Why Curiosity Matters For Sponsorship

Success in the sponsorship game hinges on a few factors.

You should have a basic knowledge of the sponsorable property (don’t let someone sell you fourth quarter rotational signage in an ice hockey game).

Like we see in the Progressive Insurance commercial, you should master the skill of opening a PDF document.

And in a non-virtual world, it probably doesn’t hurt to own a business suit that fits reasonably well.

But in the course of discussions with some valued colleagues yesterday, I identified another crucial, yet perhaps undervalued, quality that enhances sponsorship for brands, properties, media, and all others.

Curiosity.

While on a Zoom call with Chris Baylis of the Sponsorship Collective and Heather Clifford of the Vertical Challenge, I suggested that one thing I enjoyed about speaking with Chris was that he was curious. He always wants to know how to make things better and why something worked or didn’t. He then suggested the quality has merit in sponsorship seekers, because you need to desperately want to discover how to create a package that works superbly for a potential client.

I do a lot of interviewing in the course of my work, a task for which curiosity becomes a basic prerequisite. Those skills matter in sales, too (including selling sponsorships). You need to understand your customer’s businesses as deeply as possible to solve their problems for them.

In sponsorship, it wasn’t always that way. In my early days working for the Texas Rangers, I remember a sponsorship executive telling me that the customers who tended to sponsor the club were those who had executives who loved the team or the sport. He didn’t have to dig into audience data. He just had to find Rangers fans in a nice suit.

The process in media was a little more rigorous, but still not great by modern standards. In another of Tuesday’s conversations, Lauren Allison of MVP reminisced with me about the old measurements of TV viewership via Nielsen diaries. I recalled buying billboards in neighborhoods we knew hosted an oversampling of Nielsen families. As a TV station promotion director, I was trying to game the system.

Curious people like Chris and Lauren make it harder to unload sponsorships based on imprecise reasoning. They do valuations to enable inquisitive brands to determine the actual value of that baseball package they just bought that included a sign in the bullpen, title sponsorship of the manager’s radio show, and a dozen baseballs autographed by José Guzmán.

Curiosity comes in handy on the brand side, too, not just the sales side. You’ve got to think about all the ways your company can benefit from attributes associated with the property. Can your sales team use hospitality assets? Could sports content built around DEI help your Chief Diversity Offer in her mission? How can you use specific activations to microtarget important audience segments? Lauren and I discussed silos within companies. Silos are the enemies of curiosity. And of maximally effective sponsorships.

For sponsorships to grow as a part of marketing mixes, the industry has to continue to seek new ways to implement and measure them. While I didn’t get to actually speak with my friend Sophie Morris yesterday, a post on her LinkedIn page brought me to a recent survey by the European Sponsorship Association. Their work indicated that confidence in the industry is rising as we (hopefully) begin to emerge from the pandemic, and noted “a significant majority of those surveyed acknowledged that sponsorship needs to evolve.” You don’t evolve or innovate without the desire – indeed, the drive - to actively do so. Sophie and her partner at Millharbour Marketing, Manu Cendron, have mad curiosity skills and it shows in their research and sponsorship consulting work.

As a matter of fact, when I’m in London, Manu and I tend to be especially curious about pint glasses filled with different varieties of stout.

So curiosity matters in the planning and evaluation stages of sponsorships (and also at the pub, apparently). But it’s also at the heart of what makes sponsorship work, because a huge part of the job of sponsorship is to develop curiosity in the people most important to all of us in the industry: the audience. Whether it’s a logo on a press conference backdrop that drives someone to wonder what that brand is that they’ve never heard of or the video about DEI in sport that gets someone interested in the brand’s values regarding that subject, effective sponsorship makes fans want to explore and perhaps discover what’s at the bottom of that sales funnel. At that point, basic curiosity benefits the bottom line.

Thanks for reading this. I’d like to note that I would heartily recommend assuaging your own curiosity about all the people I namechecked in this article. They’re all really good at what they do and could make your sponsorship efforts better whether you work with a brand, property, media outlet, agency, or otherwise.

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

MintFarmFilms.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports 

Content Creators And AEs Running The Same Playbook

The Early Days of Football And Ad Sales

For the first four decades or so of American football, play selection had its limits. The introduction of the flying wedge in 1892, wherein a ballcarrier ran behind a massed wall of blockers, was the height of innovation. Then, in 1906, John Heisman finally convinced Walter Camp they needed to add the forward pass to the rules and everything changed.

Television ad sales and TV show production have behaved much the same way. For about the first four decades of the technology, the brute force proposition of four networks selling the only available video inventory dominated the game. Then, in the 1990s, the rapid growth of cable penetration and online options introduced the video equivalents of multiple sets, spread offenses, and jet sweeps. 

National TV reps used to come to work with a (relatively) simple job to do. They’d look at the last Nielsen book (or maybe a three-book average if they had an especially demanding buyer) and service a group of existing agency customers who wanted to match up their clients’ :30 second spots with the (relatively) simple demographic numbers in those perfect-bound manuals. Sometimes you’d add in a sales promotion or some opening and closing brought-to-you-bys. They competed in a (not relatively) small universe of networks, and while they did have to counter threats from outdoor, print, and radio advertising, TV had the hammer. They had the richest content (pictures PLUS sound!) and nobody could deliver audience numbers like they could.  

Content creators also had a (relatively)straightforward mandate. They needed to deliver 22-or 44-minute shows that could make the numbers Nielsen recorded large ones. Barring the occasional product placement or an actor on stage at the upfronts, that’s mostly how those who produced programming serviced sales reps.

Digital Spread Offenses 

Today, digital has gone all run-and-shoot on traditional ad models. Audience segmentation has become more fragmented, though that has also come with new, more targeted measurement tools. There are more networks, and they’re delivered on multiple devices. Advertisers even have their own channels, thanks to social media and websites. 

In addition, the consumer’s buyer journey has changed. A :30-second spot that used to drive people to a store where a clerk would complete (or foul up) the sale now pushes people to visit a website and/or a search engine to contemplate (and potentially execute) a purchase decision. 

So ad salespeople now face a world where their :30-second spots on linear television still have some value, but media buyers want to see more. They want more ways to speak to consumers than just one-off ads attached to content. Content creators have to help AEs deliver.

We still need to create compelling 22-minute shows, 2-hour films, or six-episode miniseries, because that’s still sellable. But we need to also think, “What else can we supply to help the network rep when she’s in that meeting with her client?” 

Content Creators As Team Players

Can we create some supplemental digital content to enable a deeper dive for the viewer and an opportunity for the advertiser to retarget the digital consumer that tuned in for the full piece? Can we make content available for an advertiser to use on their own channels? Can we offer directors and principals to participate in B-To-B functions? And what can we do to make sure viewers don’t want to skip what content we’re using to help the advertiser engage prospects? 

Producers can get sophisticated about truly helping network sales departments service their clients. How do clients’ prospects progress down a sales funnel? Much is made in the sales enablement world about having content to target (and retarget) consumers as they make their ways through their buyer journeys. If a network could supply buzz-worthy content (and video related to a network show should be a lot cooler than your standard testimonial vid or infographic), could such innovation cement a larger share of a media buy for your network partner? If so, then it might be worth some thought in planning a production. 

Football Analogies At Work

An advantage of having viewers who’ve signed up for, say, an SVOD account with you is that you’ll know more about them than the Mad Men boys knew about their mass-appeal audiences. And online services have the ability to serve content based on identifiable patterns - if they’ve got the right content to serve. It’s not too different from a middle linebacker who’s studied his opponent’s offensive tendencies out of certain formations and quickly processes that data to put himself in the right place to stuff the ballcarrier.

This can be fun for content creators. We got into this line of work because we love to tell stories, and here’s an opportunity to make even more of it, in innovative and efficient ways. The rise of subscription services who don’t show ads has helped drive cord-cutting. But ad-supported content isn’t going anywhere, because sellers of goods and services still have to communicate about what they do. Networks, including streaming ones like Tubi, Quibi, and Peacock, want to continue to be the ones to help them do it.

Ad-supported networks have to compete for eyeballs with ad-free services like Netflix. They also have to contend with Amazon Prime and Walmart’s Vudu, who have the ability to facilitate direct sales through their e-commerce platforms. Certainly content creators can make content for Amazon and Walmart, and they should be thinking about how to best drive sales there, too. But when we’re working for networks, we need to use every tool we can to help our partners succeed. That means getting in lockstep with the needs of their sales departments, kind of like quarterbacks do with receivers . . . or safeties do with cornerbacks . . . or holders do with kickers . . . or whatever football analogy works for you. 

Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

MintFarmFilms.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/mintfarmfilms/

RushOlson.com