A Proud Moment
A few weeks ago I led a learning session for sponsorship marketers at the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada’s Fundamentals of Sponsorship course held in Toronto.
The SMCC’s Fundamentals of Sponsorship is a two-day course that provides new and seasoned sponsorship practitioners with intensive professional skills development in various aspects of the craft. In the section I taught, Optimizing a Sponsorship Portfolio for Business Success based on Desperado Marketing’s proprietary process Sponsorship Accelerate™, I covered ways and means for sponsors to get better business results.
As I was preparing for the session the first time (I taught on the same course in early 2011), I was struck by how far we had come since the days sponsorship marketing was a bit of a cowboy enterprise.
My first job in sponsorship was accidental. During university, I was working for a brewery as a summer beer rep when I was seconded to help support an international sporting event that had gone bankrupt within a few weeks of expecting to welcome athletes from around the world. My employer was a sponsor of the event. In order to save face, money and spirit, the Canadian federal government and the event’s sponsors quickly partnered to take over execution of the event. On the secondment, I reported in to an army lieutenant who became responsible for various logistics aspects of the multi-day event. I loved the job and I was hooked on sponsorship.
Years later in the early 1990s, during the time when we referred to ourselves as sports marketers and before we realized that arts and cause were sponsor-able as well, little regard was given to sponsorship value and sponsorship ROI was measured mostly by gut feel and by anecdote. Sponsorship marketing was new as a part of the marketing mix and digital marketing wasn’t so much as a bit or a byte yet. In the world then dominated by print, radio, OOH and television advertising, credibility for sponsorship was hard earned. I was young, and looked younger. I dressed like a banker to help deflect the image of a sponsorship marketer as all show and no go. Traditional media wasn’t especially measurable, but sponsorships were seen as passion driven pieces of ether that most understood as meaningful, but left few with much ability to explain why.
I grew up at the right time. I have been fortunate to move through my career as sponsorship marketing has become more sophisticated. I like to think that I have helped lead the way in advocating for and building the thinking around measurement, property valuation, research and activation planning. And at that session a few weeks back, I was proud to be able to stand up in front of a group of fellow sponsorship marketers, some dressed like bankers and some not, and speak to sponsorship as an established, measurable and valuable means of reaching consumers, very often with impressive results. The cowboy days are, thankfully, long past.
