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28.7.2010 Big ideas prove key in sponsorship success

Brand owners hoping to make the most of their sponsorship programs must embrace big ideas to achieve the best results, recent initiatives from Procter & Gamble and Visa suggest.

The Winter Olympics, held in Vancouver at the start of the year, attracted numerous major advertisers seeking to connect with shoppers around the world.

Visa, the financial services provider, devised a global platform promoting its affiliation with 33 competitors and national teams from the US, Canada, China, Japan and Russia. The company developed an overarching theme of sporting excellence, with this message then tailored to 27 individual countries.

Procter & Gamble, the FMCG giant, spent an estimated $15m to become a partner of Team USA, a tie-up it employed to engage its core audience with "Thanks Mom" campaign during the Winter Games. This creative was based on the sacrifices required by mothers in raising a medal-winning athlete, and also constituted the first ever multi-brand push run by the manufacturer of Tide and Pampers.

Coca-Cola's marketing surrounding the FIFA World Cup similarly exploited a unifying topic of celebration in more than 100 countries. This supported the notion of "Open Happiness" which has formed the basis of much of the beverage maker's current output.

"Our worldwide FIFA World Cup activation was a tremendous success, bringing Coca-Cola to billions of consumers across cities, across towns, villages and living rooms the world over," Muhtar Kent, its CEO, said on a conference call last week.

"We have leveraged one campaign throughout 116 markets and drove our most unified marketing communications effort yet, all by capitalizing on our global scale while communicating locally relevant, as well as compelling stories that meaningfully connect with consumers all over the world."

B.L. 28.7.2010