This month there’s not been a lot bouncing on the trampoline of news about which a column dedicated to the subject of broadcast sponsorship can get very excited - unless the absorbing world of kitchen towels grabs you in which case you’ll be pleased to learn that Plenty are sponsoring the new series of How Clean is your House? Mercifully however, there was a degree of confusion in the marketing press the other day about the new title sponsor of The X Factor which piqued my curiosity.
First a press release from Fremantle Media announced their new action packed sponsorship and activation package with Talk Talk – including an impressive array of customer engagement vehicles including X Factor parties, tickets to the live shows and a chance for viewers to create ‘bright dance’ graffiti for broadcast during the break bumpers. All good stuff and we’ll no doubt all have an opinion on the final executions when they air later this year.
But a few days later, in Marketing, Guy Douglass of design firm FLB commented that he was in awe of OXO sponsoring the same show. How odd! Could ‘The mighty atom’ once again be stealing the limelight? Certainly Mr Douglass thought so. And if he’d been right, he’d have been right (if you see what I mean). If OXO had been the new sponsor it would have been a smart (if expensive) move on many levels.
Putting aside the obvious typographical similarity between the names of the TV show and the brand (indeed OXO have even changed the shape of the familiar cube into an X) the fact that families are more likely to sit down together to watch The X Factor than they are to enjoy a meal around the same table would appear to be a good basis on which to build a rationale for sponsorship during early evening Saturday prime time. To be picky, perhaps Britain’s Got Talent would have been the better show for pure variety and family appeal but still the association would merit consideration.
But the sad truth is that OXO aren’t sponsoring The X factor at all. What they’re actually doing is looking for a group (apparently there’s no such thing as an OXO family anymore) with the ‘OXO Factor’ to make a short beefy homemade commercial using a pre-prepared script. Consumers then upload their witty 30 seconds of footage which will then be voted on by the public and the best will be shown during an ad break in the final of The X Factor TV show. A neat idea extremely well executed online and with a variety of funny clips on how to act and direct TV commercials - no doubt supported amply on pack and in store (but I’m afraid I’ve not been to the supermarket to find out). It’s not sponsorship I know but it is a great creative promotional idea put together with such great attention to detail that you know the team responsible was passionate and had huge fun making it happen. In fact, it’s this kind of creative thinking that should be supporting broadcast sponsorship; it uses original content to entertain, engage and reinforce brand values using a wide range of response channels.
If I’m honest, I was rather hoping that Mr Douglass hadn’t got it wrong. With great ideas like this OXO need a good platform from which to launch their campaign. I’m sure Talk Talk have the budget to make their huge X Factor property sing for them - and the audience match will be spot on of course - but will the big spend be matched by well executed big ideas that stitch both customers and viewers into the very fabric of the brand? Anyone can write a big cheque.
Whichever is the most appropriate sponsor of this TV goliath is a matter of opinion; ‘fit’ between a brand and a programme is a very subjective thing. And as we all know sponsorship is effective only when people can make a connection between the two. It either works for you or it doesn’t. But the important thing is to get it right. It’s the first thing on the list.
The good news is that people will try very hard to make a connection (they want to because it’s part of a programme they appreciate). The bad news is that if the connection is unsuccessful it will be ignored and possibly antagonise. It’s very easy to see how a poor execution can quickly become an irritant when you consider a programme’s frequency – perhaps 4 times in a half hour soap which when multiplied by the number of episodes in a series begins to look like torture.
To this point, the other day I came across a good article (available free and online) by Mike Hall of Hall & Partners in Admap called Broadcast Sponsorship: How does it work? We all like to think we know but the article features research findings, ideas on how to measure success and some interesting cases to make his points. I’d recommend going online today and downloading your own copy.
Well worth a read on the train home tonight.
Thursday 10 September 2009
Marks out of Ben 10?
As the summer gets into its stride broadcasters are starting to pad out the TV schedules with repeats in the expectation that we’re all out enjoying ourselves. But for those who broadcast to children the summer holidays bring a packed line up for bigger daytime audiences.
So the announcement that Turner Broadcasting and LegoLand were joining forces for the vacation caught my eye. Cartoon Network’s shows Ben 10 and Ben 10 Alien Force are being sponsored by Lego – just in time for the vacation. As the father of two small boys I can appreciate the potency of this combination. Both are adored by my sons and I can only assume research says there are countless thousands of other children who have the same opinion. The pairing seems to be a match made in heaven.
As with most sponsorship investments (and this one is no different) there is a dazzling array of activation potential. With such a compelling range between them (content, licences, venue, media channels and products) the permutations for cross fertilisation literally abound. The objectives for LegoLand must have been simple – boost ticket sales for the summer, shift product and build a database of children and parents for future marketing.
Unfortunately, it seems the best that could be done with the execution of this campaign was the creation of some sponsorship idents and a mini LegoLand site that is accessed via a large and rather clumsy button fly-posted randomly onto the Cartoon Network website in the vain hope that some will see through the camouflage and click it. Beyond that there is nothing. A suffocating vacuum of creative thought.
It’s a wonder Turner Media Innovations would allow, let alone create, this rather plain and uneventful association. I see none of the ‘brand integration’ or ‘innovation’ promised in their show reel. And also in line for interrogation should be Carat Sponsorship who, in trying to secure the best possible campaign for Lego evidently lost the initiative. And the degree to which this campaign works will be anyone’s guess (for that’s what the evaluation will be – a guess). It’s almost criminal that today, given the stifling squeeze on marketing budgets and our duty to be more accountable, that there is no apparent means of tracking response, sales or footfall. This campaign will deliver for LegoLand little more than hope.
In the press release the words ‘interact more deeply’ drew me like a magnet. I was expecting great things from this deal. I had visions of a brand and media union that took the thread of a great idea to stitch together the idents with added value footage on a digital platform, a special Ben 10 experience within LegoLand, a licensing deal to create a limited edition range of Lego Ben 10 characters and a special co-branded website bristling with great Ben 10/Lego content and game downloads on offer in exchange for consumer data, and an online store for Ben 10 Lego sets and merchandise.
This could have been a great partnership with so much more mileage. This is a deal that must have been done in the dark. The result is a union of two brands who appear very ill ease in each other’s company and who are behaving like they’ve just woken up from a one night stand. It’s certainly a holiday romance that won’t last.
Surely all sponsorships have hidden talent. The splicing together of a brand with a rights holder’s assets will always create something new, authentic and credible; something that’s unique and will work for both parties. But thinking creatively does require a little effort. It’s not easy or we’d all be doing it as regularly as switching on the TV.
But we can change the way we think. Our vertical posture and horizontal view means we automatically assign things tops, bottoms and sides. To even maintain our balance we have an instinctive preference for the way the world should look – neatly ordered and upright. Even a tilted picture provokes a sense of unease and an urge to straighten it. It’s even difficult to recognise a familiar face when we see it upside down.
Our view of the world and our appreciation of what’s in it is obscured if the rules and expectations that we have for it are broken. The Tower of Pisa, for example, is better known for its lean that its architectural merit.
So, the next time a golden sponsorship opportunity comes along, step back and see it not for the obvious. Don’t do it the way everyone else does it. Think business, think ideas and then think execution. Try to see things differently – the rights you hold, the way they can be changed, the way they can be communicated, the way an audience can interact.
By way of an analogy; although a square may be a square the simple act of rotating it through 45 degrees will make it look quite different. In fact we call it a diamond – it’s exactly the same shape of course but is an altogether different image. And naturally, a diamond has values that a square can only dream of. It has a vast array of alternative values, meanings and associations.
If Turner and Lego had sat back for a moment and turned their campaign through 45 degrees maybe they’d have seen the true value in what they had.
Marks out of 10? Five; for getting together in the first place. See Me after class.
So the announcement that Turner Broadcasting and LegoLand were joining forces for the vacation caught my eye. Cartoon Network’s shows Ben 10 and Ben 10 Alien Force are being sponsored by Lego – just in time for the vacation. As the father of two small boys I can appreciate the potency of this combination. Both are adored by my sons and I can only assume research says there are countless thousands of other children who have the same opinion. The pairing seems to be a match made in heaven.
As with most sponsorship investments (and this one is no different) there is a dazzling array of activation potential. With such a compelling range between them (content, licences, venue, media channels and products) the permutations for cross fertilisation literally abound. The objectives for LegoLand must have been simple – boost ticket sales for the summer, shift product and build a database of children and parents for future marketing.
Unfortunately, it seems the best that could be done with the execution of this campaign was the creation of some sponsorship idents and a mini LegoLand site that is accessed via a large and rather clumsy button fly-posted randomly onto the Cartoon Network website in the vain hope that some will see through the camouflage and click it. Beyond that there is nothing. A suffocating vacuum of creative thought.
It’s a wonder Turner Media Innovations would allow, let alone create, this rather plain and uneventful association. I see none of the ‘brand integration’ or ‘innovation’ promised in their show reel. And also in line for interrogation should be Carat Sponsorship who, in trying to secure the best possible campaign for Lego evidently lost the initiative. And the degree to which this campaign works will be anyone’s guess (for that’s what the evaluation will be – a guess). It’s almost criminal that today, given the stifling squeeze on marketing budgets and our duty to be more accountable, that there is no apparent means of tracking response, sales or footfall. This campaign will deliver for LegoLand little more than hope.
In the press release the words ‘interact more deeply’ drew me like a magnet. I was expecting great things from this deal. I had visions of a brand and media union that took the thread of a great idea to stitch together the idents with added value footage on a digital platform, a special Ben 10 experience within LegoLand, a licensing deal to create a limited edition range of Lego Ben 10 characters and a special co-branded website bristling with great Ben 10/Lego content and game downloads on offer in exchange for consumer data, and an online store for Ben 10 Lego sets and merchandise.
This could have been a great partnership with so much more mileage. This is a deal that must have been done in the dark. The result is a union of two brands who appear very ill ease in each other’s company and who are behaving like they’ve just woken up from a one night stand. It’s certainly a holiday romance that won’t last.
Surely all sponsorships have hidden talent. The splicing together of a brand with a rights holder’s assets will always create something new, authentic and credible; something that’s unique and will work for both parties. But thinking creatively does require a little effort. It’s not easy or we’d all be doing it as regularly as switching on the TV.
But we can change the way we think. Our vertical posture and horizontal view means we automatically assign things tops, bottoms and sides. To even maintain our balance we have an instinctive preference for the way the world should look – neatly ordered and upright. Even a tilted picture provokes a sense of unease and an urge to straighten it. It’s even difficult to recognise a familiar face when we see it upside down.
Our view of the world and our appreciation of what’s in it is obscured if the rules and expectations that we have for it are broken. The Tower of Pisa, for example, is better known for its lean that its architectural merit.
So, the next time a golden sponsorship opportunity comes along, step back and see it not for the obvious. Don’t do it the way everyone else does it. Think business, think ideas and then think execution. Try to see things differently – the rights you hold, the way they can be changed, the way they can be communicated, the way an audience can interact.
By way of an analogy; although a square may be a square the simple act of rotating it through 45 degrees will make it look quite different. In fact we call it a diamond – it’s exactly the same shape of course but is an altogether different image. And naturally, a diamond has values that a square can only dream of. It has a vast array of alternative values, meanings and associations.
If Turner and Lego had sat back for a moment and turned their campaign through 45 degrees maybe they’d have seen the true value in what they had.
Marks out of 10? Five; for getting together in the first place. See Me after class.
Football Fever
Football is snake oil; a cure-all for dull lives and ailing brands alike. It injects a healthy dose of excitement into our otherwise need-driven lives and allows awkward geeky brands to associate themselves with the guys who are apparently having all the fun.
According to FIFA, football is now estimated to be played, watched and generally enjoyed by 3.2 billion people globally. By any measure its following is huge and, naturally, the game provides an almost irresistible pull for advertisers and marketers since they are paid to follow the crowd. It’s a perfect sponsorship opportunity.
Almost half of the world population has now been hooked on the heroin of soccer. And where there’s addiction there’s an opportunity to make money – obscene amounts of it. Business loves football and consequently the business of football has become titanic. But are the fans and game being overlooked in this vortex of deals, transactions and commercial expansion and what does this mean for sponsorship on TV?
Like the City of London, English football is at the forefront of globalisation. There appears to be a virtuous circle: it's here that cash flows most freely; talent follows the money; so from Milan to Yucatan, televisions are tuning in to our best games, guaranteeing yet more riches.
But not everyone approves. While most season-ticket holders welcome their teams' expensively purchased newcomers and dream of glory, gainsayers are saddened by the arrival of funny money - roubles, dollars, euros, bahts and kroner - which, they claim, will kill the game's community roots.
Last year, the Premier League paid out a record-breaking £531m on transfer fees, about half of which went abroad. Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, fears that foreign imports damage England's international prospects, because they squeeze out domestic talent. You can see his point, but do we care? I mean really care? How many fans would sell their 20-goals-a-season African striker in order for a kid from the local sink estate to see his name on the team-sheet? Others fret that top-flight football's ruthless commercialisation, combined with saturation media coverage, will destroy supporters' appetite for going to matches. But there has been little sign of that either. Yet.
Football fans are club junkies - very little will stop them getting their fix. But they know when they’re being ripped off. Indeed, the hairline cracks of broadcaster greed are beginning to show and it would seem that the limits of affordability are being reached. As I write three Scottish Premier League clubs are on the brink of administration and Setanta are struggling to find the cash to pay the £3 million they owe them and the £30 million they owe the English Premier league. They simply don’t have enough subscribers to make their ambitions pay.
Television audiences are definitely not what they were. The FA Cup Final this year achieved a TV audience of around 5 million compared to previous year’s audiences on the BBC which regularly pulled in excess of 10 million. The Setanta Sports (despite the return of Saint and Greavsie) and ITV broadcasts didn’t do anything for the appeal of the match even though Setanta pluckily made it free to air.
And the governing bodies still have the chutzpah to be upping the ante in the sponsor market. Although it’s early days, the FA is reportedly looking to secure £10 million for the FA Cup when it comes up for renewal in a year’s time which looks decidedly expensive for a sponsorship that was regarded as overpriced four years ago.
It would appear that businesses associated with football – the NGBs, the broadcasters, advertisers and sponsors - are beginning to lose sight of the needs of football. Moreover, if they and the clubs continue to short change the fans then the whole house of cards is likely to be blown apart by the winds of recession and stimulate utter rebellion in the serried ranks of supporters.
For sponsors, the fans are the ultimate objective. It is they who need to be nurtured, connected with and engaged. Everything else in football is a proxy; pay-TV, web sites, the club TV are all a means to an end. If we lose sight of the fans we lose sight of the goal. And if the fans walk so will the sponsors. Football will survive but the parasitic businesses that depend upon it will suffer.
If we try to take football away from the fans and force them to watch their club matches via overly restrictive and expensive TV channels, if we try to cage them into pricey pay-per-view pens for internationals, if we abuse their mobile phone numbers by blasting them with unwanted messages, if we overcharge for tickets, if we steal every opportunity to milk the audience without giving anything back we are in danger of turning football into an over-bred, steroid driven monster of a game that can only function when the veins on its muscle-bound body are pumped and swollen with cash. It’ll be ugly; it will get an audience of sorts but it won’t be football as we know it.
TV broadcasters beware. The fans will be the final arbiters of what works in football. They will find their game and they will choose to watch it where it best suits them to do so. And as they move, so the caravan of sponsors will follow.
According to FIFA, football is now estimated to be played, watched and generally enjoyed by 3.2 billion people globally. By any measure its following is huge and, naturally, the game provides an almost irresistible pull for advertisers and marketers since they are paid to follow the crowd. It’s a perfect sponsorship opportunity.
Almost half of the world population has now been hooked on the heroin of soccer. And where there’s addiction there’s an opportunity to make money – obscene amounts of it. Business loves football and consequently the business of football has become titanic. But are the fans and game being overlooked in this vortex of deals, transactions and commercial expansion and what does this mean for sponsorship on TV?
Like the City of London, English football is at the forefront of globalisation. There appears to be a virtuous circle: it's here that cash flows most freely; talent follows the money; so from Milan to Yucatan, televisions are tuning in to our best games, guaranteeing yet more riches.
But not everyone approves. While most season-ticket holders welcome their teams' expensively purchased newcomers and dream of glory, gainsayers are saddened by the arrival of funny money - roubles, dollars, euros, bahts and kroner - which, they claim, will kill the game's community roots.
Last year, the Premier League paid out a record-breaking £531m on transfer fees, about half of which went abroad. Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, fears that foreign imports damage England's international prospects, because they squeeze out domestic talent. You can see his point, but do we care? I mean really care? How many fans would sell their 20-goals-a-season African striker in order for a kid from the local sink estate to see his name on the team-sheet? Others fret that top-flight football's ruthless commercialisation, combined with saturation media coverage, will destroy supporters' appetite for going to matches. But there has been little sign of that either. Yet.
Football fans are club junkies - very little will stop them getting their fix. But they know when they’re being ripped off. Indeed, the hairline cracks of broadcaster greed are beginning to show and it would seem that the limits of affordability are being reached. As I write three Scottish Premier League clubs are on the brink of administration and Setanta are struggling to find the cash to pay the £3 million they owe them and the £30 million they owe the English Premier league. They simply don’t have enough subscribers to make their ambitions pay.
Television audiences are definitely not what they were. The FA Cup Final this year achieved a TV audience of around 5 million compared to previous year’s audiences on the BBC which regularly pulled in excess of 10 million. The Setanta Sports (despite the return of Saint and Greavsie) and ITV broadcasts didn’t do anything for the appeal of the match even though Setanta pluckily made it free to air.
And the governing bodies still have the chutzpah to be upping the ante in the sponsor market. Although it’s early days, the FA is reportedly looking to secure £10 million for the FA Cup when it comes up for renewal in a year’s time which looks decidedly expensive for a sponsorship that was regarded as overpriced four years ago.
It would appear that businesses associated with football – the NGBs, the broadcasters, advertisers and sponsors - are beginning to lose sight of the needs of football. Moreover, if they and the clubs continue to short change the fans then the whole house of cards is likely to be blown apart by the winds of recession and stimulate utter rebellion in the serried ranks of supporters.
For sponsors, the fans are the ultimate objective. It is they who need to be nurtured, connected with and engaged. Everything else in football is a proxy; pay-TV, web sites, the club TV are all a means to an end. If we lose sight of the fans we lose sight of the goal. And if the fans walk so will the sponsors. Football will survive but the parasitic businesses that depend upon it will suffer.
If we try to take football away from the fans and force them to watch their club matches via overly restrictive and expensive TV channels, if we try to cage them into pricey pay-per-view pens for internationals, if we abuse their mobile phone numbers by blasting them with unwanted messages, if we overcharge for tickets, if we steal every opportunity to milk the audience without giving anything back we are in danger of turning football into an over-bred, steroid driven monster of a game that can only function when the veins on its muscle-bound body are pumped and swollen with cash. It’ll be ugly; it will get an audience of sorts but it won’t be football as we know it.
TV broadcasters beware. The fans will be the final arbiters of what works in football. They will find their game and they will choose to watch it where it best suits them to do so. And as they move, so the caravan of sponsors will follow.
Decree Absolute
Virgin Radio is about to change its name. If you’re a listener then you’ll have heard the numbingly endless trails announcing the fact. By the end of September, TIML (part of The Times of India Group) should have completely eradicated a slice of 15 years of broadcasting history. The station’s divorce from Virgin will be Absolute. But Absolute what?
And do we really care? I’m pretty sure 5 million listeners don’t tune in just so they can tell their friends that they’re part of Richard Branson’s global brand franchise. Radio is an individual thing. It’s involving and it’s personal. We listen to presenters and content not radio stations. So it comes as very little surprise then that TIML didn’t want to pay another £8 million (on top of the £53 million for the station) for a name that is, in the world of wireless at least, a little bit tired. It’s been through too many hands and had too many personality changes to stand for anything memorable - the jocks, the listeners and the relationship that exists between them are really all that matter.
The path to rebranding enlightenment is strewn with casualties. In 2002, the vogue for oblique but unsuccessful company names seemed to have reached its zenith. The consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, perhaps in the vain hope of becoming another brand phenomenon like ‘Orange’, renamed itself Monday. The intention was to denote fresh thinking and new beginnings and not the unwelcome start of the working week. After a few long weeks of ridicule, the company was bought by IBM Global Services, which swiftly dropped the £75m (ouch!) rebranding.
In the same year – and this is surely the best case-study on how not to rebrand - The Post Office rustled up the catchy alias ‘Consignia’ in preparation for deregulation. However, failure to communicate the rationale for change to its stakeholders combined with poor performance led to a national outcry. It was, unsurprisingly, rebranded as the Royal Mail Group a few months later.
People just don’t like being sucked unwillingly into someone else’s conceit - especially when it concerns a well-loved institution like the Post Office. Moreover, surprise announcements never go down well. A loud unannounced rebranding bang is a shock that stimulates the snap reflexes of closed eyes, dropped heads, fights or flight – understandable reactions designed to protect, defend and prevent change but none of them conducive to communication.
Kellogg’s found this out the hard way when they attempted to re-christen the UK’s beloved Coco Pops as Choco Krispies in line with their other European markets. Within weeks 92% of voters in a telephone poll voted to ditch the new name and Coco Pops was back on the shelves before the milk had even turned chocolatey.
In Britain, at least, it seems consumers won’t be told what to do, think, believe or say. It’s amazing therefore that the German energy behemoth E.On managed to acquire Powergen, get rid of the name, dump some pretty good rugby investments and slip almost unnoticed into Britain and become part of our vernacular within the space of 2 years.
Back in 2006, regulations and red tape prevented the brand campaign from coming on line as quickly as had been hoped. But the marketing team also had another problem. The sponsorship marketing team had been offered a sponsorship opportunity that was a perfect fit and importantly was available – The FA Cup.
Despite having no ad campaign with which to build a brand platform – the bedrock to support the pillars of a sponsorship campaign - the deal went ahead and E.On was introduced softly into every corner of the nation alongside the country’s favourite sport – England’s greatest football tournament was sponsored by a brand that no one, in this country at least, had ever heard of. At every level of the game and throughout all media, the defeats and victories of the early rounds permeated just about every community and pub conversation. E.On had begun, via sponsorship, to establish many of its brand values in the minds of the public - values that would normally struggle to be conveyed with any real credibility by insistent advertising promises and messages.
Broadcast, press and tremendously creative activation did most of the heavy lifting. This campaign, while driven off air cascaded naturally throughout editorial without any need to take ownership of programmes or presenters. The inherent value of the news and stories generated by the sponsorship and the twists and turns within it gave (and continues to give) E.On the momentum to ensure that its name and values are communicated using a myriad of media and social networks they have not had to pay for.
Sponsorship is not a dark art; it’s common sense marketing that integrates a brand into the fabric, conversations and lives of special interest groups and communities. Importantly it builds trust and encourages them to believe. Actions always speak louder than words.
So Virgin Radio can tell me till they’re red in the face that their station is changing its name but if they were to do something that made me believe they stood for something; that they were worth changing my listening habits for I might be more inclined to believe that this was anything other than just a fresh lick of paint. Plus ça change...
And do we really care? I’m pretty sure 5 million listeners don’t tune in just so they can tell their friends that they’re part of Richard Branson’s global brand franchise. Radio is an individual thing. It’s involving and it’s personal. We listen to presenters and content not radio stations. So it comes as very little surprise then that TIML didn’t want to pay another £8 million (on top of the £53 million for the station) for a name that is, in the world of wireless at least, a little bit tired. It’s been through too many hands and had too many personality changes to stand for anything memorable - the jocks, the listeners and the relationship that exists between them are really all that matter.
The path to rebranding enlightenment is strewn with casualties. In 2002, the vogue for oblique but unsuccessful company names seemed to have reached its zenith. The consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, perhaps in the vain hope of becoming another brand phenomenon like ‘Orange’, renamed itself Monday. The intention was to denote fresh thinking and new beginnings and not the unwelcome start of the working week. After a few long weeks of ridicule, the company was bought by IBM Global Services, which swiftly dropped the £75m (ouch!) rebranding.
In the same year – and this is surely the best case-study on how not to rebrand - The Post Office rustled up the catchy alias ‘Consignia’ in preparation for deregulation. However, failure to communicate the rationale for change to its stakeholders combined with poor performance led to a national outcry. It was, unsurprisingly, rebranded as the Royal Mail Group a few months later.
People just don’t like being sucked unwillingly into someone else’s conceit - especially when it concerns a well-loved institution like the Post Office. Moreover, surprise announcements never go down well. A loud unannounced rebranding bang is a shock that stimulates the snap reflexes of closed eyes, dropped heads, fights or flight – understandable reactions designed to protect, defend and prevent change but none of them conducive to communication.
Kellogg’s found this out the hard way when they attempted to re-christen the UK’s beloved Coco Pops as Choco Krispies in line with their other European markets. Within weeks 92% of voters in a telephone poll voted to ditch the new name and Coco Pops was back on the shelves before the milk had even turned chocolatey.
In Britain, at least, it seems consumers won’t be told what to do, think, believe or say. It’s amazing therefore that the German energy behemoth E.On managed to acquire Powergen, get rid of the name, dump some pretty good rugby investments and slip almost unnoticed into Britain and become part of our vernacular within the space of 2 years.
Back in 2006, regulations and red tape prevented the brand campaign from coming on line as quickly as had been hoped. But the marketing team also had another problem. The sponsorship marketing team had been offered a sponsorship opportunity that was a perfect fit and importantly was available – The FA Cup.
Despite having no ad campaign with which to build a brand platform – the bedrock to support the pillars of a sponsorship campaign - the deal went ahead and E.On was introduced softly into every corner of the nation alongside the country’s favourite sport – England’s greatest football tournament was sponsored by a brand that no one, in this country at least, had ever heard of. At every level of the game and throughout all media, the defeats and victories of the early rounds permeated just about every community and pub conversation. E.On had begun, via sponsorship, to establish many of its brand values in the minds of the public - values that would normally struggle to be conveyed with any real credibility by insistent advertising promises and messages.
Broadcast, press and tremendously creative activation did most of the heavy lifting. This campaign, while driven off air cascaded naturally throughout editorial without any need to take ownership of programmes or presenters. The inherent value of the news and stories generated by the sponsorship and the twists and turns within it gave (and continues to give) E.On the momentum to ensure that its name and values are communicated using a myriad of media and social networks they have not had to pay for.
Sponsorship is not a dark art; it’s common sense marketing that integrates a brand into the fabric, conversations and lives of special interest groups and communities. Importantly it builds trust and encourages them to believe. Actions always speak louder than words.
So Virgin Radio can tell me till they’re red in the face that their station is changing its name but if they were to do something that made me believe they stood for something; that they were worth changing my listening habits for I might be more inclined to believe that this was anything other than just a fresh lick of paint. Plus ça change...
Monday 30 March 2009
QM blog is born!
An auspicious day as the QM blog is born. This is where you will find our thoughts and insight on all manner of topical subjects and where you can keep up to date with Quick McMorran Ltd.
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