• by Karl Greenberg , January 12, 2011

Sun Life Financial has been around for a long time, with all that 140 years of life imply (stability, reliability, not fly-by-night), but do people get that? The company has been putting that message out there both with advertising but also through association with complementary organizations that have also been around a long time. Like the Boston Celtics NBA team.

The Boston-based firm has just signed on as the first-ever presenting sponsor of Celtics.com. The deal also makes Sun Life an official team sponsor and it gives the brand a presence across Celtics properties.

The global firm, whose U.S. office is in Wellesley Hills, Mass., early last year also signed a deal with the Miami Dolphins that gave it naming-rights for the NFL team's home stadium, now called Sun Life Stadium. It also has a sponsorship association with Cirque Du Soleil.

The partnership with the Celtics puts the Sun Life name courtside, on in-game promotions and features, and on the Jumbotron. The deal also gives Sun Life Financial the key to the Boston Celtics Sports Authority Training Facility in Waltham, MA for both regional and executive meetings, and access to Boston Celtics team marks and logos in its own marketing and advertising campaigns.

Bill Webster, Sun Life Financial VP of brand strategy and the company's brand development leader, tells Marketing Daily that sponsoring Celtics.com provides the Sun Life brand with national and global reach because of the team's popularity.

"Our overall strategy for both TV and sponsorships is really to quickly and effectively establish the Sun Life name," he says. "Sponsorships provide a context for people and company: aligning yourself with premier venues helps you get recognition as a premiere provider of services. We want to avoid people thinking of Sun Life as new company. The Celtics are a storied and historic franchise; the same with the Dolphins."

Celtics.com will be "powered" by Sun Life Financial, giving it brand exposure throughout the site, including header positions on all Celtics.com pages. The company will be presenting sponsor of several interactive team content features as well.

According to Ted Dalton, VP of corporate partnerships and business development for the Celtics, the Web site has just been redesigned in a way that makes a video player function much more prominent. "We had had one on the home page; now we have a much larger video player on the home page and one on every page of the Web site." He tells Marketing Daily that viewing and downloads are three times higher in number year-over-year.

Among Sun Life's placement opportunities will be presenting sponsorship of "Celtics Minute," a daily, rich-media team update and preview. "They will also present the post-game wrap-up that we push out on Celtics.com," says Dalton.

Dalton says that making Celtics.com central to the sponsorship "really fit nicely with their objective with continuing to push the brand nationally and internationally. And as they have a big presence in Boston, it also fits their need and desire to be relevant here in the local and regional market place."

Dalton says, historically, the Los Angeles Lakers and Celtics are the most popular NBA teams in the U.S. And he says the team has 2.6 million Facebook fans -- third in number behind the Lakers and Yankees, and in the Top 10 internationally. The NBA team says Celtics.com averages more than 8.5 million page views and 1.5 million uniques per month, and 70 million page views per season.

The team has 80 or so corporate partners, according to Dalton, who wouldn't disclose financial terms but said the team is "in the top half" in terms of the size and scope of the deal. He says sponsors are a mix of local, national and global companies from Southwest Airlines, Comcast, Ford and Anheuser-Busch to regional and small Boston-based firms such as a Somerville, Mass.-based print and promotional company. "It runs the gamut."

Sun Life's messaging trumpeting the virtues of the firm as a stable provider of quality services began in the fall of 2009 when the economy was at its worst, notes Webster. "It was a time when people started to scrutinize their choices about financial services in any number of companies," he says adding that one message at that time was that the company had weathered the storm without a bailout.

The company, which does its own consumer research, may be tweaking that message, but it isn't changing it too much. "We knew that messaging was important and resonated with both advisors and consumers this year. The same messages are just as relevant now as then. People still feel an A+ credit rating and no bailout are among the most important things we can say. But we are going back in to talk about our size, that we are now the fifth largest insurer in North America."

Sun Life's marketing is directed both to consumers and to financial advisors and fund managers, since Sun Life does not sell direct, but through wholesale distribution. Webster says consumer marketing ultimately helps sell through. "We thought 'lets not just talk to advisors, let's think about what we can we do to make advisors' jobs easier.'"