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