“Behold the magic of sponsorship! You too can achieve success and riches by using the time-honoured techniques of the mystic arts. Hold still while I sprinkle you all with magic fairy dust and you will get the sponsorship results of your dreams while doing nothing but letting people buy you lunch, erasing your voicemail without listening to it, and getting your picture taken with world-renowned athletes!”

I’m thinking of using that as the opening of a new keynote. What do you think? A bit much?? Honestly, I wish it were. But this reflects the apparent approach taken by more corporate sponsors around the world than you can possibly imagine. I call them “magic wand” sponsors because they seem to think that all you have to do is be a sponsor and results will magically appear. Their tricks are many and varied, but here are a few they use over and over.

Strategy levitation trick

This is a personal favourite. This stunning feat revolves around the concept of creating a sponsorship strategy when there is no overall marketing plan or other brand strategy in place – in a sense, levitating a sponsorship strategy with no means of support.

Don’t laugh. I’ve seen it a hundred times (and been hired to do the levitation for them on a number of occasions). There are plenty of companies who seem to believe this is possible.

Here is the rub: Sponsorship is just another tool – albeit a unique and powerful tool – to achieve overall marketing objectives. If a company or brand can’t articulate the marketing objectives, how on Earth can a sponsorship plan be developed to help achieve them? It’s like trying to give directions to get to a destination that hasn’t been decided yet.

Without actual magic powers, about the best you can do is get away from what you know are not the objectives, plan for flexibility, and press “pause” until at least a draft marketing strategy is completed and a destination decided.

Leverage invisibility field

Now you see it, now you don’t. Probably the most popular magic trick of all time and definitely the most common trick for sponsors.

Putting it into marketing terms, this is when a sponsor makes an investment, doesn’t leverage it effectively (or at all), and expects to magically achieve objectives. Tah-dah! Hail the magical powers of the leverage invisibility field!!

Unfortunately, unless you’ve got Barbara Eden in a bottle, this just isn’t going to work.

When you invest in a sponsorship, all you are buying is opportunity. You are not, repeat NOT, buying results. The results are achieved by using this opportunity in a myriad of ways to:

• Make your brand more meaningful to your target markets
• Add value to your relationship with your target markets
• Add value to your target markets’ experience with the event (or whatever) you’re sponsoring
• Make your existing marketing – advertising, electronic communications, website, PR, HR, loyalty, retailer, etc – more relevant, exciting, and meaningful to your target markets

That requires actually getting off your bums and doing something creative with your investments. You can do it. It’s really not that difficult. If you’re totally at a loss, hire a consultant, but DO SOMETHING!

Pay no attention to the sponsee behind the curtain

This is another all-too-common feat of prestidigitation: You totally ignore your partners, or worse yet, treat them like dirt, and you expect them to go out of their ways to give you lots of extra stuff just because you’ve got the money.

Newsflash: Sponsorship is not a one-way street. If you’re managing it that way, you are at best wasting the huge opportunity that comes from having a totally bought-in partner, and at worst, you’re being a bully. Your partners are the conduits through which you will be connecting with your target markets and that position in your marketing efforts does need to be respected.

If you expect to get great results, you need to both nurture and add value to your relationships with partners. You simply can’t expect that treatment from them and not reciprocate. It’s bad business (and bad karma).

Cut the lovely sponsorship budget in half trick

With the economy in flux, this trick has gained in popularity manyfold, and involves indiscriminately – as opposed to strategically – cutting sponsorship budgets.

How budget cuts are handled says more about an organisation’s sophistication in this media than any other single indicator. If an organisation believes that sponsorship is a “luxury spend” and/or that it is the most expendable of all marketing activities, then they totally do not get what sponsorship is about and they’re probably better off without it.

That said, I’m a realist. I know times are tough and you may need to rationalise your portfolio. If so, do not just cut whatever is coming up to renewal because it’s easy. Instead, take it as a cue to undertake a proper sponsorship audit. That way, you will know where the dead wood is, what is delivering, and what the potential is for your underperforming sponsorships. My experience is that a proper audit will both save you significant money and amplify your results.

Pull the measurement report out of a hat

Even sponsors who haven’t resorted to the magic wand throughout a sponsorship tend to resort to unknown mystical forces when it comes to measurement.

Using the old magician standby “people know what they see”, sponsors compile a list of the most visible parts of a sponsorship only, assign some arbitrary value to each of those, compare it to the amount spent on the sponsorship, and call it ROI.

“Hmm… well, we got tickets and they were worth about $12,000. Then there was the suite. We paid for the catering, but still, the suite would have cost about $8000. Then there was all that exposure. The logo-counting company we hired came up with a media equivalency figure of $2.4 million. And it only cost us half a million. Wow. That sponsorship was a huge success!”

Did anyone new try our brand? Were there incremental sales? Were they sustained? How do the brand perception figures compare with our ambient consumer research? How about loyalty, purchase intention, or advocacy? Did it move the pin on employee morale and pride?

Those are just a few of the important questions that a measurement report should answer. Measuring the “visible” only measures how visible the sponsorship was, not how it performed.

So, if you stand squarely in the baffle-them-with-bull camp, go ahead and present the report with the magic numbers, complete with full-colour bar charts, media clips, and the ubiquitous rapturous crowd shots. Note, the truly death-defying version of this trick involves presenting the magical report to your board or executive committee. (See also related topic, “Watch sponsorship manager put head in lion’s mouth”.) But know that the first time a senior executive asks what the sponsorship actually achieved, the jig will be up and you will look like a chump.

Sponsorship requires work. It requires planning and creativity and getting buy-in and measurement. Just spending money on it doesn’t mean you’re getting results, just like having a gym membership or walking around in track pants doesn’t mean you’re fit. There is no magic wand for love handles and there is no magic wand for sponsorship.

Okay, I’m done.