Live from Intercollegiate Sports Forum: Corporate Sponsors Play It Cool
For corporate sponsors playing the National Collegiate Athletic Association sponsorship game, the tactical caveat is pushing the brand without beating students and alumni over the head with their presence.
“There’s a fine line between being omnipresent and obnoxious,” said Tim McGhee, director of national sponsorships for AT&T Mobility, at the Intercollegiate Sports Forum in New York City sponsored by SportsBusiness Journal.
While AT&T Mobility doesn’t use athletes as spokespeople, it does rely heavily on their presence for video clips in their current deals with CBS Sports around the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and its SEC conference sponsorship deals.
AT&T sees spikes in customers accessing video clips toward the climax of the college football and basketball seasons. Gauging that usage on a monthly basis to measure the number of unique video users, and ringtone sales of college songs, is a primary way AT&T justifies its spending in the college sports sponsorship arena, McGhee said.
AT&T plans to produce a series of video clips of college basketball coaches commenting on their Final Four experiences just prior to next year’s tournament climax in March.
“We want fans to keep coming back for clips. We think that’s a great way to do that in the run-up to the Final Four,” McGhee said.
Coca-Cola plans to launch a new campaign of games and contests on college campuses around its Coke Zero brand during the current NCAA basketball season, according to Allyson Young, senior marketing manager for colleges at Coca-Cola North America, with 18-to-24-year-old males as the primary target.
Coca-Cola got considerable traction from a Coke Zero gaming promotion it ran with Electronic Arts on college campuses this year, trying to redress what Young called Coke’s “stodgy” image. The soft drink superpower maintains 400 contractual relationships with colleges and ran more than 200 sweepstakes promoted through local distributors this year.
But Young emphasized that sports is simply an entry point.
“Sports is fantastic, but you want to touch people’s lives,” she said.
So Coke is planning a major recycling campaign on college campuses and will open 30 recycling centers around the country next year as part of that effort.
Pontiac has gained promotional traction with its Game-Changing Performance contest with ESPN, featuring online voting through the ESPN site for the college football play of the week. The 13 plays selected through the regular season are now being winnowed to four plays, with the ultimate winner to be revealed just prior to the BCS national championship game.
The goal of the program is to develop exposure for the brand. Chris Hornberger, Pontiac advertising manager, indicated that his company’s research showed NCAA fans are 30% more likely to consider purchasing a Pontiac.
“We’re not trying to sell cars,” he said. “We’re just trying to build relationships.”
The Game-Changing Performance drew between 50,000 to 100,000 hits on the Pontiac web site weekly.
Pontiac awards $5,000 in scholarship funds to the four schools whose teams are represented as finalists in the competition. And that result certainly would figure to make students and alumni favorably disposed to considering a Pontiac as a potential vehicle of choice.
