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Sponsorship

Hi again..

So last Thursday I had a stroke of luck and was offered the chance to go and have a look round Earls Court in West London as part of our course, and this happened to be the venue for the Ideal Home Show.. so was a great opportunity to see a snap shot of the build in. Here are the pictures from the day

Right now down to sponsorship.. both events have some level of sponsorship, although in my eyes both use sponsorship in different ways and I expect to their best advantage.

The Ideal Home Show has a whole host of different sponsors and sponsorship levels as you can see from their website (Ideal Home Show - Sponsors). The first thing to notice about the make up of the show is it is obviously an exhibition and therefore has a variety of different exhibition areas such as Technology, Garden, Cooking and various awards and competitions. This means the organisers can section off different parts and offer sponsorship to different companies which best suit there industry sector, this can been seen on the link above. For example the technology and future department is sponsored by Virgin Media, the 'How to' theatre is sponsored by B&Q and the Garden department is sponsored by Hydropool (specialising in hot tubs and swim spas). All these department sponsors are likely to have stands at the show to not only tie in with the advertisement but with the aim to make sales, I would also hazard to guess that some of the sponsors have agreed an exclusivity part to the contract and therefore will be the only business in their market segment to be at the show!

Not only this they have also assigned a main sponsor, Everest, which is attached to the Ideal Home Show logo and wherever this is printed Everest will be too. The show also has a host of subsidiary sponsors, which will have a much smaller involvement in the show. 

This shows a list of the Shows main sponsors. 

Taken from the Ideal Home Show's website home page

Another form of sponsorship is the celebrity endorsements the show uses, just like the company sponsorships the organisers have arranged a variety of celebrities to act as a figure head for each department, again on their website they have a section designated to the team and what areas they are to head.. (Ideal Home Show - Meet The Team). These endorsements are as much about promoting the event as to adding value to the show, as if they did not have the celebrities the show could be deemed to be a supermarket with plenty of people selling different products.

Demonstration of the celebrities involved in the show

Sponsorship is something that needs great consideration from the beginning, the process has the following four steps (Masterman, 2004a):

1. Determine the requirements of the sponsorship
2. Develop measures for evaluation
3. Provide a sponsorship solution with a set of event rights that mess the objectives of both the sponsor and the event
4. agree payments and/or provision of products/services to be made by the sponsor in return for the determined events rights

I believe this event has succeeded with this in mind as there is a good balance between sponsors selected and the evolvement within the show, obviously I'm not aware of the total agreement between organisers and sponsors or any monetary values paid. However this for type of event it is important to have businesses within the industry sector that the show sits at the event to add value to the event.

Overall I feel the Ideal Home Show uses its resources to the maximum and really gets the most out of sponsorship revenue. It also selects and uses celebrities to gain maximum publicity. Celebrities offer a good way to promote an event, this is because each celebrity has a public relation and tone, by this i mean the public will know what to expect when they see Alan Titchmarsh is going to be at the show. This can offer two types of benefits, one being reassurance for people not sure whether to attend and the second is raising awareness for people who are not aware of the event.

Ok now with the X-factor Live Tour this event is limited in the sponsorship revenue it can gain, essentially the marketing department have been a bit lazy in gaining any new sponsorship for the brand. This is because they have just adopted the main TV show sponsor for the live shows. This could be something that Talk Talk have insisted as they would not want another sponsor being associated with the X-factor.

Overall I think sponsorship for the X-factor Live Tour is something that just comes out of the TV shows and is not something the marketing department will spend much time on, having said that I think it works with the relation to the TV shows and demonstrates the two are linked to potential attendees. 

I have just found some more examples of sponsorship in relation to the X-factor Live Tour and it comes in the shape of ticket give aways of the packaging of well known food products.

These are two quite different product sponsorships mainly due to the surface area they have to play with when designing the packaging, the two products are very different as well! The Tic Tac's are a pocket product and likely to be displayed in many newsagents, off-licences and supermarkets near or at the till, this means that the X-factor will gain plenty of publicity. Tic Tac's are going to appeal to a wide range of consumers and I'm not sure its particularly aimed at its target market but appears to be more of a 'shotgun' approach where they have potential of hitting the whole population with this promotion.

The Chicago Town pizza ad is much more elaborate mainly due to the increase in surface area they had to use, the promotional print has consumed the box a lot more compared to the Tic Tac box. This is too such a point that information informing the customer about the product has taken a back seat! However this does allow the pizza box to inform the customer about the competition at the point of sale rather than having to go to a website. Again as with the Tic Tac's this promotion is going to appeal to a wide range of people from families, to students and people who are living alone or are house sharing,  which again is likely to hit their target market somewhere along the line.

So these promotional give aways are both aimed to give away tickets for the Live Tour shows and the television shows, therefore this is another example of the organisers feeding off the TV shows promotional activity. This is one thing that has definitely stood out compared to the Ideal Home Show, where they have had to build up a stand alone marketing strategy, where the X-factor combined both the TV and Live Tour shows marketing to reduce costs and possibly to ensure the two events/shows are seen as one organisation by the public.

• Masterman, G. (2004a) A strategic approach for the use of sponsorship in the events industry: A search of a return on investment. In Festival and Events Management: An International Arts and Cultural Perspective, Yeoman, I., Robertson, M., Ali-Knight, J., McMahon-Beattie, U. and Drummond, S. (ads). Butterworth-Heinemann

Television advertising

Watch this...

OK now for some good old traditional TV advertising... above is the ad shown on ITV in the last few weeks of the X-factor television show.

The first thing about this is that it will immediately hit its target audience obviously because they are all likely to be watching the show! This is also a natural progression for the TV show as towards then end of the series is when an increasing amount of people will be tuning in.

With regards to the theme and production of the advert, it is definitely matched against the TV shows. It also appears to be an extension of the show and a vehicle for the audiences to continue and fully round off the whole X-factor experience by that I mean all the original competitors are back for one final time to perform in the same performance before they break off and continue their own careers.

This ad is likely to be a very cheap production as it uses clips from the ITV1 show and just imposes text over the top. I believe this ad is impeccable to the whole campaign of the Live Tour despite its relative easy construction. This is because if it was not shown potential attendees could possibly assume the Tour is not going ahead as in previous years, also in this case from all my previous research there does not appear to much in the way of pushing ticket sales.. therefore I would assume most of the sales are likely to be generated off the back of the TV shows, more than likely as Christmas presents!

I will be back to compare any television advertisement for the Ideal Home Show tomorrow!

A little while later...

So I could not actually find any television advertisement for the 2012 show.. but i did find one from previous years show, my thoughts are that maybe this years ad will go live on TV next week in the lead up to the show starting. As I have previously said in previous posts, this sort of event, which runs for a number of weeks/days is more likely to attract the spontaneous punter as the whole excursion to London will not be based around this show, unlike the X-factor Live Tour.

Another point to make about the ad is that it has many celebrity endorsements and appearances, this is something that is extremely strong in the whole advertising campaign and is something I will discuss in my next post...

Tooooooobe ads

Hi again.. Last Thursday, I found myself going on a last minute trip to London with Chris, Callum & Badger from the Events course... the intention was more about chilling out and paying a visit to the famous Camden Town rather than educational blogging uni work!

Having said that as we were negotiating the crowds on the tube... and Badger was discovering that you need to stand to the right because Londoners won't ask you to move! I spotted an ad for the Ideal Home Show... but photographing it appeared to be more difficult.

Badger on the other hand... even while not being the most sober person in the world managed to capture this ---->>

At the end of a night after enjoying Camden and having a skin full of booze, we spotted another advertisement on the tube. Callum insisted on getting in on the act for this one... and yes we were those annoying drunk people on the tubes and trains that night...

Callum loving the train 

I would like to say I looked out for X-fatctor Live Tour advertisement as well, but this wasn't the case..

But I think tube advertisement is definitely more suited to the Ideal Home Show based upon the concept of the show, by that I mean it is the type of event you can drop in and out of the show over the two weeks, therefore potential attendees will see the ad and will consider a visit over the next week or so. But The X-factor Live Tour is more of a one off show type of event, where attendees will plan there night around the show. Spontaneous visits will be higher with the Ideal Home Show.

Tube advertisement is immensely valuable in London, as the tube carries around 1,107 million passengers per year! Also according to CBS Outdoor, the company who sell the ads to companies, 87% of commuters enjoy the advertisements as a welcome break from the monotony of the journey. Some more statistics include each passenger waits on the platform for an average of 3 minutes and spends around 13 minutes inside the carriage! Its a no brainer really... if you need to promote an event in London and can afford the tube ads... its a must have!