Last Generation Sponsorship Redux

By Kim Skildum-Reid

Sponsorship has arrived. Through three generations, and many lessons learned, sponsorship is finally living up to its potential. It’s multi-faceted and quantifiable. It harnesses passion and meaning for the benefit of brands and fans alike. And it’s widely acknowledged to be at the forefront of modern marketing. This is the Last Generation of Sponsorship.

It’s been a long time since the first iteration of “Last Generation Sponsorship”, my treatise on what comprises best practice sponsorship, and how it colours our sponsorship choices and results.

I’m happy to report that my assessments and predictions from way back then are still valid, and while many regions and industries are yet to reach the tipping point where this is the norm, many others have.

But as Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, so aptly observed, “The only constant is change.” Since I first wrote “Last Generation Sponsorship” in 2003, technology, communications platforms, and our ability to collect and parse data has vastly changed. Media has fragmented into a million tiny pieces, as media consumers not only take charge, but create and remix media themselves. People are realising their consumer value, and expect exponentially more from brands and companies – not only from the products and services they deliver, but how their loyalty is valued, and what the brand stands for.

And as painful as the 2007 recession was, the resulting increase in corporate accountability spurred a huge rise in sponsorship sophistication that is still reaping rewards for our industry today. And as our industry is currently being ravaged by the social and economic impacts of a pandemic, we’re being called on to be more sophisticated, more creative, and nimbler than ever.

So, although the bones of Last Generation Sponsorship remain absolutely sound, what Last Generation Sponsorship looks like, and how it operates, is very different than it was all those years ago, and the time is right to reframe what constitutes the best practice framework for our industry.

The Road to Best Practice

This is the only part of this white paper that hasn’t changed very much. How we got to Last Generation Sponsorship is still how we got here, and the issues with previous generations haven’t changed, but as our industry sees more and more examples of best practice sponsorship, those failings have come into fine relief.

First Generation: Pointless

The first generation of sponsorship was driven by gaining exposure and awareness, with a big dose of chief executive’s choice thrown in for good measure. This was the norm throughout the 70s and early 80s and, unfortunately, is still the norm for many corporate sponsors, particularly in less advanced sponsorship markets, who still hold onto the notion that flashing their logo – in the company of dozens of other logos – in front of masses of cynical consumers equals marketing return.

The proportion of rightsholders still sitting in first generation is many times higher than sponsors, with more rightsholders than not, still listing all of the places the sponsor’s logo will go – and the social media equivalent of “guaranteed mentions” – as the first things on a proposal’s benefits list.

Second Generation: Short-Sighted

The second generation had its heyday from the mid-80s to the early 90s. The focus was very clearly on sales, with immediate gains the driving force. Long-term benefits were rarely sought or even considered in this formula-based era, although some sponsorships undoubtedly achieved them as a side-effect. Bargains were big news as results were measured in things like incremental sales, sales promotion participation, retail support, case commitments, profit margins, and sales conversions as compared to the price of the sponsorship. This generation has largely disappeared, with the exception of brands that sponsor primarily to gain vending rights or other guaranteed sales.

Third Generation: Selfish

Third generation was a major step up from second, becoming popular in the early 90s and still used by a large proportion of sponsors today. Brand needs, integration across marketing channels, and the achievement of multiple marketing objectives are drivers of this generation, with the goals resting equally between the short and long-terms. Skills are strong, processes are refined, and results well-documented. It’s creative and thorough, but it’s also selfish, as their single-minded pursuit of brand goals is often intrusive and overbearing, carried out with precious little thought for the fan experience.

Last Generation: Selfless

This brings us to Last Generation Sponsorship. Why “Last” and not “fourth”? Because our industry has finally got the focal point in the right place: On the people – the fans, the customers, and the communities we serve. Last Generation Sponsorship is not ego-driven like first generation. It isn’t short-sighted, like second generation. And it’s not needy and self-centred, like third generation. Last Generation Sponsorship is, first and foremost, selfless.

Last Generation Sponsorship is about nurturing a brand’s connection with a target market by putting their needs first. It isn’t about how many times you can “get in front of” or “communicate with” your target market through a sponsorship, it is about how you can use the most emotional and personally relevant of all marketing media to improve your brand’s relationship with a target market and, more importantly, their relationship to your brand. As much as those target markets change and their needs change and the world around them and their reaction to it changes, the basic building blocks of Last Generation Sponsorship will never change.

The New Model of Sponsorship

This has led to a very different model of sponsorship. In the past, sponsors have concentrated on creating bonds with properties, rather than with their target markets. An example would be a brewery that decides that it is in their best interests to be aligned with football. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money creating an indelible link between their brand and football – they put logos all over each other, the players drink the beer, they run ads, and thank each other at end-of-year dinners – with the assumption that after all of this overt linking, their beer-drinking target market is just going to “get it”, whatever that “it” may be.

Unfortunately for all involved, it’s just not happening. People aren’t noticing signage anymore and we don’t bother with the convoluted mental gymnastics required to transfer attributes from a property to a brand (eg, “if Beer X is associated with football, and football is manly, then Beer X must be manly”). We have all become very good at editing the few marketing messages that matter to us from the hundreds that merely clutter our universe. If you find this hard to believe, ask yourself or a colleague or a friend these questions:

• What was the most recent major event you have attended (in which you weren’t involved)?

• How many logos would you have been exposed to on that day?

• How many could you name right now?

• Of those that you can name, did any of them change your perceptions of that brand or make you understand it better? Eg, your trust in their brand grew immeasurably, or you now understand how that product fits into your life, or you see that brand as “likeminded”.

• Did any of them change your behaviour? Eg, you ran right out and test drove a Ford, started to eat at KFC more often, or advocated that brand to others.

I have asked these questions hundreds of times, and I am guessing that you will remember being exposed to dozens of logos, will be able to name 2-4 of them, and none will have made you change your behaviour or perceptions. If one did, it is probably because they leveraged it in such a way that it really resonated with you, your interests, and your needs. In that case, one out of dozens got it right.

Many would say that leverage is the key to maximizing sponsorship returns, and it does help, but even if a sponsorship is very thoroughly leveraged using the old model, the focus of that leverage is football, not beer-drinking football fans. It may catch their attention, but it is unlikely to really matter to them. And to be an active part of the sponsorship, such as participating in promotions, the fans are required to make the lion’s share of the effort, for probably no benefit at all to their fan experience. This brings us to the new model: The Conduit.

First, we have to ask ourselves, is it really a brewer’s job to “align with” football? Is it in the company mission statement to be “synonymous with” football? No. A brewer’s job is to sell more beer by getting people to try their beer, engendering loyalty to, and advocacy for, their beer, and getting the companies who sell their beer to promote it more than their competitors. Their job is to connect with target markets – internal, external, and intermediary. Sport doesn’t buy the beer, the fans buy the beer. Football is simply a means to an end – a tool – and that’s it. How they, and we, use that tool is what separates good from great sponsors.

Last Generation Sponsorship puts the target market’s needs first. The property becomes the conduit – the meaning, passion, and benefits – through which you connect with that market. Identifying, valuing, and meeting those needs – both functional and emotional – now forms the basis not only for what you sponsor, but the benefits you negotiate and how it is leveraged.

How that connection is made is often very simple – a meaningful gesture (or several), a demonstrated sharing of values, or a way for your market to become more involved, influential, or integral to the property and fan experience they love. Interestingly, there are lots of examples of very successful sponsorships, built around this conduit model, but often as not, the sponsor doesn’t seem to understand why it worked, and goes straight back to the conventional model. Those that do understand and continue to use the conduit model are some of the most consistently successful sponsors around.

Win-Win-Win

For years, good sponsorship was defined as being win-win, that is, the sponsor wins and the sponsorship seeker wins, leaving out the most important part of the sponsorship equation: The target markets.

The sponsor wins, the rightsholder wins, and crucially, the target markets win. This sits in stark contrast to all of the previous generations, which grew more comprehensive and sophisticated over time, but were all too willing to sacrifice the fan experience in pursuit of their brand goals.

Think about it. Who is a sponsor trying to connect with? With whom are they trying to nurture a relationship? Who are they trying to influence? Their target markets. Who makes up the audience that drives the revenue – sponsorship and otherwise – for the rightsholder? The target markets. Given that the target markets are the pivot point for the wellbeing of both the brand and the property, it makes perfect sense to make the target markets’ needs and wants part of the basic infrastructure of best practice sponsorship. That third win is the very foundation of best practice sponsorship.

Going back to the Conduit, for the sponsor, the most important connection in the equation is the connection between their brand and the target markets. The property is very simply a conduit – a tool – through which the sponsor can strengthen that connection.

Herein lies the rub: The most important connection in the target market’s equation is their connection with the property. To those people, sponsors are extraneous and disposable, and frankly, they’re right. Over the years, sponsors haven’t exactly had a glorious track record of enhancing their fan experiences. There are certainly exceptions, but as a whole, properties have become an escalating battle between sponsors trying to draw people’s attention to their brands and people trying to ignore them, and those people are always going to win.

Want to make it work? Then knock it off. Ratchet back the hype, turn down the volume, and change the tone completely.

It’s no longer…

“If you love the property, you should love our brand!”

Or worse…

“PAY ATTENTION TO US!!!” Instead, it’s…

“We know you love this property – we love it too! – and we’ve thought of a few ways to make it even better for you.”

And that’s the key. “Making it better” is the third win.

Win-win-win is an acknowledgement that achieving brand goals and valuing the fan experience are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, delivering a sponsorship that makes the fan experience better will increase alignment to the brand, appreciation for the brand, and make it much more likely that the fans will cooperate in achieving brand goals. It’s also an acknowledgement that if a sponsor makes the fan experience worse, they may get the attention of fans, but they will damage, not nurture, the relationship. In other words, if the fans lose, so does the sponsor.

For a Last Generation sponsor, the win-win-win approach is built around the provision of small, meaningful wins for all or most of the fans, customers, potential customers, or anyone else in the target audience. Going into a draw where one person wins a giant prize isn’t a win, and neither is claiming that a fan is benefitting simply because a brand sponsors something that they love.

No, that third win will usually fall into one of three categories: Amplifying the best stuff around a fan experience; ameliorating the worst stuff; or amplifying fan passions or concerns. That means understanding the fan experience, and if the rightsholder doesn’t provide that information, you’ll need to work with them to get it.

“Don’t sponsor the property, sponsor the fans” is a mindset I recommend for sponsors of all kinds. It encapsulates both the selflessness of Last Generation Sponsorship, and primary relationship at stake. It’s one of the most powerful mantras a sponsor can adopt, and one of the most valuable marketing platforms a rightsholder can promote.

Remote Fans

Remote fans are fans that don’t attend live, but care about the property and/or the larger themes around it. They may not be part of the in-person fan experience, but they’re still having a fan experience. Last Generation sponsors value and understand those remote fan experiences, providing meaningful wins for people who may never step foot in the stadium or museum or food festival, but still care.

But if the pandemic has taught our industry anything, it’s that even sponsors that do a great job at providing wins to in-person fans, haven’t been good at understanding, valuing, and leveraging to that remote fan. All those fans got was some logo exposure and maybe some ads in their social feeds. The in-person experience was Last Generation, but the remote fan experience was first.

When in-person events all but disappeared, rightsholders and sponsors alike hit the panic button, with a collective, “What now??”. In marketing terms, the difference wasn’t as enormous as they all made out. Instead of 80 or 90% of the fans being remote, now 100% of them were remote. And whether the property went on hiatus or went virtual, they were all still having a fan experience.

The sponsors who had a track record of leveraging to remote fans were the nimblest in responding to the changed event landscape, but sponsors and rightsholders alike have now learned the skills. As the industry recovers and rebuilds, we can expect rightsholders to include remote fans, and leverage ideas for them, in their proposals. We can also expect more robust and far-reaching leverage plans from sponsors.

Last Generation Selection and Negotiation

As a Last Generation sponsor, you have three priorities when selecting and negotiating sponsorship. They are:

• Target market needs

• Internal buy-in

• Brand needs

“Whoa, Nelly!”, I hear you saying, “Brand needs third?!” Yes, brand needs are third on the list, and for very good reason: You won’t meet your brand needs effectively if the other two priorities aren’t met first.

Target Market Needs

If the ultimate goal is to connect and align with a target market in a way that creates meaningful and long-lasting changes in their behaviours and perceptions, the first thing you need to understand is who your target markets are – not what they are, which demographics will tell you – but who they are. We’re talking psychographics here – passions, motivations, self-definitions, peer influences, and opinions. If you don’t know who your markets are, you won’t be successful at any kind of marketing, much less with sponsorship, the most emotional and personally relevant of all marketing media. You need to know the answers to questions like:

• Which target markets are we trying to influence? Eg, existing customers, new business, staff, intermediary markets, other stakeholders.

• What do my target markets care about? What are their passions?

• How do they describe themselves? Are they adventurous, social butterflies, house-proud, foodies, environmentally conscious, traditional, ambitious, etc?

• Are there any events, sports, organisations, causes – or categories of these – that they really care about, or which form part of their self-definition? Eg, social justice, snowboarding, the high arts, alternative music, child health and safety, etc.

Meaning is a recurring theme across all of Last Generation Sponsorship. The more meaningful a property is to the fans – the more passionate and motivated they are – the more leverageable and valuable the property is to a Last Generation sponsor. Answering questions like these is all about gauging relevance, meaning, and passion:

• What proportion of the property’s fans (in-person and remote) are legitimately in our sphere of interest?

• What proportion of our customers and potential customers care about this property, or its major themes? Eg, your major market of foodies may not care about a specific food festival, but might still love some of the content that comes out of it.

• Why do people care about the property? What motivates them? What has meaning?

• How much do they care? How passionate are they? How involved do they get? Does it mean enough for them to influence others?

• How powerful are the larger themes around the property? Why do people care? Is it a passion point or a passing interest?

One other thing that will come out of this process is the realisation that the relevance of a property is more important than its size. If a lot of people love a property and/or the larger themes around that property, it will have tremendous potential for meaningful, multi-faceted leverage, even if the property itself isn’t huge. You don’t have to sponsor a national organisation to leverage it nationally. You don’t have to limit yourself to a few weeks of leverage around a two-day event, if the relevance is strong enough to leverage year-round.

On the other hand, a major property may have broad reach, but if the fans aren’t passionate – if they’re agnostic or fair-weather fans – your leverage will likely underperform.

You also need to understand the fan experience, helping you to identify angles for leverage, and develop your negotiation plan. You need the answers to questions like: • What are all the ways that my target market consumes the property (eg, on social media, at the stadium, in a bar, at home with friends, watching it on

TV or online, seeing editorial coverage of it, buying merchandise, donating/ volunteering, etc.)? • What are the best things about this fan experience to my target market? • What are the worst things about this fan experience to my target markets? • How can we improve that experience?

How can we amplify the best stuff, or reduce the bad stuff? • How can we amplify fan passions or concerns? Give them more influence or a bigger part to play?

As a Last Generation sponsor, the answers to these questions will help enormously in the selection process, and virtually create the negotiation plan for you.

Internal Buy-In

It used to be that one person, either a senior executive or a sponsorship manager, would make the decision about whether to sponsor something, and how to negotiate and leverage it. They would manage it, hopefully measure the results, and might even write a report on how it fared.

Originally driven in large part by Olympic sponsors trying to get maximum value from their tens of millions of dollars invested, now sponsors have realised that it is only through integrating a sponsorship across existing marketing media that they will receive the strongest and most cost-effective return. Everyone from social media to sales managers, human resources to brand management, ad agencies to new product development are using sponsorship to increase the relevance and effectiveness of their activities. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy.

The fact that sponsorship is the most emotional of all marketing media isn’t limited to the outside world. Internally, sponsorship can be both a powerful tool and a battleground. Everyone has his or her own perceptions about it as a medium, everyone has their own favourite sports, charities, and events, and a lot of them let those perceptions and pet projects rule their decisions about whether and how effectively they will integrate a sponsorship.

There is far more to say about integration and leverage than I can address in this white paper, but I will go so far as to say that there are three truths of sponsorship integration that many sponsors ignore:

• Sponsorship is the most integrateable of all marketing media.

• If a sponsorship isn’t well integrated across at least a few marketing media, it won’t work.

• You can’t force integration to happen. Your peers have to want it.

The long and the short of it is that achieving buy-in from a range of internal stakeholders, and commitment from them to use the sponsorship in a meaningful way, is a now a prerequisite to committing to a sponsorship.

This means that their departmental needs and concerns must be understood and addressed and their interests represented in negotiations. There is no use gaining buy-in from your major customer management area and then not negotiating the benefits they need to enhance their VIP connections. The fact that this is taking place before a sponsorship commitment is made is the key here. Anyone who has tried to sell a sponsorship into uninvolved colleagues after the fact will certainly agree, and the result is a sponsorship that is more costly and far less effectively leveraged. As my grandpa used to say, it’s like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Brand Needs

The good news about gaining internal buy-in prior to investing in a sponsorship is that you will also gain a far more comprehensive understanding of brand and business needs than you would if this information was coming solely from the brand group. One flows from the other, making brand needs sit very comfortably as the third, yet still very important, priority.

MOST POWERFUL BENEFITS

These are the benefits that form the engine room of a sponsor’s results, because they’re meaningful, relevant, flexible, and can be leveraged in a hundred different ways.

• Benefits sponsors can pass through to the fans

• Control or influence sponsors can pass through to the fans

• Customisable and/or experiential content

• Durable and/or serialised content

• Appearances (to create content)

• Special, non-traditional hospitality

• What-money-can’t-buy experiences – crowdsource who gets the experience, then create lots of content around the experience

LEAST POWERFUL BENEFITS

The benefits listed below are some of the most common, but least powerful, sponsorship benefits on offer. Collectively known as “hygiene benefits” or “commodity benefits”, they lack meaning with target markets, and there are no results, without meaning.

• Official designation or endorsement

• Non-VIP tickets

• Naming right or presenting sponsorship of something nobody cares about

• Ho-hum hospitality

• Signage and other exposure

• Guaranteed social posts (which sponsors generally use to advertise, not add value)

• Interruption signage

• Sponsor speeches

Last Generation Leverage

First generation sponsorship was neither leveraged nor part of the overall marketing plan. It was considered a luxury spend, with exposure being its own reward.

Second generation saw an acknowledgement that sponsorship had to be leveraged to provide returns. Sponsorship departments started budgeting extra money to run promotions and PR campaigns, often in competition to other brand activities. It was better, but still not integrated.

Integration with overall marketing objectives came into play with third generation sponsorship. It became a piece of the marketing pie, with less incremental money spent on support and more integration with existing marketing activities.

Last Generation Sponsorship turns conventional leverage programs on their head. It acknowledges the integrateability and uses the uniquely emotional power of sponsorship to drive the brand’s entire marketing program. Sponsorship is no longer separate from the marketing plan, nor is it a piece of the marketing “pie”. It’s a catalyst, centralised in the marketing mix, adding relevance and meaning and passion to every other marketing channel.

This is not to say that sponsorship should be your biggest expenditure or drive every marketing activity, simply that if meeting both functional and emotional target market needs is part of your overall marketing plan, that the more consistently and centrally you use the power of Last Generation Sponsorship, the more effective your marketing program will be.

The leverage program of a successful Last Generation Sponsorship will have one or more of the following qualities:

• It is leveraged in a way that respects and enhances the audience’s emotional connection with the property.

• It provides meaningful added-value to the fan experience with the property.

• It provides meaningful added-value to the customer’s experience with the brand.

• It demonstrates that the brand cares about what the fans care about.

• It demonstrates what the brand stands for.

The best sponsorships do all of these things.

Add Value

This is all about the third win – those small, meaningful wins that form the backbone of best practice sponsorship.

• How can you amplify the best stuff about the fan experience?

• How can you fix or reduce the worst stuff?

• What would they want from the property, if they had a magic wand? Can you give it to them? Can you get them a little closer to it?

• How can you make the fans, your customers, or your staff the heroes?

One of the most important factors in adding value is scalability. The coolest, most creative leverage idea in the world isn’t worth doing, if only a small fraction of your target market gets the “win”. Sure, you can do an on-site activation before a concert, but how many people will be able to participate? What fraction of the audience is that? What fraction of the remote fans?

When you plan your added value leverage activities, you need to ensure that you concentrate on the activities that will provide meaningful wins to the most people. You can certainly do things for an in-person audience, but you should also provide wins to remote fans, customers, staff, and intermediary markets. If you do something cool on-site, can a version of that be scaled to a broader audience? Are there specific wins that you can provide to other markets, that are more in-line with their interests and fan experience?

This brings me to boxing. I’m a boxer, and a while back, my trainer gave me an important piece of advice. He said, “It’s not how hard you hit someone. It’s how accurate you are and how fast you can hit them again.”

While I’m not advocating hitting anyone, this advice holds true for sponsorship leverage, as well. It’s not about giving fans or customers one, big win, it’s about giving them a series of meaningful wins. They can be small, but they do have to be accurate, and the result will be that they’ll think you understand and value them, and your consistent gestures will break down their well-honed cynicism, pulling them closer to your brand.

Amplify Passions and Concerns

Another way for sponsors to create wins for fans, customers, and staff is to use sponsorship to amplify their passions and/or concerns, making them feel more understood, more heard, and more important.

This can be as simple as championing the fans that are so instrumental to the success of a charity or event or team. It can also mean giving fans a platform to air their concerns, like the hockey sponsor that invited fans of a miserably

underperforming team to film and upload the speech they’d give the team before the next game. Commiseration meets catharsis, with liberal doses of humour and hope.

More controversially, it can also mean siding with fans, when a rightsholder and fans are at odds. The latter was amply demonstrated when a cadre of the biggest FIFA sponsors banded together to amplify fan concerns about corruption in football’s global governing body. But they went further than just amplifying fan voices; they used their enormous financial clout to effect meaningful change in the governance of the sport those fans love.

Leverage around these points revolves around the answers to these questions:

• What do fans love about this property? How do they express that love, and how can we amplify the volume and reach of that passion?

• What do fans dislike about this property? Do they have any legitimate, unresolved concerns? Can we give them a platform to voice and amplify those concerns? Can we take up those concerns with the property on their behalf?

Demonstrate Brand Values

More than ever, people expect the brands they use to stand for something, and shared values have become a powerful loyalty- and advocacy-driver. This is particularly true for Millennials and GenZ, but there’s a shift this direction with GenX and Baby Boomers, as well.

There are two ways sponsors are using sponsorship to demonstrate brand values. One is a simple leverage exercise, while the other goes straight to a brand’s purpose.

The first option is for a sponsor to leverage in a manner that’s consistent with their brand values. If their brand is all about being helpful, then the wins for fans will be all about being helpful. If the brand platform is that they’re all about treating customers as individuals, their leverage would be all about customisable wins. If their brand is about hyper-creative uses of technology, you guessed it… leverage would be all about using technology to deliver wins in hyper-creative ways.

The second option starts with selection, with a brand selecting largely (or entirely) sponsorships that are a true reflection of their brand essence, and leveraging them as embodiments of that brand essence.

Either way, brands are using the power of sponsorship to demonstrate – not just talk about – who they are, and what they’re about.

Last Generation Measurement

When I started in this business, I clearly remember measuring results solely in terms of impressions. One logo seen one time equals one impression. The more impressions a given sponsorship got, the more valuable and effective it supposedly was. While this did give some indication of the reach of a sponsorship, it really didn’t have anything to do with the impact that sponsorship had on brand’s results. It was convenient, it was lazy, but it was all we knew.

Second generation was all about sales and the myriad ways of counting them. If you couldn’t count it, it didn’t happen, and if the sponsorship wasn’t “profitable” in immediate dollar returns, it was a dud. Some augmented sales numbers with impressions. Others threw a big number into the ROI column to indicate the amount of good corporate citizenship the sponsorship engendered, which, crude as it was, may have been the first real indication that our industry understood that sponsorship returns could be both long and short term.

Third generation was a revelation, with a range of stakeholders not only integrating sponsorship with their activities, but also setting multiple objectives and using their own resources and expertise to measure results against benchmarks for those objectives. Market research has become an integral part of third generation sponsorship, as measuring changes in perceptions and behaviours has become an important part of reporting.

Last Generation Sponsorship takes the multi-faceted approach from third generation, and adds measures that gauge the target markets’ alignment with the brand, their level of advocacy, their level of engagement, the path to sales, and the longevity of those impacts.

Last Generation Sponsors measure their brand’s alignment and positioning with target markets against ambient numbers from brand tracking. They track the Net Promoter Score, and use social listening to track advocacy and sentiment online. They use social conversion tracking. They track pixels. There are myriad ways to track online behaviour, and it’s only going to become more robust, with advances in social and other tech.

What Next?

Last Generation Sponsorship should be a point of pride with our industry. When marketers around the world congratulated themselves for becoming “consumer-driven” or “customer-focused”, best practice sponsors were already there. When marketers revelled in the ease at which they could carry on two-way conversations with markets through social media, it was best practice sponsors that used people’s passions to imbue those conversations with meaning.

As marketers loudly declared that “content is king”, best practice sponsors yawned and said, “what took you so long?” And as the convergence of data, tech, and creativity has brought us disruptive marketing, it’s been best practice sponsors that have seen past the flashy whiz-bangery, to the myriad of ways – high-tech and low – to the human emotions and needs, at its core.

At its best, Last Generation Sponsorship is the embodiment of modern marketing. It is, at once, analytical and creative, selfless and powerful, returns-driven and human-centric. It’s both a platform and a privilege. Not a channel, but a catalyst.

And as long as we hold tight to these tenets, this industry will adapt to changes big and small, following the evolution of technology, global priorities, and our markets’ lives. Sponsorship’s implementation will change, but the structure will remain the same.

This is the Last Generation of Sponsorship.

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Kim Skildum-Reid is one of the sponsorship industry’s most influential thought leaders. She has a blue chip list of consulting and training clients spanning six continents, is author of global industry bestsellers, The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit (available on Amazon) and The Corporate Sponsorship Toolkit, and commentates to major business media around the world. She is the brains behind industry hub, PowerSponsorship.com, and offers sponsorship consulting, training, speaking, and coaching. Kim can be reached at: Email: admin@powersponsorship. com | Phone AU: +61 2 9559 6444 | Phone US: +1 612 326 5265 or for more information, go to: http://powersponsorship.com/.