Sponsorship, like all other marketing mix tools, also faces powerful challenges in the face of the digital transformation in which we are immersed.
Because of the major changes we are experiencing in the way sports events are communicated and reported, sponsorship is perhaps at a difficult crossroads, as, unlike in the past, calculating its ROI (Return on Investment) has become an enormously complex task.
However, a good sponsorship strategy requires that it affects all strategic communication elements of the company, traditionally supported mostly as an alternative to conventional advertising..
I put my advertising on the shirt of a football team, a stadium or a racing car and more people will see me than if I put an advert in the press or on TV'. This was the basic reasoning behind the investment in a sponsorship asset. All this is no longer valid, as it is well known that both through print and conventional television It is not possible today to concentrate the massive visibility impacts that were achieved in the past.
Apparently, the emergence of digital media, as well as social networks, were going to give more reliable numbers thanks to technology, but the reality has become deceptive, never better said, as the fraud that accompanies all the data in this environment, due to artificial click generators, bots, fake followers, etc, etc, generates great confusion and scepticism regarding the real impact that our sponsorship is yielding.
And while this may make it seem that sponsorship is no longer as useful a tool as it was in the past, the reality is that well managed can be more effective than ever for a company to communicate with its target universe.
The digital change therefore definitively buries the formula of putting a logo on a medium and waiting to see audience figures, but advertisers, forced by this huge change of model in which we find ourselves, can find in sponsorship the ideal environment to achieve one of the magic words of this era: The '....'.Engagement'. Go to the 'heart' instead of going to the 'eyes'.
It is true that the technology available today allows you to reach your customers in digital advertising (at least those in the online environment) with an unbelievable precision, but it is also true that simplifying a lot, we are talking in this case of a tactical marketing, not strategic marketing.
In this sense, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, geolocation, holograms, augmented reality, virtual reality, etc. also allow sponsorship to be given an extension that was impossible to achieve in the past. This digital opportunity applied to the world of sponsorship is an open door to establish emotional connections with the target group to which the communication is addressed.
Just think of the interaction that can take place between traditional sports and e-sports, with tools such as virtual reality. The spectator is part of the experience, not just enjoying the experience as in the past, where the spectator's role was passive.
If in the past one of the attractions of sponsorship compared to conventional advertising was the possibility of offering unique experiences, experiences that money cannot buy, with technological advances these possibilities are no longer confined to the physical/off-line environment, but are now also available to the public. and they can be moved anywhere, anytime. thanks to smartphones and other electronic devices.
The big remaining challenge is the measurement of this impact.If it is already difficult to analyse monitoring data nowadays, what about the difficulty of evaluating a sponsorship by measuring the satisfaction of current customers and the degree of attraction of potential customers, the commitment of employees, whether investors or institutions look favourably on our company, the sympathy with which our CSR is perceived in society, etc., etc.
I am a strong advocate of market research and surveys. Their data may certainly be imperfect, but no less imperfect I believe than the data we take as official TV ratings or Google Analytics.
To give an example of this imperfection, what good is it if we have data on impressions, likes and retweets on twitter? if we have no way of knowing what is going on in WhatsAppwhich is the largest social network of all, although it is not taken into account as it is private.
WhatsApp groups are often the platform where the greatest exchange of sport-related files and comments takes place, yet it is as if it is non-existent in the data. The solution will eventually be found, but this example is a good illustration of the fact that We are only in the early stages of change in this digital transformation. in the world of sponsorship and the immense field of possibilities that lie ahead of us.
Pablo de Villota
Director of Sports & Entertainment at Proa Comunicación