The Three Challenges of Sponsorships

Sponsorships are ubiquitous and from the red carpet, to the baseball diamond, we see company logos splattered everywhere. At times it seems like nothing can be done without a sponsorship as traffic reports are brought to you by someone and just about every sports team has an official car dealership, mattress company or veterinarian. Clearly there is a lot of value locked into sponsorships, but nothing comes easy and sponsorships too have their challenges.

Challenge #1: Sponsorships — particularly digital ones — can be narrow in focus

Whether it is March Madness, Back to School or the Country Music Awards, sponsoring an event can be a very narrow focus. If you want to get in front of March Madness viewers you turn to sponsoring a homepage or maybe sponsoring some sort of content within a sports page. It is a solid and tried and true strategy but are you really getting all that you pay for? To start with there are numerous players in the sports media business so choosing any one guarantees you lose the others, also you don’t capture those people who might tune in but never go online to read about the big game. Ultimately you’re shooting for all the basketball fans but maybe just get a few. If only you could get all of them by sponsoring the event itself!

Challenge #2: Sponsorships are expensive

Just a few years ago Toyota spent almost $200M just on sports sponsorships alone. That accounted to everything from their cars in the NASCAR Circuit, and the naming rights for the Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center to being the official vehicle of the perennial Super Bowl contending New England Patriots. $200M is a huge investment. Sure you hear about Toyota anytime the Rockets play a home game and that is a big deal and you get all of the basketball fans we spoke of in Challenge #1 but those are some seriously deep pockets you need to have to make that sort of commitment. Which is probably why you see a lot of sponsorships just for one event instead of these giant months and years long commitments.

Challenge #3: Sponsorships can be short

Just recently Delta Air Lines became an official sponsor of the Masters Tournament in Augusta one of golf’s preeminent events. Estimates say that to become the official airline of the tournament Delta spent between $6 and $8M. The final round of the Masters captured almost 13M eyeballs too so surely Delta felt they got some value out of that, but at the same time the Masters is only four days long and once the PGA’s next tournament begins, no one is hearing about Delta from their $8M outlay anymore are they?

All in all sponsorships are worthwhile endeavors, but there could be a more efficient way of doing things. The below video introduces you to GumGum’s sponsorships. Watch and learn how we can widen your focus, get you better value and extend the life of your sponsorship.

Originally published at https://marketingblog.gumgum.com on May 15, 2018.