Citi did not renew its U.S. Olympic Committee sponsorship because its payment card business could not activate the Games without conflicting with global IOC sponsor Visa, Global Managing Dir of Sponsorships & Marketing Tina Davis confirmed Wednesday. “For us, it was in 2015, our [payment] cards business transitioned from a probably 50-50 split of MasterCard and Visa, to 100 percent MasterCard, with the exception of the Costco brand,” Davis said while on a panel at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in N.Y. "And with that shift, globally, it was becoming increasingly difficult for our largest line of business to leverage an important, high-profile portfolio, so we decided to move on." Another recently departed USOC sponsor, AT&T, was represented on the same panel by Assistant VP/Corporate Sponsorships Ryan Luckey. He said that AT&T left amid disagreements over the definitions of the rapidly evolving technology and communications space, a challenge he said has hit all of AT&T’s portfolio. “Our category has evolved, and as we sat down and talked about what our category looked like in the future, if those two things don’t line up, really, we’re not doing service for our brand if we’re only doing partial categories,” Luckey said. Both gave the USOC high reviews for productive relationships while their sponsorships were active. Comcast has replaced AT&T in a reworked communications category, and financial services remains vacant for Team USA.
QUICK HITS: In a 40-minute conversation about sports marketing, both called on properties to create more flexible contracts that account for rapid changes in technology and the competitive landscape. “We’re in the payment service industry," Davis said. "So we know everyone has a credit card, but now the credit card sits on iPhone, so now Apple is involved, and payment goes over their service, AT&T, so how do we ensure in our deals that we get the right to do what we want to do, in terms of activations without this collision once this deal was signed?" Luckey pointed to AT&T Stadium in Dallas, which along with being a major brand awareness play also is home to massive expenditure of wireless bandwidth. There was a 6.5-fold increase in data sent inside that stadium in the 18 months after opening, he said. “The more we do, the more the traffic and video content is going to go over that network,” Luckey said. “What that’s doing for us in sponsorship is forcing us to pivot from intellectual property-based deals to looking for video content.” Citi is under pressure to justify its sponsorship deals internally, Davis said, and that requires the property to be open to different ways of activating. The financial services institution has launched internal software that allows her team to track every sponsorship across the enterprise and look for efficiencies and ways to combine efforts. Davis said: "We’re constantly trying to rationalize and validate why this property is important, and the only way we can do that is to give each specific line of business the kind of assets they deem valuable to them."
