Perspective: Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi and Saatchi
The ROI that sponsorship has to bother itself with has changed. Return on Involvement is where the game is going to be played and sponsorship will get obliterated if it measures itself as it does now on awareness and eyeballs, because those are the wrong, wrong measures in today’s age. We’ve moved from the Attention Economy into an Attraction Economy. Whereas eyeballs mattered, the question now is how do you attract consumers to feel loyalty beyond reason? How do you develop priceless value? Can sponsorships demonstrate priceless value? Can they demonstrate purpose, enrichment and involvement?
What does women’s tennis bring to Sony Ericsson in terms of involvement and enrichment or happiness or purpose to the base proposition? That is the question that women’s tennis has to answer. Sponsorship is talking about the wrong stuff and some of the stories are juvenile. It’s trying to compete with traditional media with the old-fashioned metrics, and it’s going to lose. Sponsorships are all about emotion, yet most of them are still sold rationally. If I were a sponsorship property now I’d be investing my money in new techniques that attempt to measure emotional connectivity and predict involvement.
The reason brands are interested in music and sport is because they’re shortcuts to people’s hearts. Every brand has to deliver the rational stuff - product, performance, quality, distribution, at a price that is competitive. If it doesn’t, it’s dead. But in this economy that is not enough. It has to demonstrate that it’s authentic, true and genuine - and certainly not manipulative. Consumers will get supremely tired, very quickly, about anything that is not authentic and deeply rooted in the brand. David Ogilvy said it very smartly 25 years ago - the consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife. Sports fans are not morons but sometimes they get treated like it. Most of the great sponsorships are grounded in the fans.
Much of what Coca-Cola does in sport is really admirable because they do it from the fans’ point of view. Toyota is another company that really gets sport sponsorship if you see what they do with Munster rugby and the Heineken cup. Some of the other stuff just tries hard but there is no link - and fans and consumers just look at it and say there’s something wrong: it’s not authentic or credible.
Nothing in marketing that we did over the last three years is going to necessarily sustain over the next three years. We are entering an era where consumers have all the power, because they have masses of information. The rules of marketing are about to change from demand and control to connectivity and collaboration. The best brands will look to collaborate with like-minded partners, who get that they are a triumvirate of property, brand and consumer, all as equal partners. Most sponsors come at this from the wrong end of the spectrum, focused on brand equity or financial return, and the consumer is treated like something at the end of the line.
