Convenient Fiction

By Shaun Whatling, published in Sports Business September 09

Convenient Fiction

Redmandarin are great believers in definition, as a foundation for planning, creativity and accountability. It underpins the thinking we apply to the challenges facing our clients. We published Defining Sponsorship to articulate Redmandarin's vision of sponsorship’s essence and potential.

And along the way, we had some fascinating conversations. Respected figures from the industry – Tony Ponturo, Patrick Nally, David Wheldon, Simon Lowden, Simon Thompson and many more – saying things we didn’t expect them to, showing the ‘party line’ of the sponsorship industry to be a convenient fiction.

Patrick Nally, for example, believes the rights package is dead. Clearly, the rights package remains the prevailing sales paradigm and is quite well actually, but a statement like that from the founder of rights packages demands consideration, especially when read alongside Tony Ponturo’s forthright statements about ‘official’ sponsorship – you’re not special, you’re just the company that ponied up the money, another extraordinary admission from an industry veteran with one of the largest budgets on the planet.

The commercial foundation for the industry rests on the complimentary concepts of rights packages and category exclusivity, and rights-holders around the world misguidedly take a lead from the Supertankers – the IOC, FIFA, UEFA and F1 – in creating their sales architecture and structure.

Category exclusivity, the ‘official beer’ story, is offered as a benefit: in fact, it is simply a hygiene factor. The truth is, the rationale for most category segmentations by rights-holders is no more sophisticated than: who is likely to buy this?

And most rights packages rely incredibly heavily on the media value of a logo on a sign in the background, despite the fact that many western brands, the brands with the scale to sponsor a Supertanker, do not, in reality, need that exposure. As Peter Franklin says in the book, Coca-Cola serves a billion helpings – spots, messages, soundbites, media – every day. True, the association - with a Supertanker in particular – communicates global stature, but, from a brand perspective… is that it?

What Coca-Cola needs even more than media (or associations of stature, it could be argued, in this time and age), is genuinely interesting content with which to emotionalise its existing media. And the question then is: how good am I as a brand in identifying relevant content?
Rather than, do I want to be the official soft drink?