Canadian Sponsorship Forum – Day One
It is a real pleasure to be attending the annual Canadian Sponsorship Forum, this year being held in Montreal in conjunction with the Just For Laughs Festival.
Mark Harrison and the team at Trojan One do an incredible job with the Forum each year, and it only gets better. Forty nine speakers and 290 delegates are here in Montreal, this event has become Canada’s pre-eminent gathering for sponsorship professionals annually.
My own presentation session, A Passion for Measurement: Optimizing Sponsorship ROI , wound up being standing room only. After a late start due to technical issues, my audience was very gracious as I shared my nerdy love of metrics.
The last session of the day was led by Don Mayo from research and analytics firm IMI International. Don reviewed results and insights from consumer research that IMI has just conducted in several G8 countries that was compelling, if not grounding.
Facebook’s user numbers hit threshold three years ago and in fact, dropped in 2011. Five percent of Twitter users are producing 50% of all tweets. QR code acceptance is at 13%, up just 2% over the last two years. Mobile device use by shoppers in making shopping decisions while in-store has been flat over the last three years, also may be at threshold. Take away: digital, mobile and social media are all communications channels, none by themselves or in and of themselves are marketing strategies.
