Over the years, sponsorship measurement has been analogous to the weather -- much talk, little action. With rights fees continuing to escalate, the demand for a more measured approach to sponsorship has also been increasing. Because sponsorships still derive much of their value from the intellectual property that is being rented, the purchase is still perceived as more of a “leap-of-faith” than sports media. While ratings and gross rating points have their detractors as well, they are a standard measure -- something that sponsorship has yet to achieve. In an effort to get a read on the current state of measurement and analysis, SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily gathered agencies representing some of the biggest brands and sports sponsors in America to our N.Y. office on January 4. During the discussion, few thought there would ever be a silver bullet metric when it comes to measurement. But there was agreement that the industry is making progress establishing better measures. A common theme was that other forms of marketing, including advertising, are not held to the same standards that sponsorship has been. Will we ever get to a dollar in/dollar out comparison for sponsorship dollars spent and sales? Probably not. While we’ve reached an age when a sponsorship is now rarely purchased because it is the CEO’s favorite sport, there are still far too many bought before agency expertise is brought in. The assembled group said that establishing return on objectives as a vital sponsorship measure, and starting the research before the sponsorship is purchased, are two priorities for an industry still striving for metric credibility. Remarks were edited for length and clarity. Please see tomorrow's issue of THE DAILY for the second half of the discussion. What is the state of sponsorship measurement? Sponsorship Research Int'l VP & Group Dir Jeff Eccleston: We’ve come a long way over the past five years, but we still have a long way to go. Clients are demanding more sophisticated measurement tools and proof of what’s working and what’s not. As a result of that, we’ve seen more sophistication and innovation, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. What are clients asking for now? What new tools can you offer them? rEvolution Senior VP/Research Darren Marshall: Fifteen years ago, Joyce Julius and awareness and exposure was state-of-the-art. Now, clients are asking for how much extra product they sell because of a sponsorship. I’m not sure it is because that many more people want to know that kind of data, they need to know, because of the way [sponsorship] prices are going up. Not too long ago, you’d walk into [a client’s] office and see 15 photos of him with sports celebrities, and I knew my chances of doing any kind of research for him were nil, because I couldn’t help him get to 20 photos. Now, the price pressure means more tough questions are being asked. GMR Marketing Dir of Research & Insights David Bohnsack: Five or ten years ago, it was knee-jerk: people would say to me, “We need research.” There’s more sophistication now, whether it’s ROI [return on investment] or ROO [return on objective]. On the agency side, the tools are better and the challenge is matching those tools with individual client needs. We may have a perfect model for weather forecasting before we have a system that shows a consumer bought a product or service directly because of a particular sponsorship or other form of marketing. How much closer are we? Relay Worldwide VP/Consulting Matt Pensinger: It’s very dependent on the category. Soft drinks are a very different marketplace than cars and you have to adjust accordingly. Online is growing so fast because things like Google search are so trackable. We can ask consumers about their behavior, but we don’t have a broad ability to truly track and say “I went to a product display at a NASCAR race Sunday and then went to retail Tuesday and bought this because of that.” We can tell you a consumer became more aware of a brand or product -- actual behavior is elusive. Marshall: What’s fascinating to me is that we are at that same place when it comes to advertising research, and yet sponsorship is held to a higher standard of accountability. Why? Omnicom Media Sports & Entertainment Group CEO Steve Grubbs: Advertising creatives get more license than the media [buying] side of the business. Just because of the dollars involved, we are held to, I think, the highest standard. Clients want to measure sales. Awareness that you are involved in a particular sport may be important to a degree, but it is more important now to show how that generates sales. Or at least, how it ties to predisposition to purchase my product. That’s where the whole media business has moved. Sponsor Direct VP/Valuation Services Chris Thompson: There are three things that can be measured in any marketing investment: What were we promised? What was delivered? And what happened? In sponsorship, everyone rushes to “what happened” and that is the hardest thing to measure. A client has never asked me, “We ran a TV ad last night -- what happened?” Yet, clients sponsor things and ask, “What happened?” My theory to explain this is that there was so much irrational exuberance built into sponsorship activation and pricing that the pricing mechanism has gotten way out of control and clients are seeing a gap between price and value. The industry has been scrambling to figure out between truly measurable value and some of the rights fees they are paying -- this is the issue. IMG Consulting Senior VP David Abrutyn: There’s more data than there ever has been and more companies supplying that data. The key thing for a decision-maker is whether there’s a methodology so I can defend an idea to spend $20M for a stadium entitlement or $5M a year for an NFL deal. The decision-makers are telling us that they need more. We are being held to a higher standard because we have no uniform metric we can all point to. Octagon Exec VP/Consulting John Shea: When do we stop searching for that one thing -- the Nielsen ratings for sponsorship -- and come to grips with the fact that it has to be customized by client, by project, by property? Eccleston: I don’t understand why we are comparing ourselves to traditional media when we are so different. The thought that we will have a “cost-per-touch” metric that sponsorship or event marketing will evaluate with is particularly troubling, because it assumes every “touch” is equal. That’s not the case, and if we move in that direction, it will be a disservice to the industry. Momentum Worldwide Senior VP Eelco v an der Noll: What we are looking for -- and will not find -- is the ability to tell a car manufacturer, a credit card brand or whatever, that if they spend a million on a sponsorship, will they get a million more in sales. Quite frankly, no other marketing discipline can do that either. GRPs (gross rating points) don’t tell if people are buying the product. Sponsorship is the ultimate integrator -- if you are the sponsorship manager, you are more versatile than your [marketing] colleagues. You are dealing with promotions, PR, sales, interactive. All these can be measured with or without benefit of an NFL mark or whatever. North America GroupM Entertainment Sports Partnerships Exec VP Greg Luckman: Integration used to be a buzzword. Now it is real. So we are looking at measurement holistically. Sponsorship is at the center, we measure advertising, PR and the PR around the sponsorship. (To Grubbs): The sponsorship industry has always been somewhat envious of the Nielsen ratings in that it is an accepted metric. Do media buyers love the Nielsens or just love having a standard form of measurement? Grubbs: It is a means to an end. Well, it is a standard that has been around for years, but frankly many of our clients are looking for a more sophisticated tool. You can measure efficiency but you can’t measure impact, and we have a lot of guys looking at market mix modeling and other things in an attempt to do a better job of that. Shea: That’s right. State of the art is moving toward marketing mix analysis. Evaluating each and every tactic based on objectives set at the beginning of the programming. MasterCard is a client that is very advanced there. They have isolated advertising, direct and all the other facets of the mix, and help us formulate metrics to measure each one. Marshall: We are isolating affinity groups impacted by a sponsorship. So if we are measuring Miller and their sponsorship of the Bears, we are going to measure consumption by Bears fans who are aware of the sponsorship versus those that aren’t. You need to isolate as much as you can. Often now we are presenting for -- or to -- different brand groups within a corporation trying to justify a sponsorship internally -- that’s happening more and more. Wasserman Media Group Senior VP/Consulting Elizabeth Lindsey: The good news is that “Execu-whim” -- I like football, so I’m going to sponsor the Bears -- is now a minimum. But the problem now is that the “so-what” factor is creeping up. Your CEO is screaming for metrics and all you are getting back from properties is awareness and impressions and tickets sold -- the client wants to know how many more credit cards he added. Eccleston: Sponsorship came into its own as a discipline after an age of advertising, when everything was based on impressions. How many eyeballs did you get? We need to move to impact and get everyone thinking about behavioral or psychological measurement. By definition that is more complex, but it is where we need to get to. Sponsor Direct President Ken Brenner: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. We’re still rushing to find the Holy Grail for sponsorship measurement. There are so many moving parts, to me the most important part is managing data and interpreting it and the answers will be different on a client-by-client basis. The emotion and art that is involved in sponsorship cannot be replaced. Blending the art with analytics is where we need to get to, but there will be no perfect measurement. Grubbs: I’ll play devil’s advocate to that. There’s the group gaining power at most of our major clients called procurement experts, and they just don’t care about the art part. They are interested in science and cost savings and money. There’s a direct correlation between how healthy a company is financially and the power of the procurement people. The more challenged they are financially, the larger the role of the procurement people. … They want to see a dollar in for a dollar out -- or if you paid $3M for that sponsorship last year, show me how you are going to take that down to $2.5M next year. Luckman: It really is category specific and some categories, like backing with financing for stadiums or arenas, give a very clear path to ROI metrics. Properties are now more receptive to sitting down at the beginning and talking about what else each side can bring to the table and making it more than just a cash transaction. Abrutyn: Absolutely, properties have begrudgingly moved to a much more client-centric view, in which all their dollars are working. The idea that it’s all rights fee, well, very few of our clients are accepting that anymore. Shea: It is still not done as much as it should be, but you had better be planning your ROO and ROI up front. For a lot of clients, ROO by itself is fine, they don’t need ROI in some cases. Lindsey: We really need to change the dialogue so that people are focusing on the sponsorship investment on the front end, not just after the investment is made. … Just as properties put forward cookie-cutter proposals, there is cookie-cutter measurement being offered as well -- offering numbers for eyeballs and impressions. None of that matters. If you do the research right in the first place, you’ll buy what you need, you’ll self-select success and the appropriate measures will be obvious. Brands need to look inward, even as they are asking properties for metrics of success. So you are told that you got 60,000 impressions -- can the clients answer what one of those does for your brand? Please see tomorrow's issue of THE DAILY for the second half of the discussion.
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| WMG's Elizabeth Lindsey |
