By Paul Birdwell (paul@roaringforkagency.com)
We here at the Roaring Fork Agency have been talking recently with an established middle-sized but fast-growing American company about launching a worldwide global brand sponsorship campaign with the challenge being this company would like to expand its reach into new markets around the world without spending a whole lot of money = under 5 million dollars total.
Event sponsorship is an efficient way to introduce a company brand into new markets because unlike digital advertising which is easy to execute but can be hit and miss with a lot of fraud to boot and thus can be a major drain on company marketing dollars…see the latest on this problem in New York Magazine….
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually, Max Reed, New York Magazine
…a company can be assured that if it sponsors “X event” in “Y market” it will get “Z number” of people that will see its company brand that will not just be a guess based on faulty and often pulled from the sky data like with digital advertising.
The Forbes Agency Council recently asked marketing experts how a company could go about launching a global brand sponsorship campaign and came up with some great advice that we are going to add to our approaches to doing sponsorship campaigns in America and around the world especially for a company like our client focused on really getting the most bang for their buck!
1. Prioritize Goals and Recognizing Your Audience
2. Find Alignment With Your Beliefs and Image
3. Find Someone Who’s Passionate About Where You’re Headed
4. Clarify The Value You Bring To Your Partner
5. Consider The Long-Term Impact
We would add to the above Five Considerations the importance of…
6. Having A Plan In Place In Each Market To Maximize the Value of the Sponsorship
7. Measuring the Bottom-Line Value of the Sponsorship by Tracking Sales After the Event
As the late great David Ogilvy, legendary advertising man and founder of the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, said when it comes to whether advertising is creative or not which we always have uppermost in our minds….
“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
….the focus at the Roaring Fork Agency when executing sponsorship plans for our clients is to emphasize on getting the company’s brand and offerings into the targeted marketplace in front of the right potential customers so that it leads to increased sales of the company’s products and/or services.
With the above in mind, one of the things we talk to clients about all the time is their specific goals for not only a proposed sponsorship campaign but also whether the goals of the marketing department within the company are FAST.
What is FAST exactly when it comes to setting goals you ask?
FAST is an acronym for an approach to setting and achieving goals that focus on four critical things:
F = Frequently Discussed
A = Ambitious
S = Specific
T = Transparent
The MIT Sloan Management Review wrote an article this past Summer that spoke directly to the idea of FAST goals with a section of that article quoted below:
With Goals, FAST Beats SMART, Donald Sull and Charles Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review
“In 1954, management guru Peter Drucker introduced “management by objectives,” an approach where employees would agree with their boss on a set of goals and work toward achieving those objectives throughout the year. Not even a visionary like Drucker, however, could have predicted how thoroughly goals would come to dominate the modern workplace. In 95% of organizations, according to a recent survey, employees set goals for themselves or their teams.
When it comes to setting goals, most managers follow a well-established set of practices. They hold one-on-one meetings with their subordinates to set goals, and then they review performance against those objectives at year end and link their appraisal to promotion and bonus decisions. These same managers aspire to make their goals SMART, by ensuring they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
The conventional wisdom of goal setting is so deeply ingrained that managers rarely stop to ask a fundamental question — does it work? The traditional approach to goals — the annual cycle, privately set and reviewed goals, and a strong linkage to incentives — can actually undermine the alignment, coordination, and agility that’s needed for a company to execute its strategy. Expecting employees to hit 100% of their targets to earn their bonus, for example, creates strong motivation for them to “sandbag” by setting conservative targets they are sure to achieve. And when goals are kept private, employees don’t know what colleagues in other teams are working on.
Goals can drive strategy execution but only when they are aligned with strategic priorities, account for critical interdependencies across silos, and enable course corrections as circumstances change. If these conditions aren’t met, every employee could achieve their individual goals, but the organization as a whole could still fail to execute its strategy.
If the traditional approach to goals cannot ensure successful strategy execution, what’s the alternative? Over the past few decades, a handful of leading companies including Google, Intel, and Anheuser-Busch InBev have pioneered and refined an alternative approach to harness the power of goals to drive and align action. To understand how this new approach works, we studied these companies and others, analyzed a proprietary data set of more than half a million goals, and reviewed the academic literature on goal setting.
We found that four core principles underpin effective goal systems, and we summarize these elements with the acronym FAST. (See “Make Goals FAST, Not SMART.”) Goals should be embedded in frequent discussions; ambitious in scope; measured by specific metrics and milestones; and transparent for everyone in the organization to see.”
We have found here at the Roaring Fork Agency that having a FAST approach to setting goals it is a lot easier to achieve the stated goals for our clients because everyone at our agency and within the client organization that we are working with knows exactly what goals we are trying to achieve, how we are planning to achieve those goals, and most important of all:
If the sponsorship campaign was able to achieve those goals and if not, why not?
Like our client that is now looking at doing a global brand sponsorship campaign to drive their company and brand into new markets in an efficient way as possible with a limited budget, if you are interested in talking with the Roaring Fork Agency about how we can help you expand your company’s reach around the world with sponsorship we can be easily reached and are ready to talk to you at the below numbers.
Just give us a call!
If you have any questions about event sponsorship or venue naming rights contact the Roaring Fork Agency at:
info@roaringforkagency.com
San Francisco, California - 415 730 - 4854
Lake Tahoe, Nevada – 775 374 - 6400
Bend, Oregon – 541 237 – 8080
Honolulu, Hawaii - 808 638 - 2600
Twitter - @RoaringForkAgcy