TV Sponsorship Report
Since the beginning of the year a batch of new broadcast sponsorship deals have been finalised.
ITV and Diet Coke combined to bring the network the ‘Diet Coke Movie Premiere’, billed as the biggest ever single sponsorship deal. The latest addition to the field comes from BT, which is to sponsor the ten week run of Cilla Black’s ‘Suprise, Surprise’. The deal is thought to be worth around £750,000.
According to ITV, broadcast sponsorship is currently worth between £20-£25m, with this figure expected to rise to £50m over the next few years. The escalating interest amongst potential sponsors has led ITV to move from naming a selection of titles available for sponsorship to a broad based ‘you tell us what you want to sponsor, and we’ll tell you how much it costs’ approach – ITV has recently put its children’s programming up for sponsorship, although no deals have as yet been made.
Legislative Requirements
Legislation covering sponsorship on ITV allows sponsors an exclusive 15 seconds of full screen sound and vision credits at the beginning of the programme, 10 seconds at the end, with 5 seconds or more ‘break bumpers’ going into and out of the commercial break. All trailers can contain a sponsor credit.
During a recent sponsorship conference both Alan Chilton, Chairman of Sponsorship for ITV, and a spokesman for Courage Ltd expressed a desire to see the ITC’s restrictions on straplines on programmes and the use of creative credits amended, both seeing this restriction as hindering the medium’s progress. Although an update to the Code of Practice is currently in the pipeline, it is unclear as to whether any such amendment will be forthcoming.
Client Reaction
Companies which have made use of broadcast sponsorship would on the whole appear to have benefited from the medium although several, including Michael Reynolds, executive director of Courage, still displayed a mixed reaction to the medium. At the 5th National Sponsorship Conference held earlier this year he described broadcast sponsorship as ‘still being in its infancy, having experienced an initial honeymoon and now the test is on’.
Even with this scepticism there are still a number of companies willing to give the medium a try. New deals are plentiful; this week seeing the latest in sponsorship of TV detectives with the first of a new series of ‘Taggart’ carrying sponsorship from Strathearn Spring Water.
In addition, a number of network sponsors have recently renewed their deals, most notably Powergen’s £2.2m renewal of the weather bulletin. Programmes where sponsors have pulled out of their sponsorship deal also appear to have fared well, in terms of finding new sponsors, for example, Twix’s take-up of the Chart Show, which was dropped by Pepe.
Future Research
Over the summer, research should be available on Tetley’s sponsorship of ‘The Darling Buds of May’ and AEG’s sponsorship of LWT’s ‘Poirot’. At present the latest data refers back to Morse and Beamish, Barclaycard and Wish You Were Here?, Croft Port and Rumpole and Sega and football.
Although there has been a recent flurry to enter the realms of broadcast sponsorship, it still only represents a small proportion of the estimated £2.5bn value of the TV industry. Increased growth will undoubtably lead to greater specialisation amongst those that deal with it, with agencies establishing specialist sponsorship units. Many have already recognised sponsorship’s potential it would seem, with both BBH and Still Price Lintas recently stating their commitments to sponsorship as part of their marketing plans.