Something that I'm particularly interested in is the high end sponsorship deals, and how these are put together. Today rights holders have to be innovative in order to meet the demands of a very competitive industry, clearly there are a limited number of brands that have the budgets required to engage in these agreements. What creative rights holders are looking at is innovative ways in which they can incorporate the services of the sponsor into the day-to-day activity of the sports property. A brilliant example of this is SAP with the German National Team:
SAP provided the German team with its software 'Hana', an in-memory database architecture - which essentially develops stats from football performance based on key performance indicators. To give you an idea of the power of the software the system captured 5,000 data points per second. This data is then used as a metric for performance, with the German team between 2010 and 2014 the average ball possession went down from 3.4 seconds to 1.1. All very impressive, but more importantly from a sponsorship perspective, an unbelievable case study for SAP - their software played a direct role in Germany winning the World Cup. The headline in the Telegraph... 'Germany's World Cup tactics: shaped by data'. Other publications hailed SAP technology as a secret weapon.
Despite this example I still think that the sports industry as a whole can be more creative when it comes to integration, I believe that the benchmark for that was set by the Decode Jay-Z with Bing. Before I go on, I need to state that the person who came up with this is a genius.
The goal was to increase Microsoft's relevance with the 'Y' generation and engage more consumers with Bing's new mapping software. They looked to hip-hop artist Jay-Z because he already had the desired audience, the 'Y' generation who are digitally savvy, consuming and sharing content online. The campaign aimed to generate a buzz around the new Jay-Z autobiography by taking pages out of the book into the real world locations and in turn create an online experience using social media technology. The concept was that for every day for a month a page of Jay-Z's book would appear in a place relating to what the page was talking about. The pages were printed on billboards, basketball nets, burger wrappers, cars and even the bottom of swimming pools. Fans were tasked with finding each of the pages through Bing maps and clues were posted online. Microsoft created a free online tool for fans to find and store each book page location online - collecting pages before the book was even released.
The result? One month. 11.7% increase in visits to Bing, 1.1 billion global impressions, Jay-Z's book in the best sellers list for 19 weeks.
To be honest, I can't do it justice - watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNic4wf8AYg
There's some way to go for sports sponsorship to produce something this innovative, but it seems clear to me it's crucial that a brands service or product is central to any sponsorship agreement.
JL
