The Buyer's Perspective: What Properties Need to Know

Flexibility and a Willingness to Go Beyond Terms of a Contract Can Help Properties Stand Out from the Pack

What do sponsorship buyers want to hear in a pitch? What are the attributes of desirable properties?

IEG SR posed those questions to a handful of sponsorship buyers. Below, they share feedback on what properties need to do to stand out from the pack.

Make sure there is a relevant fit. When targeting prospects, sellers need to make sure there is a natural fit between the property and prospect.

"Not every partnership is relevant to a company. I wish properties would consider that before soliciting a company. I've received offers that make absolutely no sense for a luxury car brand," said Susie Rossick, Acura brand manager.

At the most basic level, properties should make sure their audience represents a demographic the prospect is interested in.

"If we are going after 18-to-34-year-old males, it doesn't make a lot of sense to review a sponsorship for 35-to-45 year-old women. I know this sounds simple, but you would be amazed at how many proposals we receive that are off target."

Treat sponsors as partners. To ensure a relationship is a success, properties need to move away from transactional relationships in favor of multi-dimensional partnerships that provide value to both parties.

That is the thinking of Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC.

"We understand Mercedes-Benz is a great name for a property, but we want someone who will not take that for granted. They need to provide what we need, and we will provide what they need," said Stephanie Zimmer, Mercedes' department manager, brand experience marketing.

Zimmer points to the automaker's relationship with Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts as an example of a partnership. In addition to providing customers complimentary rooms, the automaker promotes the hotel, its services and chefs at its own events.

Similarly, Mercedes leverages its partnership with Nike Golf by giving the company exposure at sponsored events.

"We bring them to the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup. We use their product in everything we do."

Be flexible. Tony Schiller, executive vice president of Paragon Marketing Group, looks for properties that are flexible and willing to go beyond terms of a contract.

Schiller points to the NHL New Jersey Devils as an example. The team embraced a new activation idea that was brought up as part of PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.'s renewal discussions despite the fact the program extended beyond terms of the original relationship.

"There wasn't talk of 'We don't do this or we haven't done that.' They embraced the idea and said How do we make this happen?'" said Schiller, who reps the bank.

"The days of transactional relationships are disappearing. If a property can't engage with brands to build a platform, it's not going to be a long-term sponsorship."

Tim Collins, Wells Fargo & Co.'s senior vice president of experiential marketing, sums it up: "Like any good relationship, desirable properties listen, are flexible, go above and beyond and are proactive in providing information and resources."
(Source: IEG Sponsorship Report, 06/25/12) 

Obamacare Just Created a Huge Ad Category

Health insurance companies already moving toward consumer advertising 

It's official: the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare, depending where you sit on the political spectrum) has been upheld by the Supreme Court as of this morning. While the announcement certainly wasn't the proudest moment for cable news networks (easy on the trigger there, fellas!), it's likely to be very good indeed for television as a whole.

Pivotal Research senior researcher Brian Wieser (formerly the top forecaster at Interpublic) has a solid predictive track record, and he's extremely bullish on the possibility of a rapidly expanding healthcare category on television and in other consumer media as the hotly contested individual mandate becomes a reality in 2014. Individual healthcare policies are the exception, rather than the norm, but if everyone in the country is required to have some kind of coverage, the number of those policies sold is going to skyrocket. That, said Wieser, means new business models.

What will probably happen at first, according to the analyst, is that a single company will grab a lot of attention when it rolls out an effective campaign. "A reference point could be the auto insurance market until the last decade," said Wieser. "It was a lot of smaller companies, and then Geico catalyzed the entire sector. It will make a huge difference in market share."

Since health insurers market mostly (sometimes exclusively) to businesses, there's a steep learning curve ahead for big insurance companies that don't yet have a consumer-friendly infrastructure. "These marketers are going to have to reorient themselves from being B2B brands to being consumer brands," said Wieser.

And it's worth noting that some of them have already started to do just that. Last April, Cigna bgan its pivot toward consumer-focused advertising by hiring Hill Holiday to handle its needs in that department; the company also rolled out its "Go You" campaign a few months later (see link above). Meanwhile, WellPoint has hired Interpublic agency Deutsch, also with a conumser focus in mind, and even earlier—in May 2010—Humana retained Omnicom.

"I'd be surprised if you see them in next year's upfront, but I think you'll see a little in the fall of 2013, more in 2014, and a lot more in 2015," said Wieser. Still, health insurance advertising increases may be a safe bet, but there's no guarantee that it will be a net gain of the $1 billion-plus that Wieser predicts the market will eventually reach. "Health insurance goes up and maybe it makes it more difficult for soft drink manufacturers who were, uh, on the other side of the health proposition," said Wieser with a laugh.

It's also probably safe to expect the larger insurers to start retaining the larger advertising agencies; consumer ad spending hasn't yet been a priority, but the Kaiser Family Foundation (a nonpartisan nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of the health insurance industry and is formerly affiliated with Kaiser Permanente) predicts that the number of individual policy holders in the U.S. will at least double from 14 million to 28 million by 2016.

Sam Thielman - Adweek, 6/28/12

Study: More Regional Ad Agencies Budget for Digital Specialists

The following article was written by Jay Friedman, chief operations officer of Goodway Group, and appeared in the January 17 edition of Ad Age Agency News.

This month we published the results of a study detailing the state of "going digital" within regional agencies around the U.S. The study asked 12 questions and was answered by 90 agencies, up from 74 in 2010.

The fact that we have two years of comparative data also allows us to see how the mindset around core digital-media needs has shifted year over year. Some results are expected, but many are truly astounding. What's more interesting is different people will find the results astounding for different, and sometimes opposite, reasons.

Responses to each of the 12 questions are fascinating, but I've chosen three of the questions to highlight here with the hope you'll read the full study as well.

In 2010, 26% of agencies said clients "weren't asking for" digital media. That dropped to 4% this year as it appears marketers who felt this way a year ago may have realized digital is a requirement, not an option. The fact that "budgeting to hire and train a new staff member" shot from 14% to 51% from 2010 to 2011 shows us regional agencies now have realized that digital media may be so complex that existing staff with different backgrounds and expertise will not naturally become digital-media experts. Or it could be the costs of learning on the job are too great.

We predict the major "aha!" in 2012 will be that budgeting to hire just one staff member will not be enough. Social content, web development, analytics, SEM and display are all significantly different subspecialties within digital. Still, most agencies do not have the budget or need to hire full-timers in each of these areas.

If you ask people who have been working in display (online, mobile, video) for a while about the notion of click-thru-rates as a metric of success, they will most likely scoff at it.

Real ROI, effective cost per action, and brand lift are often considered more meaningful metrics for success. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed view CTR as the primary metric for success while another 20% view CPM. This data shows that regional agencies are still in the introductory learning stage of digital media.

If you're a digital veteran, you may remember working on your first several campaigns and eyeing the CTR as the campaigns progressed. You may have gotten excited about a rising CTR only to feel a bit empty when a campaign finished: "Great, we got lots of clicks, but does that really mean we succeeded?"

Since many agencies (and likely their clients) are focusing on CTR and CPM to define success, it's not surprising how the next question plays out, "How successful would you rate your past digital campaigns?" Only 2% of regional agencies rated their past campaigns as "very successful" because they and their clients have not established healthy metrics for campaign success.

This study culminates with the final question, "In terms of agency business priorities, where would you say 'going digital' falls?" Last year, 71% answered it was either their top priority or one of the top few. This year 59% said, "We'd like to, but we're not in a hurry." What happened?

We believe this de-prioritization is the result of the combined experiences and lessons from the areas we've described above. This is especially true because in the beginning we all thought, "It's just another medium. It can't be that different." This obviously has not proven out.

Programmatic digital buying and the expertise needed around it are a world apart from the spots and dots of traditional media. These inaccurate expectations combined with the challenges of campaign metrics could certainly lead agency owners and top executives to rethink speeding headfirst into their next digital project.

Having spoken with hundreds of regional agencies across the country, one thing I can definitively say is these agency owners and top executives are incredibly smart and will figure this out in short order. But like any new subject, having a great teacher can be the best path. As regional agencies lean on vendors and other industry experts, we expect to see a hockey-stick-like understanding of digital and how it fits into the entire media picture.

(Source: Jay Friedman, Advertising Age, 01/17/12. The full study is available here.)

Branding: The Law of the Word

The Law of the Word states that a brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.

Building a brand in the mind of end consumers requires focusing branding efforts on owning a word or a term in their minds. To have some fun with this concept, here is a short quiz. Below is a list of words (slogans) that various auto brands own in consumers’ minds. Try to guess the brand without looking at the answers below.

1. Tough

2. Moving Forward

3. Zoom Zoom

4. Like a Rock

5. The Ultimate Driving Machine
(1. Ford 2. Toyota 3. Mazda 4. Chevy 5. BMW)

 

Here are a few other completely unrelated categories.

1. I’m Lovin It

2. Just Do It

3. You Can Do It—We Can Help

4. You’re In Good Hands

(1. McDonalds 2. Nike 3. Home Depot 4. Allstate)

These companies have been successful at focusing their branding efforts on owning a word(s) in our minds. Once a brand owns a word, it is almost impossible for a competitor to take that word away from the brand.