Trends in Sponsorship 2009 – 2010

Now is an important time for everyone involved in the sponsorship industry to take a big step back and reevaluate. Agencies, properties and sponsors all have ample opportunity to evaluate, reflect and prepare to emerge as better practitioners of our craft.

A recent industry event I attended helped me crystallize some ideas that had been forming on my side. I’ll share an initial five trends today and follow-up later in the week with the remaining ones:


1. A Return to Fundamentals – time to step back and remember why sponsorship grew so large, so fast:
• The ability to draw and deliver an audience with deep affinity and personal connection to a sport or property, allowing brands to meet customer needs at the emotional intersection point.
• Broad, deep and unique marketing assets, affording brands ample room for creative integration opportunities

2. Accountable Sponsorship Deals – measurement, metrics and ROI have been on countless agendas among sponsorship professionals. For too long, it has been given only lip service by many in this space; preferring to wait for black box or silver bullet solutions.

Going forward, anyone pursuing sponsorship must include a pragmatic, realistic and doable measurement plan, with clear and tangible links to business objectives. This will put pressure on agencies and properties to provide structure and quantitative results input. It will also require brands to do the hard work of collecting and organizing the data. And then socializing it with all and anybody to ensure that the contribution to the business of sponsorship is well understood.

3. Shrinking of the Industry – let’s be honest, there are far too many college bowl games, conference tournaments, tour stops and second tier sports out there. As advertisers and sponsors seek quality, there will be retrenchment. There will be more casualties: leagues and teams may fold, made for TV events will go away, agencies consolidate, etc. While painful and unfortunate, the industry will emerge stronger as free market economic forces prevail.

4. Revamping of Deal Structures - Sponsors will push for shorter term deals, comprised of only the assets they value and can utilize for their brand. There will pressure on properties to disaggregate the ‘packages’ they have been accustomed to selling. Properties may look to get agreement on a series of 1 year deals as opposed to a multi-year agreement. Properties will also build in specific activation programs and budgets to ensure that the assets are used as planned. Properties must also be prepared for ‘performance based’ deals, where they have some skin in the game, as well as the sponsor.

5. Properties as Problem Solvers – It will no longer be acceptable to sell a deal and then move on. Properties that want to differentiate themselves and gain long term relationships will be forced to play a more important role with sponsor brands and agencies in creating and executing activation plans.


I will post the remaining trends I foresee in a few days. In the meanwhile, your insights and comments are invited.