Gone are the days when sponsorship was just about exposure and awareness (and invariably a large component of a CEO’s passions!). Brands that currently invest in sponsorship but only go so far as to splash their logo across the event are missing out on the tangible opportunities.

Think about the last time you attended a sporting event or a music festival. How many logos were you exposed to? How many do you remember now? And most importantly, do you recall why they struck a chord with you?

Chances are, the brands you remember were the ones who reached out and engaged you on an emotional level and did something memorable. These are the brands that have been clever by investing budget to activate.

There is always an opportunity to engage emotionally with audiences and leverage sponsorships so that a brand’s activity will create a tangible memory.

Follow our simple tips on how to activate a sponsorship effectively:

Louise Walker,
Campaign Director,
Impact

(1) Leverage:
Brands who don’t invest the extra dollars effectively to activate their sponsorship and ensure maximum R.O.I aren’t spending smart. The industry rule of thumb is that for every dollar spent on sponsorship, spend another $1 to $3 to activate and promote it.

(2) Key questions:
A brand needs to ask itself several simple questions when choosing which property to sponsor:
• what are my customers interested in?
• what do I want to get out of this sponsorship?
• will I have enough budget left over (after paying sponsorship fees) to implement an effective sponsorship activation?

(3) Keep it simple:
After ensuring the sponsorship opportunity works for both the brand and your budget, the next step is working out the best way to activate at the event. The activation needs to enhance the consumer experience at the event, not hinder it.

Car parking can be one of the biggest time wasters for consumers when attending an event. As part of Ford’s sponsorship of Geelong football club, the first 100 Ford drivers to enter the car park at Skilled Stadium on match day parked for free.

(4) Keep it nice:
To further maximise opportunities at events, brands should build a close relationship with the event organisers to help ensure the best activation possible. You can maximize the opportunity by negotiating the best site, finding out about other brands involved to assess if cross promotional opportunities are available, as well as pushing the boundaries of what can be activated at the event.

(5) Connection:
Sponsorship should be all about consumer engagement. The events themselves provide a fantastic platform to engage consumers while they are in a relaxed and open state of mind and receptive to brands engaging with them.

Nokia kick-started conversations with an activation to trial its new 5300 handset. ‘Silence booths’ were installed at music festivals for consumers to shut themselves inside to make a free phone call. This allowed them to totally experience every aspect of the handset, making it a much better selling tool than picking up a dummy version inside a mobile phone store.

(6) Tap into the excitement:
Look at what the favourite components of the event are and see how a brand could become part of this.

For the masses that attend Australian Open every year, the best part is of course watching the tennis itself. Nintendo tapped into this, creating further excitement when legends of the game Pat Rafter and Henri Leconte played Wii tennis endorsing Nintendo’s sponsorship as Official Gaming Console of the Australian Open.

(7) Anticipate your consumer needs:
Consider what the worst components of the event could be and how your brand could lend a helping hand.

When Red Rooster sponsored ‘Moonlight Cinemas’, branded mini torches were included in a goodie bag for its VIP guests. This meant that the embarrassing mission mid-film to the toilet in the park, and in the dark, was made a little easier (and fewer feet were trodden on all round!).

(8) Tailor your activity to your audience:
It’s of vital importance to deliver an activation that is appropriate to and inspires your target audience, offering them an experience they want to get involved in.

Cricket fans are predominantly male, have a fierce love of the sport, their players, and of course a competitive streak, which is why 3 mobile’s activation at the cricket worked so well. Fans were invited to a branded zone to test their cricket skills by bowling at a cut-out of Gilly and attempting to get the ball to pass through a hole in his hand, with a range of prizes on offer.

(9) Promote loyalty:
Sponsorship activations also work brilliantly for brands that want to reward loyal customers.

When ANZ sponsored the FINA World Swimming Championships, it offered VIP entry for ANZ card holders to beat the queues. ANZ customers were able to walk straight in through a special entry with ANZ branded promo staff directing them. All of the people stuck in the queue got to watch the special treatment the ANZ customers got from their bank. ‘Priceless’ as Mastercard would say.

(10) Face up to it:
It goes without saying that if your activation involves using promotional staff, use the most experienced and relevant personnel you can get your hands on. It’s vital to get this right as an activation can succeed or fail based on the quality of staff that deliver it.

So the next time you attend an event or festival make a mental note of which brands are ‘activating’ their sponsorship successfully by making an emotional connection with you.

A successful sponsorship should be measured by not only the value received from the investment (e.g. how many times the logo appears) but also by how the sponsorship is activated, the way the brand engages the senses and how it leaves a lasting impression on the consumer.

Thanks to: Louise Walker, Campaign Director, Impact, Ford, Nokia, Nintendo, Red Rooster, 3 mobile, ANZ.
Posted by: Louise Walker

An oldie but a goodie – this is no new campaign but we didn’t want to miss the chance to highlight Volkswagen’s (VW) ‘the fun theory’ campaign as it’s a great example of how a brand’s ingenious use of creativity can help instigate positive consumer behaviour and build a strong following.

VW’s campaign was created in a series of phases:

Phase 1: lead by example - VW demonstrated how making things fun can positively change behaviour with its own three experiments:

1. The Piano stairs:

This resulted in an increase of 66% more people taking the stairs. With the additional online component, the video had over a million views on YouTube.

2. The world’s deepest bin:

Another idea aimed to get more people throwing their rubbish in the bin by making it resemble the sound of a 50ft-deep well. The bin collected 72kg of rubbish in one day, 41kg more than a regular nearby bin.

3. Bottle bank arcade:

Would more people recycle glass by making it fun to do? Designed like an arcade game with music and lights, this bin was used by nearly one hundred people in one evening, compared to the nearby one, which was used twice.

Phase 2: embrace consumer ideas – by holding an online competition, VW invited others to contribute their ideas, encouraging entrants to be strategic in how they could prompt behavioural change through fun ideas.

Whether their ideas aim to help other people or the environment, most of the experiments aim to effect a positive cultural change, such as safer driving, recycling and personal hygiene.

Phase 3: choose a winner – judged by a panel of experts known for either their entertainment or philanthropical values, or both. Click here to see the winner.

In addition to the wide number of consumers it garners, ‘the fun theory’ also demonstrates the longevity these kinds of ideas can leverage. It proves that, not only are everyday people willing to invest their time in good ideas (and in doing so sit side by side a brand), it reminds us how dynamic the relationship can be.

Sure, there is still relevancy in doing the tried and tested when it comes to advertising, but this example demonstrates we can afford to think a little bigger when searching for engagement. How refreshing.

Thanks to: Volkswagen
Posted by: Carmen Campbell

Known for creating extraordinary retail experiences, IKEA once again puts itself in the spotlight – or this time, subway …

If IKEA can make the Paris metro warm and inviting, imagine what it could do for an apartment! This is a brilliant example of retail theatre and a brand actually doing something to improve an environment and in the process showcasing its design and creating buzz.

Let’s just hope those sofas are bolted down…

Thanks to: IKEA
Posted by: Carmen Campbell

If there’s one trend you need to watch in the communications landscape in 2010, location based media is it. Why? Because this is the one shift that will fundamentally change how people relate to your brand. It also gives brands no other choice than to reassess how they can connect with their audiences.

Today let’s start with the basics…

Location based media is when information, entertainment and multimedia content is delivered to your mobile phone based on your location at that moment in time.

It first started appearing on the radar in 2004, but it’s only now that we have the technology to experience it (iPhones, smartphones).

With penetration of smartphones predicted to be at 448 million by 2011, this isn’t something that won’t happen. Currently in Australia smartphone penetration is at 30% and growing at a healthy rate.

The way developers and brands are delivering the experience to consumers is also becoming more sophisticated. It’s not all about being sent coupons for $1 Big Macs every time you walk past a McDonalds.

Take Foursquare, an example from the US that is rumoured to replace Twitter.

Foursquare is downloaded onto your smartphone and instantly gives you and your friends (who you can also choose to sign in to let you know of their whereabouts) a new way of experiencing old environments. As you are signed in and go about your day – visit a café, go to a theme park etc – you can earn points, receive promotional offers and so on.

You are also given information about new places in the area you might not have tried. Information like peer reviews on restaurants, discount vouchers and more. The more you interact, the more points you earn, the more brands can allow you to experience.

Foursquare is just one application. More will follow as developers refine their understanding of what people are looking for in their experience and we’ll be back with more reviews on such applications in the months to come.

Posted by: Carmen Campbell
Thanks to: RBC Capital Markets, “Sizing the Global Smartphone Market”, 2009 & AIMIA figures 2009

When Nike thinks innovation it thinks progression. So at this year’s Tour de France it created the Chalkbot to raise money and awareness for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Born out of the observation that every year supporters of the Tour de France write chalk messages on the streets surrounding the race, Nike followed suit – it just turned up the volume, a lot …

People were invited to send in messages of support via Twitter, SMS and wearyellow.com – then in turn, the Chalkbot would print these messages on the pavements surrounding the race.

The Chalkbot looks like this and has a computer inside which happily received people’s messages and then printed them out on the streets.

It didn’t stop there – Nike then took photos of the messages and sent them back to the person who requested the message in the first place. They were also posted on wearyellow.com on a Google Map so people could see exactly where the messages came from.

What eventuated was a collaboration between traditional and very non-traditional communication specialists to ensure people saw these tangible voices of support move into social media networks, where word of mouth became a powerful driver.

Well done to all involved. This is a campaign that required insight, patience and the support of everyday people to be a success.

Posted by: Carmen Campbell
Thanks to: Nike Chalkbot, Contagious

Let’s face it, the thought of learning how to save a few bucks on your power bill is not always at the top of people’s list when out shopping. Yet this experiential idea from the Queensland Government has achieved just this – and very successfully.

This interactive home, placed in shopping malls throughout North Queensland, demonstrates how people’s power usage not only impacts their back pocket, but the environment too.

Built with the purpose of demonstrating how small change can reap big rewards, it includes a thought-provoking display of what contributes to power consumption in the home.

It suggests positive changes from small things like drawing the curtains or setting your air con unit to a lower heat, through to having ‘ClimateSmart’ items installed, such as water saving shower heads, energy monitors and energy saving light bulbs.

“The campaign was a great success in terms of customer sign-ups to the ClimateSmart home service. The set itself also generated lots of consumer interest and positive feedback.” Louise Walker, Campaign Director, Impact.

The installation was part of a wider integrated campaign that saw the character ‘No one’ from the television commercial making live appearances at the mall.

The interactivity of the home is what stands out here. It takes a low interest topic and makes it interesting for everyone because people can see the immediate impact of how small changes can make big difference to their back pocket – not to mention the environment.

This initiative was developed by Mitchell’s experiential agency, Impact.

To find out more about how impact work with brands contact:

Sydney: Louise Walker (02) 9267 7766
Melbourne: Richard Chapman (03) 9690 5544

Thanks to: Queensland Government, Impact, Cummins Nitro