When you think of the UEFA Champions League and sponsors, you think of Heineken. When you think of Formula 1 and sponsors, you probably think of Heineken as well.

Heineken could have reached those synonymous positions simply through longevity of logo slapping and the long association of sport and beer. We have all, however, seen the amazing activations Heineken executes.

Heineken is a huge company, with 25 million Heinekens served each day across 192 countries. Like all great companies though, they evolve and lead. It has been fantastic to see Heineken’s commitment to women’s sport and the integration of their zero-alcohol beer into existing sponsorships.

To take us inside sponsorship at Heineken, Thomas Mulders, Senior Global Sponsorship Manager, joins us on the show. Thomas is closing in on eight years at Heineken, having begun in marketing and social media at the Heineken Experience. These days Thomas manages UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Europe Conference League sponsorships at a global level. He also manages partnerships with top-tier museums in Amsterdam.

In the show, there is mention of some amazing activations Heineken has undertaken. Be sure to check out these links.

Heineken – The Jonah Lomu Machine
Heineken – The Dilemma
Heineken – The Negotiation

Enjoy

We are very privileged to be able welcome such amazing guests onto this show and chat to them about their work. And, despite the ongoing challenges faced by the world, 2022 gave us another round of great guests and episodes full of excellent advice, insights, and experiences.

Now, as always, we’ve wrapped up the year and re-visited the 12 episodes of Inside Sponsorship from 2022. You might have seen on social media that, for each show, we pull out a 30-45 second snippet and turn it into a video to help whet your appetite. As such, we’ve gone back and pulled the full question and answer, for that snippet, and created a best of 2022 show for you.

Enjoy.

It feels pretty redundant to note that there has been a lot of change in the world in recent times and, of course, those working in the sponsorship space know this only too well.

Included on that front is the employment market, a popular news topic at the moment. There are fewer people moving between countries, people returning home to their countries, and talk of the great resignation, silent quitting, and employment padding.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that the industry still needs quality professionals to sell, manage, and activate sponsorships. That’s why, in this episode, we’ll take a look at the current employment market and how it relates to sponsorship professionals and sports and entertainment more broadly.

To help us do that, Jonathan Harris, Managing Partner, ANZ, at SRI, joins us.

SRI is an executive search and consulting firm focused on driving individual, team and organisational performance in converging and transforming industries: media, entertainment, gaming & esports, fashion, technology, sport, and sporting goods.

So, whether you are looking to make a move to a new job, or you want to attract and retain the best talent, Jonathan is well-placed to provide us with an update.

You can connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and find out more about SRI on their website.

Enjoy

The sponsorship industry can be guilty, sometimes, of just rolling out the same old properties activated in the same old ways. We all cringe at the thought of logo slapping and chairman’s choice sponsorships, yet it still happens. 

Innovation is what can give a sponsorship a competitive advantage. Whether that is better awareness and positioning for brands versus their competitors, access to target audiences, better ROI/ROO, or whether it is just a stronger overall relationship.

In the end, innovative sponsorships become a very attractive commodity. Of course, creativity is synonymous with innovation and while many people working in sponsorship are good at their jobs, they don’t often describe themselves as ‘creative’. 

So, if we know innovation drives better outcomes, and we need to be creative to be innovative, how do we help ensure that happens on a consistent basis in our sponsorships? 

It’s a question for all three sides: rights holders, brands, and agencies.

To help answer that question, one of Australia’s most recognised innovators, Adam Ferrier, Founder and Consumer Psychologist at Thinkerbell, joins us.

You can connect with Adam on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

I highly recommend checking out his Black T-shirts Podcast, I’m a listener myself. Adam also has two books – Stop Listening to the Consumer: Try Hearing Your Brand Instead as well as The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour.

Enjoy.

As we know, sponsorship is one of the most effective means of marketing. 

In a US$60 billion industry (and growing) where brands spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on sponsorship, the ‘gut feel’ is still largely being used. As such, the biggest challenge marketers face is quantifying ROI.

It is a challenging situation and often traces back to disparate data sources, a lack of measurement framework, or even consistent KPIs.

For brands, those things have long been an issue … and then COVID came along and brands were forced to really evaluate their sponsorship portfolio.

As such, the age-old question, for brands, “How do we properly manage, measure, and optimize our sponsorship portfolio?” has become so much more important.

The answer is a single source of truth and to help us unpack what that means, and why it is critical, Scott Tilton, EVP, Sponsorship Analytics at KORE Software, joins us.

You can connect with Scott on LinkedIn and learn more about KORE’s Portfolio Optimization platform here. 

Enjoy.

On 29 July 1948, the day of the Opening Ceremony of the London 1948 Olympic Games, the first competition for wheelchair athletes, which was named the Stoke Mandeville Games, involved 16 injured servicemen and women who took part in archery.

Fast forward from its humble beginnings, and the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics in Japan featured 4403 athletes from 161 countries.

Ryan Neiswender was one of those athletes, winning a gold medal in wheelchair basketball, for the USA, and he joins the show to discuss paralympic and disabled sports sponsorship.

Ryan is a Visa sponsored athlete as Visa’s connections to the Olympic and Paralympic Games extend beyond simply their sponsorship of the Games. Visa understands that the skills that make Olympians and Paralympians successful in sport extend to the workforce as well. As such, a number of elite athletes have taken the opportunity to join their global team where they are investing in their careers.

Ryan is one of those elite athletes and is a Digital Partnerships, Senior Manager at Visa. As such, this chat is really insightful as Ryan can speak from both sides of the fence – rights holder and sponsor.

There are 1.3 billion people in the world who are living with a disability and those 1.3 billion people have a combined disposable income of US$13 trillion.

While the world is largely focussing on digital, Web3, crypto, and blockchain, as new sectors and opportunities to develop in sponsorship, maybe there’s been an opportunity right under our noses the whole time.

If you would like to learn more about Ryan, visit his website ryanneiswender.com You can connect with Ryan on LinkedIn and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Enjoy.

Worldwide, Rugby Union boasts 500 million fans and 10 million players within 128 national member federations affiliated through six regional associations.

The driving force behind the sport’s significant growth has been World Rugby’s portfolio of major events, from the flagship men’s and women’s Rugby World Cups and U20 Championship to the excitement of the men’s and women’s Rugby World Cup Sevens and HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series which are instrumental in attracting new fans. Plus, Rugby Union is now an Olympic Games when it returned to the Olympic Games program at Rio 2016 with rugby sevens and, of course, rugby sevens is also a Commonwealth Games sport.

In Australia, Rugby Australia is the sport’s national governing body and is a member of World Rugby, Oceania Rugby, and SANZAAR.

In Australia, Rugby Australia is the sport’s national governing body. It essentially arranges it’s commercial program around three pillars – the classic 15-a-side teams, for both men and women, the newer sevens teams, for both men and women, and classic wallabies, a program for past players.

It is an exciting time for Rugby Australia as they have a huge calendar of events coming up over the next 10 years or so with both Men’s and Women’s World Cups, multiple Olympics and Commonwealth Games, and a British and Irish Lions tour.

Today, James Durbin, Chief Commercial Officer, takes us inside sponsorship at Rugby Australia.

If you would like to connect with James, you can do so on LinkedIn and you can find out more about Rugby Australia at www.rugby.com.au

One thing we have been thinking about, for some time, is creating a curated list of the host’s personal favourite insights or pieces of advice from our guests.

We have always envisaged it to be a bit of an anchor or touchpoint for those of you with lots of sponsorship industry experience, in the sense that you can always revisit it and be validated or inspired again. Or, for those new to the industry, a condensed show of lots of great advice from lots of smart guests to help you on your journey.

As such, in this episode, our host has hand-picked 14 of his favourite pieces of sponsorship advice and insights from 109 episodes.

The best of the best!

Enjoy