event Style Reporter.
