What is sponsorship?

Note translator: today we decided to introduce our readers to a small but capacious article by Seth Godin, an American writer, entrepreneur and marketer, winner of the Momentum award for outstanding achievements in the Internet industry and a regular contributor to Fast Company. In this article, Seth discusses why companies sponsor events, books (and other businesses), and what conclusions project managers can draw from this.

The answer to the question "How are you going to pay for this project?" more and more often it is in the plane of sponsorship. If you don’t know why organizations want to sponsor this or that activity, then you will probably have to go a long and hard way before you find the necessary sponsorship.

With the growth of media opportunities (including blogs, books, conferences, tattoos, performances, film festivals, stadium events, entire sites ...), it’s worthwhile to think a little about why organizations sponsor something.

1. In some cases, this is a replacement for advertising. How many people will see it? How much will it cost per person (this is the same CPM, but instead of the cost of a thousand page views or magazine articles, you pay for thousands of impressions that can be made in millions of ways)? I think this is a model for a film festival or book fair. This is a reasonable way to reach a valuable audience, access to which is not so simple.
2. Sometimes this is a way to show off. This means that the sponsor is not as important an occasion as involvement, which can be shared with others. Something like a confirmation of their merits on the contrary. In this case, not media opportunities are sponsored, but a “license” to belong to something. For example, a company can sponsor the arrival of a famous speaker in the city. Of course, the audience of 500 people who will come to listen to him will not be able to provide worthy CPM value, but the fact that you did it gives you power over those who found out about it.
3. Perhaps this is a chance to influence the sponsored organization. This explains why large corporations are eager to sponsor political congresses.
4. Sometimes this is a good way to inspire your own employees and draw their attention to something. When people who work for you see that you are sponsoring a worthy charitable organization or a thoughtful opinion leader, they can change their views on their own work or on how they prioritize.
5. This pleases the CEO and allows the company to get a place at a certain “table”. It seems to me that the model of sponsoring sports stadiums belongs to this type [ adding the name of the sponsor to the name of the stadium - approx. perev.] - an act which, in terms of increasing the recognition of a company in the media space, has never made sense.

Since there are many ways to come to sponsorship, evaluating such an act is not so simple. If you are a bank that sponsors a bicycle exchange service, how do you compare the effect of this promotion with five hundred advertising spreads in the newspaper (which will cost you the same amount for the same period). Of course, you will not compare. You can not. Instead, inside the company you must be very well aware of why you are going to do this.

In general, if you have decided which of the above five types of sponsorship suits you, you should know that the majority of sponsorship deals stand out against the background of traditional media advertising, especially if you are trying to reach out to elites or to an audience that is otherwise very difficult find an approach.