That approach paid off handsomely for global marketers such as
Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Visa. Executives say that for
brands such as these, tightly aligning all their activation for a
sponsorship under a theme that reinforces their brand message pays
significant dividends for them and limits opportunities for
competitors.
"It is not important, it is critical," said Antonio Lucio, chief
marketing officer at Visa, which saw dramatically improved returns
on sponsorship investment after shifting all of its global
activities under the "Go" platform, which emphasizes the access
Visa provides during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (and,
subsequently, the 2010 World Cup). "At the end of the day, a
sponsorship is nothing more than an amplification of the brand
message, and it doesn't work if that message isn't ... consistent,"
he said.
There is, in some way, a back-to-the-future quality to this
trend. Part of the reason heavily themed sponsorship efforts went
out of style was that work built for one event is often difficult
to repurpose for another. An ad built for a soccer tournament
doesn't fit in during a basketball broadcast, and it's hard to
justify the expense of creating reams of creative with such a short
shelf-life.
But the soaring costs of sponsorships, combined with an
increasingly fragmented media that both dilutes muddled messages
and also provides countless outlets -- and ammunition -- for
would-be ambushers has forced major-event sponsors to
reconsider.
One mega-marketer that clearly came to the same conclusion was
P&G, which reportedly spent $15 million to become an official
sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Team and utilized the platform solely
to court moms. The "Proud Sponsor of Moms" program at the Winter
Olympics incorporated advertising and promotion for 18 brands,
including endorsement deals with 16 U.S. athletes and the company's
first corporate-branding effort on TV, marshaled by Wieden &
Kennedy, Portland, Ore. The company also set up a house in the
Olympic Village in Vancouver for families of U.S. athletes and paid
travel costs for moms of athletes who couldn't otherwise afford to
come to the games. Besides some well-received ads produced in
advance of the games, P&G also got NBC to provide footage of
moms celebrating the victories of their children to show in a
commercial that aired during the closing ceremonies.
The effort paid off in spades. P&G's favorability rating
jumped 10 points over the course of the marketing program, said
Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard, and sales and share
of the participating brands grew ahead of projections. In all, he
said the program generated 6 billion impressions, 3 billion of them
from PR with 2 billion from TV and 1 billion online. Months later,
he said, P&G is still getting letters from moms thanking the
company for the work.
Key to making the program work, Mr. Pritchard said, was a strong
unifying idea. "We had 18 different brands that sponsored 16
different athletes. Each of [the brands] had their own idea. That
was good. But we didn't think it was enough. So then we put that to
our creatives. The brief was what idea would link these 18 brands,
16 athletes and P&G. And at first it wasn't clear what that
would be. [Wieden] arrived at the idea that behind every athlete
was a mom, and moms are there to sacrifice every step of the way,
and P&G is there every step of the way in appreciating
them."
The 160-country, $600 million campaign Coca-Cola launched for
this year's FIFA World Cup had a broader target in mind than
P&G's Olympics push, but executives there insisted on a
similarly singular message for the largest campaign in the history
of the world's most famous brand.
Coke executives said they realized early on that, given how
cluttered the media landscape is, they'd need a clear and simple
message to break through. So in 2008 they took 13 different
agencies to South Africa, took in a local soccer game and quickly
decided that all of the company's activation around its massive
FIFA sponsorship would focus on soccer celebrations as the
expression of Coke's "Open Happiness" tagline.
That started with creative focused on the "History of
Celebration," from Argentina-based agency Santo, which assembled
highlights of some of the most memorable on-field rejoicing in the
sport's history. The celebration theme was continued through Coke's
sponsorship of the World Cup trophy's 126-city, 84-country tour,
which drew 862,000 consumers, many of whom recorded their own
celebrations that were uploaded to the campaign's hub on YouTube as
part of a 120-country deal with the web-video colossus. As of June
25, the YouTube page and associated widgets had garnered 25 million
visits.
The effort had a soundtrack, too: Somali-born artist K'Naan
re-recorded a celebratory anthem with Coke-inspired lyrics, and the
song hit No. 1 on iTunes in 15 countries. Coke also deployed the
theme on packaging, producing more than 1 billion special-edition
packages with the celebration theme.
And, in addition to all those Coke-branded billboards
surrounding the pitch, the marketer also got FIFA to agree to
present a trophy to the player whom fans selected as having had the
best goal celebration at the end of the tournament -- via internet
voting, of course.
While consistency is always a virtue in marketing, it's also a
money-saver for global marketers such as Coke that need to operate
in dozens of countries at once because they can deploy many of the
same materials and programs with only minor tweaks.
~ ~ ~
Contributing: Jack Neff
