The Fate Of The Sponsorship Industry?

By Shaun Whatling, published in Sports Business May 09

The Fate Of The Sponsorship Industry?

The current model of the sponsorship industry was spawned by media sales, driven by the entrepreneurial realisation that the aggregated exposure available through major events had sizeable commercial value.

Everything else is post-rationalisation. I say this so clearly because of the huge absence of vision and any clear articulation by the sponsorship industry of what it represents.

The experiential movement, by comparison, comes from a vision which aspires to a depth of engagement with consumers beyond what is achievable in 2D. And this vision is articulated passionately and intelligently by agencies, predominantly in the US, for which Jack Morton is rightfully the spokesperson.

Advertising has its evangelists and its heretics, its apologists and its critics. Forever expounding, enthusing, spinning, suggesting. Sponsorship hasn't.
Our in-depth conversations are all about the rights market; rights inflation, leveraging your rights, carving up old rights, discovering new rights. It’s the same conversation on loop.

We’ve mistaken the medium for the message.

And what we've lost, perhaps forever, is the opportunity to understand and own the space of brands' relationships with people. Not that we could own it exclusively, but a very deep, very important slice - a slice that gives us the authority to frame the argument.

We’re surrounded. The experiential movement aspires to own customer engagement. Product placement has manufactured its own distinct space. Affinity marketing is reproducing the same model with brand partnerships. And Corporate Responsibility has finally come to the realisation that they often command more valuable assets than TV coverage.

None of this has passed by the advertising industry, which is retrospectively, cautiously absorbing the critical take-outs and starting to ask their own questions: “how do we remain the dominant conversational partner with brand clients?” “How can we assimilate the new communications models that sponsorship represents?” “How do we leverage what we do best - defining and articulating an emotional proposition - through other media?”

As it stands, the advertising industry is going to gobble us up. They’re going to deconstruct sponsorship and reconstruct it inside the conceptual framework of advertising.

And they will unless we, as an industry, find a way to articulate the essence of sponsorship, to offer coherent and robust theories to support the emotional connectivity it can create.

And stop talking about rights fees.