Monitoring Your Sponsorship Activities – Damned Lies, And Statistics

The second person to speak at the sponsorship conference was Geoff Mayhew, Publicity Manager of Cornhill Insurance. In 1977 Cornhill conducted a survey that asked members of the public to name all the insurance companies they could think of. Unfortunately for Cornhill they didn’t come out of it very well. Less than 2% of the 2000 people surveyed by NOP mentioned Cornhill.

The reasons for Cornhill’s low awareness were, at the time Cornhill was a broker-orientated company which had little direct exposure to the public and unlike chocolate bars or soap powders, insurance is an infrequent purchase and the public often saw it as necessary evil which they had very little interest in.

Along with the fact that a number of various insurance companies were failing in the early 70’s, people were reluctant to insure with a company they had never heard of. Cornhill were in the process of expanding and needed to become more better known. Test cricket at the time was under siege from Kerry Packer who was leading top cricket stars from around the world were leaving their contracts to join his world cricket league. Cricket was in need of financial backing as it could not afford to compete with Kerry Packer. A deal was reached within 48 hours and thus the Cornhill Insurance Test Series was born.

Cornhill then set about monitoring the affect of their sponsorship. Cornhill analysed the press coverage of test series and decided that the easiest way was to simply monitor the number of times the company name was mentioned within an article reporting on the sport or event that was sponsored, also whenever a photograph appeared with the article the stumps, which carry Cornhill’s name, were always visible. Television coverage was also helpful with Cornhill’s name appearing in varied places around the cricket ground including the score board.

Another survey was carried out and this time awareness of Cornhill was up from 2% to 24% making it one of the best known insurance companies in the UK. There was a more detailed survey carried out prompting the public as to who the sponsor of test matches were and how big a company Cornhill was. The research company also set about trying to evaluate television coverage of a sponsored event in advertising terms. It took the number of time Cornhill’s name was clearly visible, visibility had to last at least one second to count. This was then related to the audience during individual time segments throughout the day as well as the location of commercial air-time within the same time period.

Geoff concluded by saying, “Has Cornhill been able to evaluate the amount of extra business that has come through the door since it started sponsoring cricket?”

His conclusions were that it created significant core brand awareness across a wide target audience, created a favourable climate in which to do business and it removes some of the barriers that might exist and which can create resistance to the marketing of the brand.