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| Index on sponsorship |
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| Sunday, 25 July 2004 | |
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ICT companies are now 'big hitters' in the field of sports sponsorship.
So where's the 'bang for the buck'? And where's the 'boost for the
brand'? And what happens when you lose
?
Just what drives large companies to spend millions or billions to plaster their logos across sportsmen/women or the cars/bikes/horses/boats upon which they achieve their stardom or infamy? Here's a list of five possible explanations to be getting on with: corporate vanity: typically C-level or above decisions and hospitality for friends, clients and the press (nothing wrong with that, click here to send invitations to me, which might be accepted in the interests of research); community policy: often the justification for sponsorship of what are dubbed 'minority' sports, which often have more active participants than professional, 'majority' sports, but which to do not command TV audiences; brand identity: sit and RAID the fact that ICT companies have overtaken tobacco companies as sponsors in high-profile (and big budget) sports such as Formula One; national identity: 'flag' carriers, such as Europe's ex-monopoly PTTs, enjoy any association with the teams representing their home nations or the most likely winners in any national league in any major sport; technology affiliation: companies queue up to provide broadcast services or other technology connections to major events, such as the Olympic Games, and to teams in events ranging from motor-racing to cycling. Stub it out The demise of tobacco sponsorship (based on the somewhat simplistic idea that it was not good to promote sport via the advertising of a product that might kill you or otherwise inhibit your ability to perform sporting acts) has created a vacuum into which tech companies, along with those from the financial services and alcoholic beverages sectors, have been sucked (only the latter, one assumes, through a straw). For those of us who do not live our lives along the tramlines or the tribal boundaries of sport, or at least not those of all sports, it is quite possible to see titanic clashes of the genre not in terms of the teams at play but instead according to the brands in combat. A game of English football between, say, Arsenal and Manchester United might be the 'game of the season', but to the disinterested it's O2 vs. Vodafone a classic duel between the big names of the mobile telecom soccer sponsorship elite. You can have any colour, so long as it's There are all sorts of funny things that happen when brand sponsorships are morphed onto the existing brand identity of a sporting team. Global mobile operator Vodafone likes things (sorry, teams) that are red hence its gravitation towards Manchester United (football) and Ferrari (motor racing). Its rival, T-Mobile, likes things (sorry, teams) that are pink. If they are not pink they may have to change to pink in order to attract T-Mobile's sponsorship. In many sports such as those played by the more 'macho men' pink ain't too hot. Try telling that to T-Mobile when it comes waving its euros. There are exceptions to this chromatic rule: last year, Budweiser entered Formula One only upon agreeing to change its 'red' logo to a 'blue' logo in order to match the livery of its chosen BMW-Williams cars (although sponsoring drivers who go faster than most of as a way of promoting a beer product may seem a bit strange). In general, when a would-be sponsor wants the 'gig' badly enough, they will compromise. Relegation woes Of the five justifications for sponsorship listed earlier, the first two are common enough but the last three are where the real business usually happens. There may be a degree of selfishness or sincerity when a CEO proclaims "I've always said that when I run a major company I want an executive box at the Bernebau" (and the boss may be a true fan) or "I won't forget the little people in the synchronised swimming team back home." But the big bucks are around promoting the brand, promoting national identity and promoting capability and gaining maximum national or worldwide media exposure along the way. All of which makes some sponsorship decisions hard to fathom.Here are five instances of very potential pitfalls: choosing to sponsor one team engaged in a century-long contest with a cross-city rival (Manchester, Madrid, Milan, etc in football) instantly alienates up to half of that city's population; sponsoring a dominant team, which often invokes the 'mild dislike' of the fans of other teams, alienates just about everybody. Think of the Dallas Cowboys which is at once 'America's favourite football team' and 'America's least favourite football team' (although the Americans have kept team sponsorship at arm's length in most professional sports, relying on civic sponsorship and broadcasting rights instead); high-profile sport today seems to invite scandal (lots of sex, lots of drugs and a shortage of rock 'n' roll as far as this observer can tell). Sponsors are often the first to react to such scandals; high-profile sport (including team sports) also cultivates individual personalities, for whom entire 'damage limitation' departments are established in case they run off the rails set out in the name of corprorate image-making; you can end up sponsoring a person or a team who are just not good enough (or, in the fans' vernacular, are "rubbish"). Orange disorder The latter is fun because it brings us to the Arrows Formula One racing team, sponsored for a while by Orange (beginning before its acquisition by France Telecom, and lasting for a while after the takeover). Orange/Arrows were good value from a sponsorship point of view, because each time their cars slid off the track (which they did with tedious regularity, often a few days before the start of the race), the cameras would focus on the static car in the gravel trap for up to 20 seconds. Global TV audience upwards of 500mn. Go figure what that might have been worth. Compared to the 'blink and you'd miss it' regularity with which Vodafone (sorry!, Ferrari) whizz around the track, this was prime-time gold- (or 'Orange-') dust. In case you think this a cynical take on F1's priorities, one owner has complained this season that changes to qualifying procedures (don't ask me what has changed: you turn on the ignition and go 'whoosh!', I thought) are reducing TV exposure for the smaller teams. Whereas Vodafone (sorry!, Ferrari) gets all that exposure after each race when the handsome and exuberant German guy is splashing the TV camera's lens with champagne (sorry, I am writing this from a pre-prepared script called 'Schumacher.doc'), failure may be the surest means of success as far as the smaller teams and their sponsors are concerned. The way in which F1 sponsorship is structured also gives rise to some anomalies. When prominent IT consultants became involved, the sport nearly collapsed because nobody could design a car with eight driver's seats and no steering wheel. When the IT telemetry gangs got involved, all information sent from car to pit was promptly outlawed in FIA regulations. One of these statements is true. Yellow disorder If 'schumacher.doc' makes for boring reading and reportage, then 'armstrong.doc' is possibly worse. Cyclist Lance Armstrong has just won his sixth Tour de France, eclipsing the other 'five-time' legends Antequil, Hinault, Merckx and Indurain. His achievement takes its place at the top end of cycling and sporting history. Yet, despite some attempts to woo native French crowds at this fabulous spectacle, Armstrong is often disliked in France. It may be a throwback to the time at which the Americans opted for 'freedom fries' and spoke of the French as 'cheese-eating surrender monkeys', but such language cannot be blamed on Armstrong who, although a Texan, is a fluent French-speaker and a self-avowed Francophile. France's ambivalence towards the champion of their annual tour also dates back to well before the autumn of 2001. Armstrong is just a driven (odd terminology for a cyclist) sportsman and thus maybe not always the warmest when exposed to the full glare of publicity. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss Armstrong's heroic personal battle with cancer from which he has recovered to the point of wearing a sixth Yellow Jersey. You want a sporting hero a sporting legend and he is it. The rest, even a sponsor might acknowledge, is flummery. So, in the context of this (and of article), who are his sponsors? Disappointingly for the high-tech age, it's US Postal (maybe that explains it). Of the ICT teams involved, T-Mobile (that's right, in pink) have captured the team prize while CSC have clung onto third place in the team competition. Other telecom teams such as Euskatel (from the Basque country) are further down the ladder after a horrendous tour. (For a report on how they fared, click here). But here's a queer thing about sponsorship. If Lance Armstrong returns to the Tour de France next year in search of an unprecedented seventh title, it seems that his team will race under the colours of the 'Discovery Channel'. This is a good example of how sponsors can influence sport, as it seems certain that Armstrong's contuinued participation (which had been in doubt; he's 32) in an event where he has almost nothing left to prove was probably both a carrot and a condition for attracting the new sponsors. Over the coming months, our Index on Sponsorship will will look at the links between sports and ICT sponsorship, attempting to strike the right balance between the business aspects and the fun. Not unlike modern-day sports themselves, for that matter Jim Chalmers |
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