Marketer, Should You Try Brand Sponsorship?

Sponsorship can be a powerful tool for boosting brand awareness and engagement, but it requires commitment. Sponsorship is the right strategy for your brand when you have certain long-term goals in mind and you are able to build it with the right tools.

There are numerous ways a brand can go about sponsorship to stand out or boost marketing efforts. Visibility through tv sponsorship, for example, is a way to reach audiences quickly and with precision. Television, radio and social media are the most consumed media by Finns – they watch television about 2 hours and 50 minutes per day.

“Television is the most effective media, but you also need the courage to invest time and money in it,”

Television is an excellent avenue for marketers. “Television is the most effective media, but you also need the courage to invest time and money in it,” says Merita Lantto, Creative Strategist at Sanoma.

When may sponsorship be a better option than other options, such as in-stream or spot advertising? First make sure you can check these 3 questions.

1) You can organically link a brand with a programme

Popular format tv shows, like Big Brother or Voice of Finland, provide a great channel for embedding a brand’s name or message. Sponsoring a programme has huge potential: a vast audience, guaranteed to sit in front of the tv at a particular moment, consuming every word on the screen. Branding or product placement in the midst of it all can be highly effective.

However, the programme needs to be just right for the brand – it should never be forced. If the connection is not clear in the viewer’s mind immediately, it isn’t there, and can even harm your marketing efforts.

So, make sure that the show is selected just right. You may consider having a creative partner involved in the process. “If the client’s brand is not suitable for a certain format, we as professionals will always tell the client,” Lantto notes. 

2) You are in it for the long haul

Advertisers know that unless the world turns upside down in one day, brand awareness does not happen overnight. This applies here, too. Building the brand and reaping the results through sponsorship requires time and enough monetary investments. A minimum budget for producing desirable results, say 20,000 euros, may be too high for smaller companies. On the other hand, the results of brand differentiation through sponsorship can have immeasurable value.

One of the reasons television and radio are so effective is that they are built around repetition. Having your brand displayed week after week to a huge number of viewers yields all types of results, in the short and long term. Sponsorship is very different from spot advertising and cannot include tactical messages, such as product descriptions or price – as such, it’s all about persistence.

3) You want to market with emotion

According to Lantto, audiovisual marketing is the most effective advertising solution, when it comes to consumers’ media behaviour and appealing to their feelings.

Television is one of the best ways to do this, since it includes moving image and audio. If a brand latches onto particular format tv shows or themes, such as interior design, there is already a format in place designed to prompt a reaction, move the viewer. Another option is to build campaigns around a particular target audience, say women aged 25–54, which then determines the shows that are included.

People who watch their favourite sports team or show with dedication time after time will most likely already have a strong emotional bond with it. For a marketer, this is a delicious opportunity to tap into that dedication, get the brand across as a sponsor or launch a product. When you throw some radio into the mix or include a consumer competition, chances are it won’t go unnoticed.

Range of television advertising opportunities

If you don’t quite have the budget for it, or you want to reach your target audience with a particular product via television, you might want to skip sponsorship and go for spot advertising instead. If you do decide on sponsorship, there are different ways to build successful campaigns.

Sanoma is happy to help you in getting started or offering different sponsorship models. It’s important to make sure you reach your audiences with just the right channel mix and strategy. 

Sanoma integrates creative solutions in all different media categories. “We can combine a creative idea across media and through multiple channels, such as television, radio and native advertising – helping to produce an even stronger sponsorship campaign," says Sebastian Wikman, International Key Account Manager at Sanoma.

Planning on a new advertising strategy? Find out more about Finland as a market