Commentary

Most Sponsorships Are A Huge Waste Of Money

I have a fair bit of sponsorship marketing and activation experience – and I always tried to understand how a sponsorship contributed to the overall marketing goals of a brand.

My quest was informed by the late Chuck Fruit from The Coca-Cola Company, who was an influential mentor in my life, and who shared the “buy what you need and use what you buy” mantra as a guiding principle for sponsorship deals. I love this mantra for its elegant simplicity. If you truly live by it, you can’t really go wrong with partnering with sports or entertainment companies.

You do need some strong principles to manage the process to establish what you need, why you need it, and how the deal will be used to support your marketing goals. This is why “real” measurement is so important. Where “likes” and “impressions” are digital media’s empty calories with limited value, so are “on-air visibility” or “audience size” for sponsorship deals. All of this came to me as I read about several sponsorship deals announced over the last week or so.

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Let me start off by saying I have zero involvement or data points regarding the examples below. But I could not help thinking wearily about Chuck Fruit’s principle when I read about the plethora of brands that signed up to be “official partner” of the launch of the new “Beetlejuice" movie. How do you think the CarMax marketing department felt when they realized they had to share their asset with insurance company Progressive, Secret deodorant, Denny’s Restaurants, cosmetics tie-ins with Nyx and Sally Hansen -- and Fanta launching a new Beetlejuice-inspired flavor?

It was no doubt a great deal for Warner Bros., who got huge movie launch exposure through the various commercials and other promotional activity from all the contracted brands. And given the box office success, the Warner strategy certainly worked.” Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” surpassed the original film's total earnings in just a few weeks. To date, it is one of the biggest box office hits of 2024.

But can Progressive measure the impact  of its investment? Can CarMax trace dealership footfall or sales back to their movie tie-in? Did people use more Secret than Sure deodorant?

I know, these questions are never easily answered, no matter how good the marketing measurement is. But the questions are valid, given the no doubt significant investment from each of the marketers. Is slapping a Beetlejuice partnership announcement on your TV commercial, or even creating a whole Beetlejuice commercial (CarMax, Progressive), a good example of “Use what you buy” -- or an expensive vanity project? How many of Denny’s patrons can correctly identify the  partnership, and convey how that positively impacted their view of Denny’s Restaurants?

And don’t even get me started on the news that Norwegian Cruise Line is now the official partner of the NHL. Per the MediaPost article, the partnership provides “NCL with exclusive marketing rights and designations that will connect the NCL brand with the NHL and its fans through the NHL’s marketing, digital, and social media channels.” That sounds a lot like the kind of empty media calories I referenced above.

If you are in the market for a sponsorship plan of any kind, please apply Chuck Fruit’s mantra, and build measurement of meaningful metrics from the beginning.

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