It started with a few dozen pretty women in orange mini-dresses with no apparent branding attending the Netherlands’ first round match. “Dutch supporters”, they said. FIFA correctly thought otherwise, then did just about the stupidest thing they could have done.

What FIFA should have done…

• Get their own megalomania under control.
• Roll their eyes at the lame attempt to “ambush” the World Cup with a low-impact, first-generation visibility grab.
• Realise that 36 pretty girls sitting together in orange dresses is not going to harm the sponsor, particularly if they had done a good job of leveraging their massive investment. (It was Budweiser, but how many of you knew that?)
• Inform the broadcaster not to dwell on them.

If they really wanted to be hard, they could also have informed the women that if they returned in that or a similar get-up, they would not be allowed entry to future games.

What FIFA actually did…

• Eject the women, hold and question them for four hours.
• Arrest the ringleaders in contravention of anti-ambush legislation.
• Make Bavaria Beer and their models a global phenomenon.

Good on you, FIFA! You’ve turned an inconsequential, cosmetic ambush into the biggest sponsorship story of the World Cup.

Actually, FIFA’s reaction was so predictable (as are all the various World Cup organisers and the IOC) that Bavaria was probably banking on FIFA to do all the heavy lifting for them! All the while, Nike is running rampant with viral video that actually is creating marketing value for them and reducing the effectiveness of Adidas’ sponsorship.

Wake up, organisers! It’s time to stop dwelling on the inconsequential and start tackling the big issues in ambush marketing. When the ICC (Cricket’s global ruling body) started going through fans’ coolers and dumping out their Coca-Colas, it made Cricket World Cup sponsor, Pepsi, look like a spoil sport. When organisers of major events make fans turn their T-shirts inside out, it makes both the organisers and the sponsors look petty and mean.

Why do organisers do this? Because at least it looks like they’re doing something. What they’re not doing, however, is stopping the kind of ambush that hurts their sponsors. To do that would require them to admit that they can’t control it, tell their sponsors that great leverage is their best defence, and to work and be flexible with those sponsors to find leverage ideas that will work across the entire event experience.

Do I think this will ever happen? No, because being pedantic, sabre-rattlers is easier.

I’ve recently been involved in a lively discussion on LinkedIn about the value of online sponsorship submission forms. The response has been divided, to say the least.

Some people advocate their use, citing two main reasons:

1. It allows for an apples-to-apples comparison of properties.
2. It is a faster way of vetting sponsorships than going through stacks of unsolicited proposals and request letters.

I am not a fan of these forms in any way, although I can understand why they have appeal. On the surface, it absolutely looks like a time-saver and an objective assessment tool. If you look a bit deeper, however, there are some fatal flaws in this premise.

Sponsorships are not apples

As for making apples-to-apples comparisons, every sponsorship is so different, it would be impossible to compare them unless distilled into the most basic of commodities. How much exposure, tickets, hospitality, etc for how much money? Sponsorship simply isn’t a commodity industry, it’s a creative ideas industry. Imagine if ad agencies had to pitch for business using an online form!

Sponsorship comes in all shapes and sizes, all degrees of engagement and creativity. The huge sponsorship will tens of millions of impressions may look good on a form, but offer very little real value against the objectives of a mature brand. They may be totally disengaged. They may be a nightmare to work with. You can also make enormous returns from small sponsorships that are leveraged creatively, but for a sponsor to see that potential, the property needs to be able to showcase the creative leverage ideas that will create that return. Some of the least “sexy” sponsorships could provide the best return, and vice versa. None of that – positive or negative – will come out in a form.

The value isn’t in what you get, it’s what you do with it

When you invest in sponsorship, you are investing in opportunity. It is leverage (aka “activation”) that provides the results. The best sponsorship seekers are providing those creative ideas for leverage in their proposals, making it very easy for a sponsor to see how they can make it work for their brands.

Old school sponsorship seekers tell sponsors what they’re about, list the benefits, and in effect, say “you figure it out”. That “figuring out” of what’s in it for you takes a long time, but that’s exactly what sponsors set themselves up for when they use sponsorship submission forms.

If you really want to figure out which of those proposals submitted through a form will work for your brand, you need to go through the process of idea development. This takes a lot more time than reviewing the ideas that great properties will provide to you, if you give them the chance. And if a sponsor isn’t prepared to go through the process of “how could we make this work for our brand”, then they are making decisions about who to sponsor or further consider and who not to based on least common denominator mechanisms.

My recommendation: Sponsorship guidelines

Rather than creating walls, how about sponsors  just being more open and specific about your needs. And no, including the line “we only select sponsorships which meet out needs” does not count. You have to tell the sponsorship seekers what you need.

• Create a set of sponsorship guidelines and make it really easy for seekers to get them.
• Put them online, but don’t bury them six links deep on your website.
• Ensure your voicemail says, “if you want to submit a proposal, please understand we only consider properties that meet our needs, as outlined in the sponsorship guidelines you can find xyz”.
• Ensure every point of entry for sponsorship requests has access to electronic copy. This includes brand managers, regional managers, sales managers, and senior executives (who often say “yes” just so they don’t have to say “no” – this gives them an out).
• Ensure your switchboard knows that if someone calls asking to “speak to someone about sponsorship”, they should direct them to your sponsorship guidelines online.
• Finally, make it absolutely clear you’re serious. The first sign a proposal doesn’t comply, send an email telling them that the proposal wasn’t compliant and if they want to be considered, they need to follow your sponsorship guidelines.

Anecdotally, the number of proposals you get will drop by around 60-75% and the quality of those proposals will rise dramatically. They will be more comprehensive, creative, and objective-driven. I get a lot of love letters from sponsors about how sponsorship guidelines have made their lives easier.

Get your free, comprehensive sponsorship guidelines template.

If you use a template as a starting point, creating sponsorship guidelines takes maybe an hour. You will probably have to get sign-off, which can take a bit of time and fine-tuning, but my experience is that you could have them on your website and in the hands of all of your proposal touch points (electronically), such as brand management, local and regional management, senior managements (usually their assistants), and more – within about two weeks.

Even smaller sponsors can benefit from having good sponsorship guidelines. They may not have the massive workload that comes along with hundreds or thousands of proposals a month, but they still want good proposals that are about their needs. I know many smaller and mid-sized companies that are very happy with the reduction in workload, and especially the higher quality of proposals, that they get. I even know of several companies that have guidelines for smaller sponsorships (eg, for investments under $2000) that are not as demanding as their guidelines for larger sponsorships, but still require a degree of strategic benefits and ideas.

What about sponsorship seekers?

My strong advice to sponsorship seekers is to ignore those forms and go straight to the brand manager. Don’t pitch. Contact them having done your homework and seek to fill in the blanks so you can create a customised, creative proposal with great ideas for them to leverage. If they tell you that you have to submit via the form, they have just told you “no” and basically didn’t want to do it themselves. Go ahead and submit, but the ultimate decision will rest with the brand manager, and if s/he’s just given you the flick, it’s highly unlikely to be “yes”.

For more on reading the signs, I recommend my blog, “Six Signs a Sponsor Is Just Not That into You”.

For the whole process of offer development and sales, I suggest my book, The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition.

The upshot

The upshot for all concerned is that sponsorship submission forms are a false economy. They work only in an environment that rewards old school thinking and constrain the creative process that is part and parcel with gaining the best returns at the least possible spend.

Just in time for the FIFA World Cup, my newest tutorial, “Ambush Marketing Basics in About 10 Minutes” has been posted to the Power Sponsorship YouTube Channel. Yay!

The new tutorial isn’t fancy, but provides a short, sharp look at ambush marketing – what it is, how it’s done, and how to keep it from happening to you. I hope you enjoy it!

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Also on the Power Sponsorship YouTube Channel is “Sponsorship Measurement Basics in About 10 Minutes”.

In my recent run of workshops, keynotes, and in-house training, I have started using a new word around sponsorship – “privilege”. At one point, I was trying to convey the critical importance of putting your target markets first when developing a leverage plan, when I blurted out something like this:

Sponsorship provides you with the privilege to connect with people in a meaningful way through something they already care about. Your choice, as a sponsor, is whether you are going to respect or abuse that privilege.

Now, I’m not usually someone that struggles for words, but when the word “privilege” came out, I couldn’t help but be surprised that I hadn’t thought of it before. Sponsorship is a privilege. (Smack self on forehead.) Obviously.

Framing sponsorship as a privilege – and leverage as a choice between respect and abuse – brings an additional degree of clarity about what does and does not constitute best practice sponsorship. With that in mind, here are my top five ways that sponsors abuse the privilege.

1. Blah, blah, blah…

Okay, don’t get me wrong here, but sometimes sponsors just need to shut the heck up.

In any given sponsorship, the target market is the most important party, their main concern is whatever it is that you’re sponsoring, and your brand is the third wheel. That’s your starting place: Interloper.

If you want to shift your brand into the position of being a welcome part of that experience, being a pest is not the way to do it. Instead, sacrifice some of the volume and add meaningful value to the experience. Sacrifice repetition ad infinitum and focus on sharing the fan experience. Sacrifice visibility and create collaborative fan experiences. Show the fans that you are in this with them, don’t yell at them and expect them to listen.

2. Hey, over here! Look at me! LOOK AT ME!

I believe interruption signage should be banned.

There is all this debate in America about whether athletes should wear logos on their playing jerseys or not and how that diminishes the game. Honestly, I think that outrage is misplaced. Whether there are logos on a jersey or not is unlikely to diminish the fan experience. The strategic worth of those logos is up for debate, but they don’t make it harder to follow the progress of a play anymore than having a big team logo or design does.

What does diminish the fan experience is interruption signage – moving, flashing, or electronically-inserted signage, particularly signage in the line of site of the field or court, that is specifically created to divert the audience’s attention from the experience they’re trying to have and onto a sponsor’s logo or message.

If you’ve ever been at a basketball game or been watching a rugby game and you’re trying to follow a crucial play on the other side, but the signage in the background is also moving, you know what I mean.

Put yourself in the audience’s shoes… would you really rather watch a game where the background was lit up and moving? Does that make your experience better or worse? Then ask yourself, is diminishing my target markets’ experience good for my brand? Will it make them love my brand more? You know the answer is “no”.

3. Be part of our “brand story”

Sponsors have learned a lot from experiential marketing, but this little phrase is one I wish we hadn’t. Here’s the thing, unless you are Apple or Harley Davidson, nobody wants to be part of your “brand story”. Your target markets have their own stories. Your goal is to make your brand the natural choice for that target market – to be part of their story.

Creating experiential events, installations, road shows, etc, as part of your leverage program, can be a good thing, but more often than not, they are build on a premise of “come meet our brand”, not “here’s something for you”.

If you’re going down this track, make it primarily about the fans, not your brand. You want to engage with the fans in a meaningful way, not have them wandering around your “experience” just to kill time until something interesting happens.

4. You could win this fabulous prize

SMS your details and go into a draw to win…

Collect three proofs of purchase and go into a draw to win…

Register on our website and go into a draw to win…

We’ve all seen this type of leverage. Heck, we’ve probably all run them at one time or another. I have.

The problem is, they don’t tend to work very well. Breaking down the mechanics, you are basically asking someone to do some work on your behalf, provide contact details to you, and possibly buy your product, in order to go into a draw to win one big prize that they really don’t think they have a chance of winning. It’s true that some prizes are more compelling than others, and it is possible to get big participant numbers, but my experience is that is not the norm. Whether you intend it to be or not, this approach is inherently selfish, and your increasingly cynical consumers can see that.

Best practice sponsors subscribe to the idea that sponsorship should be win-win-win. That is, the sponsor wins, the property wins, and the target market wins, with small meaningful wins for all or most of a target market, not the chance to win one thing for one person. Those “wins” can be functional, emotional, or a combination of both. Do this, and your target markets will see that you do understand the experience and are taking steps to amplify the good stuff or fix the bad stuff. That is the ultimate in respecting the event experience.

5. It’s complicated

Leverage programs should definitely be multi-faceted. What they should not be is complicated.

Following on from point 4, your interaction with target markets should be as simple as possible. Don’t make people go through more steps or jump through more hoops than absolutely necessary to get their third “win”. Don’t make them part with personal information unless absolutely necessary. Your goal is to change people’s perceptions and change their behaviours. Email addresses are not generally requisite for that.

Keep it clean. Keep it streamlined. Make it easy.

Without doubt, some of these things abuse the privilege more than others, simply because they are more invasive, but the undercurrent is the same for all of them. That undercurrent is brand selfishness. Brand needs are not most important, when it comes to sponsorship, target market needs are. I’m not saying brand needs are unimportant, but if you don’t understand, respect, and meet the needs of your target markets, they won’t help you meet your brand needs. It’s as simple as that.

Great sponsorship is, by its very nature, a collaborative process. It only works if a critical mass of your stakeholders are integrating sponsorship across their activities. My experience is that if you create a multi-departmental stakeholder team and get them spooled up on the principles of best practice sponsorship, you will get the buy-in to the approach that you need.

The weak link for buy-in tends to be at the senior executive level. There is something about that potent combination of not knowing how sponsorship really works, benefitting greatly from the status quo (great tickets, meeting top sportspeople, funding pet charities, etc), and a healthy corporate ego, that makes it attractive to resist any major changes in how sponsorship is done. And if your CEO nixes the plan, you don’t have a lot of room to move.

I have three suggestions for handling this senior executive roadblock.

Provide a stakeholder team recommendation

Your first and most attractive option is to work with your stakeholder team on the development of the overall sponsorship strategy and any leverage plans that are big enough to catch a senior executive’s attention. This means the plan will be highly credible and clearly delivering across a number of areas of the company.

The success of this option will be largely due to your corporate culture. If your senior executives have a culture of respecting, valuing, and empowering middle management, they should be quite open to a new approach if it is signed off by key people they trust.

The ideal scenario is that your CMO will table the recommendation to other c-level peers, providing you and your ideas with high-level endorsement. The CMO should also be able to advise you on whether this is the best approach with the executives you’ve got, or whether to move onto a different option.

Propose a pilot program

If you’ve got a major sponsorship – beloved by one or more senior executives – and you want to change how it’s leveraged, you may see some resistance. In that case, you can provide a recommended course of action from the stakeholder team and include a pilot program as your Plan B.

A pilot program is a smaller version of something you want to roll out across a year, season, country, etc. For instance, you may want to do a comprehensive social media campaign around a league sponsorship or do virtual bounce-back coupons for fans, via their mobile phones.

If this is all sounding a bit wacky to your seniors, you could pilot some of your easier, lower cost, minimal infrastructure ideas – like the ones above – at one midweek game in a smaller city. There is no reason you need to put all the flashy bells and whistles on it if the point is to try it out. Add them when you get the green light to roll it out.

If you do propose a pilot program, the most important parts of the equation for your senior executives are the objectives and measurement plan, which must be strategic and detailed. That way, you can all be agreed as to what will be considered a success.

Sneak in some best practice

I am a firm believer that it is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission.

If your stakeholder team is strong, and their day-to-day operations are not being micromanaged from above, there is no reason you need to even tell your senior executives about the new approach. Instead, embark on a plan that includes the best performing, most internally popular leverage ideas from previous years, and add a number of best practice, last generation** leverage ideas to the mix. The senior executives won’t have lost any of the activities that they think have value, but you have the opportunity to significantly improve the returns.

On the numerous occasions when I have taken this approach with clients, all the sponsorship buzz ends up being around the last generation leverage activities, the senior executive team is delighted, and you will have a lot more freedom to do great things – and get rid of old-school thinking – in the future.

If you go all out and do something really cool with your leverage activities, be sure to submit your case study to an influential marketing or advertising publication, like Brandweek, AdAge, AdNews, etc. The kudos your company and, by association, the senior executives, will get from this kind of endorsement of your strong strategic work will definitely free you up to do more of it in the future. I’ve done this with a few clients, and even the most stubborn Managing Director starts to see the light when a few of their peers phone up congratulating them on “their” innovation!

**Not sure what Last Generation Sponsorship is? Download my white paper, “Last Generation Sponsorship”. You’ll be in good company – it’s been downloaded about 400,000 times!