October Focus: Sponsorship as a Platform
The primary goal for us at the Sports Innovation Lab is to make simple the complex. Truly, that is the goal of all research—taking something inherently complex, demystifying it, explaining it, making it clear, and revealing more questions and complications that require research. We’ve made this our goal in everything we do, form our Leadership Board Program, to our Workshops, an in all the content we produce for the industry in the form of reports, seminars, podcasts and videos.
Starting today, Sports Innovation Lab will be spending each month focusing our content on a singular theme, to help the sports industry make sense of all the rapid change occurring as a result of technology. It is another way for us to communicate more clearly all that our analysts are seeing happen in the industry. On the first day of each month, we will produce a post that will explain the theme, and that will provide links to learn more. As the month goes on, and we talk to more experts and share more insights, we will add those links to this post. So bookmark this now, and come back throughout October and beyond to learn more about Sponsorship as a Platform.
What is Sponsorship as a Platform?
For decades, sponsorships have been largely driven by the idea of association. The argument was simple: sports fans like a player, a team, or a sport, and if you associate your brand with that player, team, or sport, they will in turn like you! This is still the primary driver of sports sponsorship aimed at building brand awareness or brand affinity, and it works in sports because of the scale of the audiences. But the world of advertising and marketing is changing fast, and there is increasingly more value for marketers in highly focused, targetted approaches being offered by digital and social platforms. The advantage these platforms have is a tremendous amount of data on users to help guide their partnerships. For the sports industry to compete, it needs to move past the old inventory of billboards, tarps, and activations, and fully embrace technological partnerships that create platforms for fans to do more things. We call these behaviors, and the more behaviors your fans can do with you—sharing, creating, betting, and beyond—the more data you can begin to collect to enrich your CRM and design better sponsorship opportunities.