The NFL lockout is forcing corporate marketers to spend twice as much time developing activation plans for the ‘11 season, a panel of sponsorship execs said during a panel titled “Sponsorship Value and Innovation: The New Realities of Sports Marketing.” Marketers are developing both regular and contingency activation plans for the NFL season. It is an effort that PepsiCo VP/Sports Marketing Jeff Dubiel called duplicative. “It's extra resources and extra time,” Dubiel said. It is also an effort that could hurt the return on Pepsi’s activation because it has had to water down its NFL-themed retail displays so that they can be dumbed down from an authentic NFL display to a local college football team. Proctor & Gamble and its Gillette brand are in a similar situation and have reached a pivotal point in their NFL activation plans, said Global Sports Marketing Dir Greg Via. The company has developed both NFL- and non-NFL-related POS displays, and retailers will make a decision on which one to feature this May. Similarly, Visa has been speaking to its member banks to keep them abreast of the NFL’s situation so that they can elect which marketing materials they choose to use this season. Visa Head of Global Sponsorship Management Michael Lynch: “Our plans and our hope is that we’re all systems go. ... Everyone is hoping like hell it’s going to be reconciled in time. It’s that powerful a property that we are planning as if things are going to happen.” Anheuser-Busch, which is starting the first year of a six-year deal valued at more than $1B, will test the public appetite for the NFL during the lockout by launching a Bud Light promotion against the upcoming NFL Draft. A-B VP/Media, Sports and Entertainment Marketing Mark Wright said, “We’re all guns ablazing.”
THE EVER-ELUSIVE ROI: Marketers are still struggling to measure return-on-investment effectively, but the recent recession helped them unearth some formulas that work for their brands. Pepsi has begun measuring a sponsorship’s effect on brand health, how it delivers against key objectives, and whether or not it is using all of the assets delivered in a sponsorship contract. Dubiel: “We have a disciplined audit process where a couple of times a year we’re going to report out -- yes we got it, down to the picture at an NFL stadium. It forces everyone to think a lot harder about the returns and what we’ve signed up for.” In recent years, A-B also has focused on a sponsorship’s effect on its brand health. Lynch said that since Visa went public in ‘08 the company’s management has been increasingly insistent that he show the value of a sponsorship. Lynch: “I can’t talk to my management now without talking numbers first. ... As a global company, are we making money off this investment or not? If we’re not making money, we won’t be renewing this deal.” P&G’s marketing objectives increasingly focus on what the results of a promotion are at retail, so it has pushed its agency partners to be more creative in designing programs that help move products at retail. Via: “We don’t have a good handle on it at all. We know when we run a commercial and that commercial is tied to a property and tied to retail activation and shelf space, we can say, ‘OK. We sold product off that.’ And that’s the best way we’ve found.”
