The Art of Selling: Sponsorship 101
 Email to Friend
|
|
The Art of Selling: Sponsorship 101
|
|
|
|
By David Cameron, Italy
Atlas F1 Magazine Writer
|
Table of Contents includes links to each chapter
|
|
Most of the smaller teams have been complaining this year about the cost of going racing, and FIA President Max Mosley made a swathe of changes to the rulebook to try and save all the teams a few dollars. With the world economy tightening its belt, new sponsorship opportunities would seem to be few and far between. This notwithstanding, Wright and his team have managed to bring a few new sponsors into the team over the last six months - most notably NiQuitnCQ and Budweiser - seemingly bucking the economic trend of the recent past.
But how hard is it to find money for the teams these days? Says Wright: "Well I think the first answer is that it's hard not just these days; it's always been tough to find money. The kind of money that we need to look for is millions of dollars, and those decisions aren't made lightly. I think increasingly, over the last five years certainly, there's so many checks and balances within companies now that you never convince one guy and he says we're going to do it and the deal's done."
"Ultimately," Wright continues, "if you can convince one guy - and it's normally a marketing director - he then has to go to the other board members and convince them that it's the right thing to do. And that's the tricky part, because quite often we're not given that opportunity to make that presentation, so you're reliant on someone to do that for you second hand. And a question could be asked from the board, or a negative response from the board, and if we were there we'd probably have a good positive reply to it, and you sometimes find yourself in that situation where deals break down because you're not able to communicate to the other decision makers. "To answer the question, it's always been difficult to find money. At the moment, yes, it's more difficult, but it's difficult to find money in any form of advertising medium - ask the guys who are selling advertising on any television station in the world and they'll say it's more difficult. But I think what this means is that you've got to have more initiative, you've got to think outside the box not only in terms of which companies you are approaching, but also in how you make that approach. "You have to try and make it easy for them by thinking through why they may say no and have the answers for them. And the way we do it is that we have a team of three guys in acquisitions, and they are responsible for going out and selling. These days I don't do very much in the way of selling, but some of the deals where I had a personal dealing, like some of the sponsors that I brought in, and some of the new leads do still come to me and I will follow through on them. But ultimately it's three guys who work on it, and they work flat out." With the sheer variety of business sectors that have been or are involved in Formula One, it is a difficult task to track down a new one, but with the pending removal of tobacco sponsorship the marketers have had to search for alternatives. The Allianz deal was one such solution found by Wright, although pitching a sport involving cars at speed and potential crashes to an insurance company was not an easy sell. "Well you're right, and on one of the occasions we were looking after them at the Nurburgring, Pedro Diniz had his massive shunt at the first corner, and we though 'oh my God'. "But you know, he stepped out of the car and he was unhurt, and we said 'there you go, that's precisely what we're talking to you about - this is a risk management'. And we were talking about developing a risk management image for Allianz which was based around safety in Formula One, and you'll notice all of their exploitation work is to do with safety of cars, safety of drivers, safety of circuits. One of the things they provided to journalists this years was the lexicon of safety - A is for Armco, G is for Gravel Traps, K is for Kerbs and so on. "I can't pretend it was an easy sell - it wasn't, it was very, very hard - and we also tried to involve the FIA, because the FIA is obviously the governance of safety, and we were keen for them to get involved. And they did to begin with, but some of the other teams complained that the FIA was helping us to get sponsors. I find that small minded, because here we are bringing in a new category of sponsor to Formula One, and there are a lot of insurance companies out there." Wright did such a good job of selling Formula One to Allianz that they have now extended their sponsorship to include on-track signage at a variety of the circuits, although naturally he feels this is not of much value to a sponsor. "We would contend that the on-track signage is not something that we would support - we have evidence to show that that doesn't work. Paddy McNally, who does sell on-track signage, probably has research to show it does work. "I think what it does do is give people in the corridors of the companies that take on-circuit advertising a warm feeling, because they turn on their TVs and they see the circuit advertising, and because they are looking out for it they see it and say, 'okay, that's great, it's massive', and maybe also at a time when we weren't winning races that gave them a feeling of comfort. "I think there was also a lot of corporate one-upmanship going on in Germany at the time, with Deutsche Post taking a lot of on-circuit advertising, and if Deutsche Post did it, Allianz should do it. But certainly we can prove through research that the value of circuit advertising is zero - it's wallpaper. I mean, you watch a football game, can you honestly tell me who was on the perimeter boards?"
© 1995-2005 Kaizar.Com, Inc.
. This service is provided under the Atlas F1 terms and conditions.
Please Contact Us for permission to republish this or any other material from Atlas F1. |
|
|
Wright is most likely alluding to the case of Jordan versus Vodafone that is now awaiting the decision of the High Court in London. The Jordan team are suing mobile phone giants Vodafone for $150 million UK pounds, claiming that Vodafone had a binding agreement to sponsor Jordan Grand Prix, after global branding director David Haines told Eddie Jordan 'You've got the deal'. Vodafone deny there was any binding contract.
