A review of existing research into how broadcast sponsorship works

David Brennan
Thinkbox Research & Strategy Director

When I was asked to produce this review of existing research into the effectiveness of broadcast sponsorship, I thought it would be a relatively easy job. After all, there are hundreds of case studies out there, and TV sponsorship has been in the public eye for 18 years now, since those first tentative programme idents were allowed by the (then) ITC back in 1989. 18 years of activity – surely we must know an awful lot about how it works. Well, yes….and no.

My enthusiasm quickly turned to concern after I ran a search on the WARC¹ website for relevant papers and research studies. Believe it or not, the first three papers I downloaded contained the following three statements;

“Despite its popularity, however, (broadcast) sponsorship has received only limited research attention”                   POON & PRENDERGAST (2006)

“So far, studies of sponsorship effectiveness have yielded inconsistent findings. This is ascribed partly to a lack of understanding of the fundamental mechanisms behind consumer’s reactions to sponsorship stimuli”                        CHRISTENSEN (2006)

“Overall, little is known about the conditions which lead to successful and durable image transfer from the sponsored activity to the sponsor"         WALLISER (2003)

Of course, as usual, the academics have got it wrong in some respects – there have been numerous studies done on individual sponsorship campaigns. There is, however, a grain of truth in these assertions; we know how well individual sponsorship campaigns have performed, but there is still a lot to learn about how and why sponsorship works so well generically.

This is not totally surprising – the market for broadcast sponsorship in the UK is still a relatively new one, with the first examples not hitting our screens until 1989. In that time, we have seen a growing list of advertisers use the vehicle, a rapidly increasing range of programmes available for sponsorship and a constantly changing regulatory framework opening up new creative opportunities. In such a climate, it is no wonder research has been somewhat on the back foot. That said, the commercial broadcasters, the research agencies and the world of academia have, between them, opened up our understanding considerably.

WHAT DO THE CONSUMERS THINK?

Back in the 1990’s, I ran a research project called ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Clutter’ for the ITV Network Centre, examining the ecology of commercial breaks. An overriding conclusion of the study was that viewers enjoy the ‘punctuation’ (their word, not mine) of breaks, with a special regard for sponsorship messages as they frame the breaks themselves, as well as providing a smooth transition between programme and advertising. Our recent Engagement Study reached very similar conclusions.

Viewers want to understand the link between the sponsored programme and the brand, and they will often deconstruct the creative to get at that understanding. It’s part of the game – not unlike the ‘guess the ad’ game htat many viewers play during the commercial breaks. That is why changes in sponsor are often assimilated relatively quickly.

Viewers understand that the sponsorship is in itself a commercial message but they see it as ‘same, same but different’ – it is softer and more implicit than a straightforward spot ad. Generally, their perception of sponsorships is positive – they can be enjoyed if the creative is good and the fit works, and they rarely irritate. In 18 years of tracking broadcast sponsorships via the Television Opinion Monitor, there are never more than a handful of respondents who express negative views about specific sponsorships, or about sponsorship in general.

The differences between sponsorship and spot ads are apparent in the different ways viewers engage with them. Sponsorship was part of the remit of our recent Engagement Study, but because running lengths are relatively short and the messages are part of something else (the programme), we found that eyes on screen were higher for sponsorship messages compared to spots, but there were markedly less observable engagement-related behaviours associated with them. This supports the theory that sponsorship works on a more implicit level than spot ads, and that we need to apply sensitivity to how we measure their impact.

WHAT ARE THE OUTCOMES OF SPONSORSHIP?

We know a lot about the outcomes of sponsorship, because our stakeholders have been tracking them continuously.

We know that broadcast sponsorships of events can completely overwhelm the event or team sponsors, as was demonstrated during the first major sponsorship I ever worked on; the 1993 Rugby World Cup on ITV.

We also have evidence that sponsorship often works in softer, more subtle ways, affecting things like employee motivation or retail shelf space. It is when we measure performance against a wide range of ROI metrics, though, that sponsorship really comes into its own. On the Thinkbox website we have a large number of case histories, which show significant increases in performance measured by product sales, retail footfall, product trial, online hits and red-button interactivity. For an indirect communications vehicle, sponsorship can produce some direct – and significant – results.

Now that sponsorship is reaching maturity in the Uk, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get ‘pure’ readings of its effects; it is usually part of an integrated communications mix, mainly for well-established brands of which many consumers will have direct, day-to-day experience. It can be quite difficult to extricate sponsorship’s effects from all that ‘noise’.

In the early days of sponsorship, there was a standout exception to this. When Powergen sponsored the National ITV Weather, it was – to quote the legendary Ivor Millman – “  an entirely new company and brand name. It had not advertised itself. Nor had it any interface with the general public. As a consumer you have not been able to buy from it. Nor have you seen its name on the High Street. The only contact members of the public will generally have had with Powergen is through seeing the ITV National Weather” 

Despite these limitations – as well as the regulatory creative limitations that reduced sponsorships to little more than a billboard message – Powergen managed to achieve massive awareness in an incredibly short space of time.  

Another of the benefits of tracking so many sponsorships over time is that we can look at which metrics work for which campaigns. Just taking a sample of sponsorships from 1999, some perform really well on awareness but relatively poorly on ‘appropriateness of fit’ (e.g. Cadbury’s/ Coronation Street) whereas for others (e.g. Going Places/ Blind Date) the reverse held true. Even on just two dimensions, it is apparent that different sponsorships appear to do very different things. To explore this further, I went to source, talking to the 3 major research agencies that between them dominate the TV sponsorship tracking market.

WHAT DO THE RESEARCH AGENCIES THINK?

Millward Brown have created a sponsorship insight tool, based on the results of more than 70 recent broadcast sponsorship projects. They point out the differences with advertising research, in particular the fact that the way viewers feel about the programme itself is a large element of the communication. Of course, the numbers of such viewers and their level of bonding with a programme are subject to high uncertainty pre-transmission.

Their model is based on asking a number of key questions to matched ‘exposed’ vs. ‘non-exposed’ samples to get at the 3 main pillars of sponsorship, namely;

• brand awareness
• purchase consideration
• images associated with the brand

From that data, it is possible to plot a brand’s profile on their brand pyramid. In a study earlier this year, they compared the profile of a number of brands that had engaged in sponsorship compared with a similar number who didn’t. There is a marked difference between the two; not only at the roots, through ‘relevance’ and ‘presence’ but also at the very top level, in terms of close bonding with the consumer.  

SPA (Simons Priest Associates) have been responsible for around 250 sponsorship case histories and they feel the main challenge is to get a sensitively designed sampling framework of ‘viewers’ vs. ‘non-viewers’ – especially in relation to both loyalty and frequency of viewing (these are not measures of the same thing).

Brands that tend to perform the best are those that have concurrent spot activity happening around the sponsorship and/or have creative congruity with their advertising, plus all other consumer exposures to the brand – especially close to the point of purchase.

Certain market conditions also appear to work well within sponsorship. If a brand is already established, they can use sponsorship to ‘stretch’ the brand or say something different about themselves (e.g. Nescafe speaking to a younger audience via Hollyoaks) or, especially if there is intrinsic goodwill towards the brand, to remind consumers they are still around. Sponsorships where consumers have to work harder to ‘get’ the synergy (e.g. Domino’s & The Simpsons) or where the brand can adopt ‘multiple personalities’ (e.g. Stella’s sponsorship of movie strands) also seem to work consistently well.

SPA feel that recall levels compared to similar weight spot campaigns also tend to be better, probably because people have the programme as a frame of reference for the message. Interestingly, though, when tracking successful sponsorships, it is not recall or awareness that move the most dramatically, but brand equity values and more emotional responses to the brands. This is especially true of longer-term sponsorships, as these measures may take longer to build

Hall & Partners have also conducted a number of successful sponsorship research projects. They believe sponsorship can work in three distinct ways;

• Presence – where a brand can establish credibility; extend brand visibility or spread coverage to audiences that are not normally reached via other forms of marketing
• Shared Values – where they can reinforce or heighten existing brand attributes (especially those that are strong for the programme); borrow the programme values (if not already associated with that brand); or  create deeper involvement with the brand through being part of the programme

When I was getting the Hall & Partners perspective, I was also referred to their work on branded entertainment, defined as ‘Where a brand creates consumer entertainment that would not have existed without that brand and where consumers choose their involvement’. This is a growing market, not least because it answers the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question that consumers are increasingly asking from all their contacts with commercial brands.

Their evaluation model, which they’ve developed in conjunction with TBWA, makes it clear that this market needs to be measured very differently to spot advertising. In particular;

• It is the experience rather than the exposure itself that will determine consumer reactions to the brand’s involvement
• There are many more indirect effects (such as PR or word of mouth) that can have a disproportionate amplifying effect on the activity
• It is absolutely not about awareness – indeed, too much awareness (via in-your-face branding within the activity) can be counterproductive. Instead, advertisers should see this as a ‘gift’ which will eventually be credited to the advertiser, possibly implicitly
• The unifying currency is enjoyment – if the consumer has a great time, everything flows from that.

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest there are lessons to be learned here about how we measure sponsorship and all other forms of editorial marketing.

WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

“When studying sponsorships and their effects, it seems that low-involvement and peripheral information processing are clearly present….thus it is important to measure attitudes towards the message and emotional responses towards the programme and the sponsor in order to determine effects”                                                    CHRISTIANSEN (2006)

Our recent Engagement Study tested the relevance of the recent advertising theories of low attention processing, peripheral messages, the role of emotion and implicit vs explicit memory and the results suggested these are all relevant to some extent or other in how we respond to spot advertising. The academics suggest this is even more the case in how we process and store content associations. This makes sense. It appears to be more about how we feel about the programme and the way that the advertiser links their product message to it, that are the important take-outs for consumers.

If we look in depth at what research has told us about different sponsorships, a real paradox emerges. Many case histories focus on awareness and more explicit measures of what the consumer knows about the sponsorship and how it has impacted on them. It is based on conscious, rational responses to explicit questions. Relatively fewer concentrate on the emotional take-outs (which the recent IPA’s ’Marketing in the Age of Accountability’ study has demonstrated are far more influential in a brand’s success), the implicit feelings about the programme, sponsor and their message, which may exist at a more sub-conscious level. The problem is that the former is based on direct measures that are relatively consistent and easy for the consumer to communicate  whereas the latter are probably the direct objectives for a truly successful sponsorship, but are based on much more indirect, hard to elicit measures.

One example from our Engagement Study highlights this point. During the exit interviews, Celia Vaughn (pictured) talks about her loyalty to Coronation Street, which she watches regularly. When she is asked specifically about the sponsorship, she struggles to name Cadbury’s and most quantitative research would focus on her lack of awareness of the sponsor. However, elsewhere in the interview, she berates her husband for buying own label chocolate when she feels Cadbury’s offers a far superior quality. So, did the sponsorship work on her, or was it a wasted communication? I have sat in on many telephone interviews in my time running my own research agency and my guess is she would have been recorded as a ‘don’t know’. Only deep and focussed questioning about her feelings towards the brand would have brought out the true impact that the sponsorship has had on her.

CONCLUSIONS

Rather than finish on a gloomy note – are we missing significant ‘below-the-radar’ impacts of sponsorship, I’d rather reflect on the fact that in reviewing the research on the role of sponsorship, I didn’t find one article or even paragraph that questioned its effectiveness.

What I did find was a great deal of retrospective analysis to show how well it worked and how it contributed to a wide range of consumer take-outs. Where the academic world has shown the way is in looking at the broader effects of sponsorship, so we can work out how to use it most effectively in future.

All this research, plus the contributions from our stakeholders, has identified some real areas of potential for future research activity, such as

• How to integrate the sponsorship with other communication channels to maximise the synergy
• Working on the strategic fit and how that is perceived by programme viewers – especially loyalists (or, maybe in the future, programme community members!)
• Working out how the creative execution can work to strategy, whilst at the same time employing good marcomms practice in getting the message across
• And understanding how effective frequency (which is at a higher threshold   than for spot ads)  can best be calculated and how creative rotation can best be managed, especially when the people you want to impress most will be seeing your messages over and over again.

We do now know much more about all these different aspects of a best practice broadcast sponsorship….but there is still a lot more we would like to know!

^{1World Advertising Research Centre}