Festival Media Corp. is leveraging the Internet to help brands tap the 200 million event and festival audience in the U.S., and even coordinate efforts to reach the 1 billion audience worldwide.
The Seattle-based event sponsorship automation company announced at PROMO Expo that it is launching SponsorFest, an Internet-based service for planning, purchasing and evaluating of sponsoring community festivals.
The platform allows festival producers to profile their individual sponsorable assets, such as banners, venues or product sampling rights via the online interface. The program then matches sponsor requests to festival assets, and recommends a preferred list of festivals to the sponsor; it allows online negotiation and adjustment of an individual festival's package or price. FMC then makes the purchase for the sponsor, and puts the festival producer in contact with the sponsor.
"SponsorFest offers national sponsors and agencies a single source to plan and select community festival audiences by consumer demographic profiles, sales or marketing promotion goals, target geographies, and other dimensions taken for granted in mass media but never before possible in the community festival segment of event marketing," said Charles D. Brown, chairman and CEO of FMC.
According to Brown, more than 60 U.S. festivals have signed onto the SponsorFest program.
In other company news, FMC announced that Brad Davis has accepted a position on its board of directors. Davis, elected to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Hall of Fame in 2004, is the chairman of the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA), a national organization comprised of the top marketing officers in major retail companies throughout the United States. He was also behind the Washington Mutual campaign, Broadway for Teachers, that was the winner of the 2003 PRO Award for Best Campaign of the Year. Davis delivered the keynote address to PROMO Expo attendees yesterday.
