Sponsorship: Working hard & playing hard

Jessica Hallsworth, senior research executive at GfK, on the value of event sponsorship…

GfK NOP Media is the research sponsor of the Media Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival in August and we are all quite frankly looking forward to it.

A lot of hard work goes into these events but they are a break from the normal routine tasks. The Festival promises to be a fun event following a particularly challenging period for media in general. Events like these are not just about sharing information and debating the future as well as showcasing the best of the TV industry, they are also about networking, learning the tricks of the trade and showing a strong brand presence. This article delves into the relative merits of sponsorship and the value of participating in events such as these.

At the beginning of the recession, the main conversations centred around the importance of maintaining advertising budgets in order to keep ahead of the game. To a certain extent this was true but the most crucial target became staying on the map and not disappearing completely. Marketing needed to be effective to keep a brand’s head above water but it couldn’t take money off the bottom line. Sponsorships and associations during this time may, in some cases, have been a cheaper alternative and in others an unnecessarily expensive or risky option.

The risk is that there are at least two brands involved in a sponsorship, with the service (such as a TV programme or event) being at the forefront. In advertising, we saw how quickly brands publicly disassociated themselves from the News of the World scandal and a certain incident on ‘that’ reality TV programme saw a mobile phone sales company running for the hills in case the negative press against the TV show rubbed off on the brand sponsoring it.

Microsoft also pulled their sponsorship of Family Guy claiming ‘the show’s offensive content did not fit with the company’s brand’. In the case of Big Brother there is evidence to suggest the withdrawal of the sponsorship was a product of its own success. The strong positive image and benefits for Carphone Warehouse (as a sponsor) from such an association in the programme’s heyday meant that when the negative press came out the company thought they would be inextricably linked to the new more offensive image.

Virgin Media clearly didn’t believe this though and promptly stepped in with a new sponsorship deal for Big Brother. Carphone Warehouse then went on to sponsor The X Factor instead. Microsoft on the other hand had been sold purely on the audience Family Guy offered; young, modern, edgy males, which admittedly is a very attractive audience to reach. It is just a shame Microsoft did not realise how edgy before the story hit the news.

However, we believe any association with the Festival can only be positive. In theory it is very unlikely that there are going to be any PR disasters among the very people who contribute to the PR machine. People are in Edinburgh to have a unique experience… in a professional manner: your work colleagues after all will either be there or will hear about it. The hard work has already been put in to make the event informative, enjoyable and with high quality contributors, which are attributes we value.

Thinkbox’s TV sponsorship research shows the value of positive associations and how a brand and programme become more aligned in terms of their qualities. Their example was of Bombardier and Al Murray’s Happy Hour, where the sponsorship resulted in viewers believing the brand of premium bitter to be ‘funny’, ‘light-hearted’ and ‘friendly’, which is in stark contrast to what a non-beer drinking, non-viewer such as myself would be describing a bitter called Bombardier as.

The sponsorship, of course, has to be intuitive for these attributes to become apparent. It is unlikely that Rimmel London would work as a sponsorship for Top Gear but a media research company sponsoring a media event is as close as you get to a beer sponsoring a programme based in a pub. If a sponsorship is well executed it will be widely noticed and the rewards will become apparent.

In a recent GfK NOP Media survey, we asked people if they were affected by sponsorships at all and 42% claimed they were. Of those 69% said the sponsorship had made them aware of the brand, which is an incredibly important consideration for relatively new or lesser known brands.

There is also the advantage that the TV Festival is self-contained to those who work in the TV industry and its media partners. It provides a localised solution to the ‘one size fits no one’ mass marketing approach. The two brands (in this case GfK NOP Media and the Media Guardian) are similar in their target audience and the sponsorship reduces wastage. Admittedly on the other side there are quite a few others we still wish to reach (print and online are noticeable omissions) but as the readers of this article realise media is not fragmented and the budget holders will certainly be interested in how our name filters across different media types through any (positive) notoriety we achieve with the sponsorship.