With fans returning to events, our latest webinar discussed how brands are investing in sponsorship to drive awareness and engagement as things begin to go back to normal.

The panellists were:

• JM Finn: Head of Marketing, Oliver Tregoning
• Carparison: General Manager, Matt Woodward
• Royal Ascot: Head of Partnership & Commercial Sales, Craig Staddon

Firstly, what makes a great sponsorship?

Oliver Tregoning: A key factor is longevity and the shared long-term values the brand has with the rights holder. Our relationship with Surrey CCC has been in place for over 15 years. It started initially with a corporate box to entertain clients and over time we added some advertising hoardings, hoping for that glory shot in the back pages of the national media. Since then, we have progressed to being the official Wealth Management partner and now naming rights to the JM Finn stand.

There’s the associated PR and brand alignment with an enormously successful club. It is an iconic London landmark, it has a fantastic history and amazing legacy and is run by a series of top leadership team. So being part of the Surrey family has been enormously powerful for us.

As a wealth management firm that focuses on personal service, much of our marketing spend is on building those client relationships particularly in a more informal environment. So hospitality is crucial to us – this year we are hoping to take over 600 guests to the ground. The Surrey partnership works so well because they know exactly what we want to get out of this relationship. They helped us deliver that, and more importantly they helped us measure it, which is obviously a key aspect of a sponsorship.

Matt Woodward: One that closely ties to your values and culture as a business. For us with the Exeter Chiefs this includes coming from humble beginnings and going big on local responsibility and sustainability. For example, we are avidly promoting green travel, especially the shift towards electric vehicles, and the Chiefs are also happy to engage with us to try and get in front of the local council to drive a tri-party green initiative for the Southwest.

For Carparison it is about trying to associate positive sporting experiences with seeing our name effectively. You only have to look at the atmosphere at the England/Germany game at Wembley to understand what sport means to this country and the positive connotations that spectators can take from those experiences.

Craig Staddon: When the rights holder understands the partner, looks at things in a completely holistic way and challenges the rule book. It’s also about answering the tough questions: how can we work together as a partnership with transparency? If it didn’t work, why?

How did the pandemic impact your priorities?

CS: For all its negatives, there has also been a positive, it has made Ascot and its partners / suppliers / sponsors work closer together to find solutions to deliver offsite activations. We had to think how can we get things moving forward for Royal Ascot’s partners? We didn’t really want to give them money back instead actually give them more value. As a result, we came up with ideas and concepts that were quite new to them and most of them were very engaged in wanting to pick up the baton and run with it. The thinking and willingness of most of our partners to diversify from the ‘norm’ has certainly changed.

We didn’t know what the new world would look like but digital came very much the forefront. We never really thought of that before. We have now got a lot of digital assets that we are trying to reinvent or create based on ideas and concepts that are working. A good example is a golden ticket where we’re working with partners so that those that are not actually on site could still win. Moet is a great example, it was founded in 1743 and when the time is 1743 a golden ticket drops into someone’s online wallet. That engagement is fantastic to see.

With fans returning to events – we had 12,000 people each day over the five days of Royal Ascot – the biggest positive was everybody was genuinely excited about coming back on site. Now we have a two-fold approach, with people on site that we can engage with, as well as all the work we have done over the last 12 months in terms of improving offsite engagement.

OT: It gave us a good opportunity to take stock and have a look at all our sponsorships and programmes and make sure that we were getting value from them. We spent a lot of time working on our CRM system internally, making sure that we can track any leads, so we have got the data. Ultimately, we are all looking for new business but as we all know that’s difficult, so qualified leads are what we are trying to deliver as marketeers.

Brand awareness is important to support our business development efforts as we work in a very competitive industry and our marketing efforts are designed to support those business development trends.

MW: We started to engage with the Chiefs early on in our trading history – about 18 months ago, We put that on ice as the first round of the pandemic hit. In times like this you have two approaches; there is the scaling back and being protective and cautious of your investments in partnerships and general marketing. Then you have got those that are bolder and more courageous, depending on where they are in the business’s lifecycle.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen from your sponsors before the start of fans returning to events?

CS: Ours have been much more proactive in wanting to explore digital opportunities. Whereas before it was seen by some (not all) as a secondary element to the partnership, we’re now finding that for some it’s the key piece of activation.

Also, they’re coming to us with ideas, rather than us having to pressurise them. For instance timekeeper Longines brought the idea of a Predictor Challenge (a race predictor league across the five days for people to compete with their friends, family or colleagues) not the other way round.

Take Porsche. Usually prior to COVID they would utilise the Heli pad; high net worth individuals would land and a Porsche is waiting to pick them up. During the drive to the stadium they get a nice brochure and somebody to talk to about a Porsche. But now they know content is king: together we created a race between an experienced driver and a race jockey, combining the two at Ascot and creating content around the power of Porsche. And that has been incredibly well received.

What are your feelings towards the Tokyo Olympics going ahead?

OT: Brands sponsoring the Olympics must be incredibly nervous. The IOC is incredibly powerful and there are huge contractual obligations to go ahead with it but the reputational damage is a massive risk. It looks like Japan is about to enter another state of emergency. Just on a small scale, we took 100 guests to the Oval last week on two days, and we needed to complete appropriate risk assessment to ensure social distancing, so it just adds another level of nervousness to any sort of engagement.

MW: I am of the mindset that we’re just going to have to live with COVID and whatever that may look like in 6, 12, 24 months and beyond. Naturally, you would want to get as much bang for your buck. However, you do run the risk of almost destroying your credibility by being associated with something that people feel so passionate about. I think if the organisers can demonstrate that they are doing absolutely everything responsibly then why not. Obviously, consistency is an issue as well; in terms of fans returning to events, Craig was allowed 10,000 at Ascot last week and Silverstone in a month’s time is 140,000. But now you are talking about a global event where there is going to be people from countries at different stages with tackling COVID.

CS: It is going to be global, it is going to be on TV, it is going to happen. All the athletes from my understanding are signing up to go, there are just no fans. As an event, would it not be right to ensure, for the good of sport, that we get on with it? We raced behind closed doors, no different in terms of Japan, and I think you need to do it. You need to have an Olympics, like you need to have the Euros, but it needs to be sensitive to the fact that things change. The government needs to make the right decision for the people.

As a rights holder, what are the key lessons you’ve learnt from fans returning to events for others who will experience this later?

CS: Firstly, both the rights holder and brand need to be flexible. Second, there’s a need to continually innovate to understand the changing market place. Post-COVID people are so much more different in their needs and expectations and you need to adapt to meet these. Third, rights packages need to be more bespoke and, finally, drive more content, content, content.

How do you define and measure success?

OT: As brand awareness is a key part of our marketing strategy we will measure this using surveys across Surrey’s T20 series and the England Test Match series against India. The aim is to understand what people associate with Surrey County Cricket Club and the Oval, whether they have heard of our brand, what do they think we do, and how we can help them. Hopefully over time, that will inform us exactly how we can best engage with cricket audiences.

MW: We are very fortunate that the size of the social media following and our engagement level is now considerably above the industry average now. We have also got some advertising hoardings around the stand as well as the video referee screens. The nature of our business is very transactional; generally private individuals see it, maybe click, point, and go.

We set up specific traffic tracking numbers for where we advertise in different spaces. For example where we use phone numbers, the one that is displayed around the Chiefs stadium will be different to the one we use on Google Pay per Click. Therefore, we can understand quickly whether we are getting an immediate response from a player scoring a try, as you can see Carparison’s logo across his shorts. Does the phone ring 20 times in the next five minutes, or does it come after the weekend on a Monday morning? We have some robust KPIs as this is a trial-and-error stage for us.

How are you engaging with younger audiences?

OT: Typically, the c-suite audience are the more traditionalists who like the Test Matches. Whereas the younger demographics, particularly at the Oval, tend to be London-based, living within 20 miles of the Oval and they love the razzmatazz of the T20.

Supporting grassroots in the sport that you are involved in is important. We are the shirt sponsor for all the junior sides from under sixteen teams down across the Surrey County game, which has been successful for us.

Also, one of our long-standing ambassadors is Tammy Beaumont, who is the England #1 lady’s batsman in one day international cricket. This has been a very successful partnership; she has been phenomenal, and having her JM Finn branded cricket bat has really helped us in terms of our engagement with a younger, more diverse group of talent.

Interestingly, this has worked really well for recruitment which wasn’t actually the goal when we started out. The aim was very much business development, trying to engage a younger audience.

We do have a very diverse client base (50% male/female) but the sponsorship turned out to be a real boon to our diversity efforts as well. One of the reasons why this partnership has worked is because we have sponsored a couple clubs in areas where we have branch offices. This has allowed us to use the wider partnership with Surrey to really embed ourselves into our local community, which has been beneficial for us.

MW: We have a brand ambassador partnership with Rob Baxter, the Chiefs director of rugby. To drive engagement we just started hosting a quarterly Q&A with the fans and our first one saw phenomenal engagement through social channels. This was especially true with the local audience as we are a local brand with a local franchise and he is local himself, but we also saw fans from rival clubs getting involved and having a bit of a laugh. This is all generating a bit of noise around what is generally a very well thought-out campaign hosted by Carparison so we are interested to see how that develops.

CS: We have a Colts & Fillies club, with around 20,000 subscriptions who can come on any race day with their parents. We work very closely with them; they can get close to horses, they put the silks on, then go to the parade ring and get a bit of history background. They are the grass roots, if they are enthused, their parents will keep bringing them back and when they hopefully have children, etc it continues.

Secondly, we work very closely with schools; our CSR programme is massively important and one of the areas we do is a drawing competition for Royal Ascot for all different ages from your five-year-olds right up to your 14-year-olds. If you were to walk through a tunnel at Ascot, you will see all the winners and runners up. Prize winners attend the Saturday of Royal Ascot, they go on the podium and get their prizes delivered but it is about engagement with the local community as well.

What’s a key piece of advice you’d give other brands thinking about sponsorship?

MW: I think there is a general fear that budget holders in businesses look at the cost of the marketing and the sponsorship in one big lump sum and not all the other advantages. For example, we are a pure online business, we do not have a physical showroom so it gives our staff something to tangibly shout about, it gives them a sense of pride for working for the business.

Our marketing budget is large anyway because we have got to get in front of people digitally but it costs us 50% less per eyeball to carry out this partnership with the Chiefs than it does for us to advertise for Google Pay Per Click based on the TV audience and in-ground spectators.

Think about the bigger picture.