Ever since Apple rocked the Superbowl with their ‘1984’ spot, marketers have been trying to emulate the success of the one-time ad that assumes legendary status. Lured by access to so many people in one sitting, they’ve been prepared to shell out most if not all of their historic advertising budget to gain unprecedented attention. (Personally, I think basing a strategy on that 1984 spot is flawed, because although the commercial only played once, Apple itself was a well established brand and its marketing stretched far beyond that commercial.)

But is “big bang branding” ever worth the price of admission? And here I’m not just talking about the one-time ad spot, I’m also referring to an all-in sponsorship or any other marketing activity where you focus everything you have in one place in order to achieve monumental effect for your brand. I’m not qualified to give a media perspective on such a decision, but it’s an interesting question from a positioning point of view.

Let’s start with the advantages. They revolve around two things: audience; and association. First of all, you have a catchment that will probably not be available to you at any other time of the year. Many millions of people. One place. One time. That’s a tempting prospect for marketers struggling to get breakthrough and to be taken seriously as competitors in the swirling waters of the middle tiers of some markets. Secondly, the association with the big league has the potential to change how people see you because of where they have seen you – and it gives your brand a significant ‘talking point’ to potentially build on in social media and mainstream media channels. That’s important if you are being muscled out by high-profile brands that have captured public attention and won’t let you get a word in edgewise.

Is that enough though? Because it doesn’t take long to compile a pretty powerful list of reasons why such an investment is foolhardy: attention is fleeting (and you’ll never be the center of that attention anyway); the sales case in terms of monies generated from that much spend probably won’t stack; the accusation of ego-advertising is never far away; once is never, ever enough; and the contrast between being suddenly seen and then not seen at all could prove very confusing for your consumers.

While it can be argued that there are good reasons for big brands to be associated with big events, I’d love to see the success statistics for smaller brands that have tried this approach. How many of them I wonder have found themselves catapulted into a new league and were able to take their businesses forward at that new level? And how many failed to fire, lost the confidence of their senior decision makers and went back to fighting for market share in the same ways as they used to, only minus the CMO that proposed the step-up in the first place? I’d find those stories helpful in terms of making a case one way or another.

But faced with the question ‘should we?’ or ‘shouldn’t we?’ and in the absence of those stories to help rationalize the decision, I would ask five questions:

1. How dependent is the brand on its current marketing strategy for revenue? Because if continual marketing presence correlates directly with continuing sales, then interrupting that flow could have serious repercussions.

2. How does the brand fit with the proposed event? Is the context right? As Rob Siltanen observes, “The Super Bowl is not for everybody or every brand. If you have a serious message you need to convey, you might think twice about delivering it in front of an audience that is wired to party.”

3. What shift in perception are you looking to achieve through your one-off appearance and are you geared up to deliver on that new perception once you have established it? This is about seeing past the audience numbers, and really honing in on the associative advantages and the inclination of the audience associated with that event to act on, or at least endorse, that shift in perception. Then, having changed expectations, are the other aspects of your business aligned with that change?

4. Is there a larger agenda at play? For example, if the business is looking at a merger/acquisition or wishing to deflect unwanted attention, then lifting the profile of one of the brands could help that process in a range of ways.

5. What new conversations can you open up that would not have been possible otherwise? For example, people love the idea of getting access to something or someone that would otherwise be denied to them. How can you use your participation in the event to get people to ‘lean in’ to learn more? Could you make a documentary that you share with clients and prospects? Could you get someone to speak at your conference that you would otherwise never be able to attract? Can you spin out a limited-edition of one of your product lines to honor the event?

In a marketplace that increasingly associates profile with success, it’s tempting to believe that attention is all your brand needs to hit the big time. You may be right – but first you need to be extremely clear on what constitutes success for your brand and how, where and why it requires such an exponential investment. Fortune may favor the brave, but not always the reckless.

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Second, they are extremely expensive. I have not seen the wall, but one would imagine an arbitrary assortment of movie stars, supermodels and famous sporting clubs. Written across the top of this wall a large banner probably reads “Turkish Airlines Potential Sponsorship Partners”.

Then, it seems, once a year Turkish Airlines embarks on “marketing planning” by inviting its chairman, Hamdi Topcu, to put on the ceremonial blindfold, stand 20 feet from the wall and throw the all-important Turkish Airlines “Dart of Truth”. The airlines marketing team then rush to the wall to discover who or what they will recruit for the coming year’s brand sponsorship strategy.

In 2009, the dart landed on movie star Kevin Costner. Despite the fact that Costner had never been to Turkey, ever flown Turkish Airlines, or had ever expressed even the most passing interest in Turkish Airlines – the “Dart of Truth” was infallible. Costner was contacted out of the blue, and paid a small fortune to fly to Istanbul and make a series of TV and print ads in which he was made to “feel like a star” on Turkish Airlines business class service.

In the behind the scenes “making of” documentary, a clearly disoriented Costner smiles amicably throughout the intensive and highly lucrative filming and then hops back onto a plane (one would hope Turkish Airlines but don’t be too sure) back to the US none the wiser, but several million dollars the richer.

In 2010, the planning process for the upcoming year began. We cannot be sure what happened behind closed doors in Istanbul this year, but it seems that when the “Dart of Truth” was thrown it landed between two distinct, ultra-expensive and entirely non-Turkish-related organizations.

First, we learned that Turkish Airlines had become the official airline of Barcelona Football Club. Once again, the airline demonstrated an ability to go for the expensive and arbitrary over the authentic and organic by paying £6.4m for a two-and-a-half-year deal to become the official airline of the Catalonian giants. Cue a super-expensive TV ad in which a Barca training session is suddenly interrupted by a Turkish Airlines jet landing nearby.

Barcelona stars Lionel Messi and Carlos Puyol – currently demonstrating their skills for Argentina and Spain, respectively, at the World Cup in South Africa – are shown gazing at the approaching cabin crew with the same benevolent confusion that Costner exhibited a year earlier. The jingle repeats “We are Turkish Airlines” over and over, presumably to remind the audience as well as the players which arbitrary airline has just turned up.

The airline demonstrated an ability to go for the expensive and arbitrary over the authentic and organic but the dart of truth had not just landed on FC Barcelona. It had also touched down at Old Trafford when the carrier signed a three-year, £7.5m deal to become Manchester United’s official airline in 2010 – again underlining the airline’s love for cost and confusion.

Whatever the process by which Turkish Airlines chooses these sponsorship targets, these decisions are symptomatic of an industry that no longer understands or even respects brand equity. Costner, Barcelona or Manchester United certainly confer global brand awareness, but beyond this simple goal, what of the more complex challenge of building brand associations? Is there even a sliver of brand heritage or genuine patronage in any of this?

Manchester United is about as English as fish and chips, just as FC Barcelona is the most Catalonian thing on the planet. Neither club has any link whatsoever to Turkey. You can only fly to Barcelona or Manchester once a day with Turkish Airlines – hardly an extensive connection. And until the deals were struck none of the players of either team, like Costner before them, had ever even sat in a Turkish Airlines plane. Gone are the days when a sponsorship deal was a more authentic and enduring relationship between brand and patron. Today, it is about big money, multiple logos and short-term contracts.

Turkish Airlines joins a Manchester United stable of more than a dozen global brands including a US sports brand, a Korean city, a German car marque and an Indian telecoms provider all claiming to be “exclusive partners” of the great British club.

The game of global sponsorship is an expensive one. The only way it can be justified is if both brand awareness and brand associations are served by the commercial relationship. Unfortunately for Turkish Airlines, its current raft of high profile, zero authenticity deals means it risks becoming one of the best known most anonymous airlines in the world.

Published by Branding Strategy Insider in partnership with Marketing Week

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Back in 2004, in an earlier, more innocent age, Northern Rock was proud to spend £25m on sponsoring Newcastle United FC. Northern Rock chief executive Adam Applegarth looked ahead to five successful seasons together and spoke of ‘a long-term relationship’. Barely three years later, everything had turned sour.

It was a similar story in 2007 for West Ham United. A £7.5m deal, worth £2.5m a year, was agreed by package holiday firm XL Holidays. But with two years of funding still to be paid, XL went bust and West Ham was left sponsorless. Last month, Manchester United suffered the same indignity when AIG announced that it would not renew its four-year sponsorship deal when it expires in 2010. AIG is also exploring options to terminate its current £56m deal. With 80% of the insurer owned by the US taxpayer and 97% of its shareholder capital lost, a glamorous global sponsorship looks a little incongruous these days.

Three big-money sponsors. Three business debacles. Coincidence? There are plenty more examples. Take Royal Bank of Scotland – currently the biggest business basket case in Britain. Aside from losing a whopping £28bn last year, RBS is also notable for the extraordinary largesse of its sponsorship department. Despite its imminent nationalization, you could still spot the brand on Andy Murray’s right sleeve in Melbourne last week, and it will be all over the British and US Open golf tournaments this summer. It’s the main sponsor of the 6 Nations rugby tournament and its brand is proudly plastered across its own F1 racing car.

Could there be a link between the kind of companies that embark on gratuitous levels of sponsorship and those currently suffering the most in these difficult times? I think so. Their troubles are not being caused directly by their sponsorship deals – though the millions off the bottom line hardly help. The real connection is more indirect. Big, dumb sponsorships are always going to be popular with the kinds of companies that think big, and don’t sweat the details.

If you run the numbers on the cost of a big sponsorship you will usually discover that the actual ROI is much less than using the money for a variety of smaller, more local, integrated activities. That’s why smart marketing players such as Tesco, P&G and Apple rarely get involved in this kind of sponsorship. But if you are a big, arrogant, ambitious and badly run operation, these global sponsorship deals prove irresistible. For the same reasons that these companies over-leveraged themselves and lost track of their costs, they also love to sponsor.

Still not convinced? Take a look at the London 2012 sponsorship list. It’s a roll call of companies in trouble. Top tier sponsor Lloyds TSB looks likely to become nationalized, which prompts the question why it is even bothering to pay its £80m sponsorship fee. Within months, it will probably be owned by the British taxpayer anyway, which means you will be paying to sponsor your own Olympics. Eh?

Another top tier sponsor, BT, is in dire shape after apparently getting its sums wrong to the tune of £340m. Things are even worse for another of 2012’s main sponsors, Nortel, which has entered bankruptcy protection.

It seems to me that the bigger the sponsor, the bigger the risk, and the more likely it is to go broke. Next time you see a football shirt, racing car, or sporting event – take note. The brands associated with them may well go to the wall in 2009. I’ll bet you all my RBS shares.

Courtesy of Marketing Magazine

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After 156 years and 38 contests, the finally returned to Europe. In April of last year, yachts from 11 nations  began competing in Valencia to see who would eventually race the current holder, the Swiss yacht Alinghi. It always is a massive event, but arguably those with the most to lose are not the yachtsmen or countries involved. In fact they play an almost peripheral role compared with the companies spending nine-figure sums to associate their brand with the event.

As I walked around Valencia, Spain’s newly designed marina it could easily be likened to visiting an exotic menagerie of big brands with some of the fattest marketing budgets on the planet. BMW and Oracle had joined forces with Allianz to sponsor the American yacht. A few meters away the French boat sponsored by Areva, the French nuclear power company. For reasons that weren’t immediately obvious, New Zealand’s entrant was sponsored by Emirates. Most companies pay upwards of $100m to be a sponsor. Meanwhile, supporter brands such as Vodafone (the official phone network), Nespresso (the official coffee) and Adecco (the official HR supplier) were also stumping up millions to be a part of it.

With stunning locations adorned with glamorous yachting fraternity, it would be all too easy for marketers to lose their focus and fall into the ancient trap of assuming anyone spending this kind of money must know what they are doing. It is exactly these big-money events at which a marketer must maintain their ROI focus. How, we should ask, can a B2B software company such as Oracle justify spending that kind of money on a yacht race? What, we may wonder, is the link between nuclear power and yachting? And what has Emirates got to do with the Kiwis?

The answer is in the two elements of brand equity. To create a strong brand, marketers must first build awareness among the target market to establish its existence. Then they need to build the right associations that will ensure differentiation and strong relationships with customers.

While it is true that most of the sponsoring brands gained significant awareness from the event, it is hard to justify their investment simply with media mentions. There were 11 boats competing for attention on the water and soon 10 of them would be out of the race.

It is even harder to prove ROI in terms of brand associations. Most of the sponsoring brands had no legitimate connection to yachting or the Cup itself, so their marketing teams were working overtime to highlight their ‘authentic’ role in the event. Alcatel-Lucent showcased the race live at its Second Life stall. BMW went to great pains to point out that four of its engineers advised on their yacht’s hull design. Apparently, researchers from the Allianz Center for Technology developed a more robust spinnaker pole for the same boat. According to Bjoern Widemann, global sponsorship manager at Allianz, ‘Allianz’s partnership with the BMW Oracle Racing Team is more than just sponsorship; we draw on our core competencies to offer specialist support that gives the team a competitive edge out there on the water.’

The real message remains much clearer. Forget marketing ROI and brand positioning and have some old-fashioned marketing fun. Girls in bikinis, sea and sunshine, millions in unmeasured marketing spend and, in the distance, the magical sound of clinking champagne flutes. All aboard!

30 SECONDS ON … AMERICA’S CUP

– The Americas Cup trophy was designed in 1848 by Garrard & Co and yachtsmen colloquially refer to it as ‘the auld jug’.

– The most famous person to have competed in the event was Sir Thomas Lipton. The Scottish tea baron tried and failed five times to win the Cup. While the Cup eluded him, his reputation as the world’s most cheerful loser built the Lipton tea brand in the US and Britain.

– Mirko Groeschner, marketing director of the BMW Oracle team, made capital out of the fact that the VIP section at the event offered an area where the team had breakfast and lunches. ‘Guests can actually see the team eating. You don’t get that with Formula 1.’

– The ultimate VIP seat was a spare 18th seat on one of the 25m sailboats alongside the crew. At least one team is considering selling the seat to raise money – the price tag is rumoured to be 1m.

– The 2007 race was won by the Swiss yacht Alinghi in the 7th race.

– Currently the sailing community has shifted its focus from the race to this nasty lawsuit.

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Instead of naming buildings after founders, civic leaders or other heroes, we now name them after the highest bidders. Historical names are replaced with the names of the brands with the biggest bucks. While this does not seem that different from a university naming a building after the philanthropist who made the building possible or a theater naming a seat after a donor who donates a certain amount of money, to many, it seems indicative of all the things that are wrong with our over commercialized society.

As an alternative, I might suggest that brands take a higher road, “Adopt a Highway” or underwrite specific museum or gallery exhibits, or sponsor certain performances. While it might require more thought and effort to underwrite specific events, performances, community projects and other worthwhile causes, I believe the public will give the brand credit for choosing to support certain worthwhile community-enhancing activities rather than just slapping its name on a building for a large sum of money. Somehow, the latter makes the brand seem much less self-serving, much more community oriented and much more likable.

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