Words: Niamh Smith
FP Live! panellists have encouraged the adoption of employee engagement and media value equivalency metrics.
As more brands recognise the value of sports sponsorship beyond brand awareness, marketers have been encouraged to explore more unconventional metrics to measure return on investment.
Speaking at FP Live!, Jasper Martens, chief marketing officer at PensionBee, said the brand’s sponsorship of Brentford FC helped to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
As a result, PensionBee has reduced its reliance on brand tracking studies that focus solely on measuring reach and awareness and instead turned to media value equivalency calculations.
“For every pound we put into the Brentford sponsorship, we get approximately £5–£6 back in media value. This is something you can measure for the value of a sports sponsorship,” he said.
He added marketers should consider timing how long their brand logos or boards were visible during games or post-match interviews or how often they feature in photographs included in newspapers.
This helps to determine the cost effectiveness of sponsorship compared to paying for out-of-home and television advertisement as well as paid media, according to Martens.
Kelsey Offord, senior sponsorship manager of Standard Life, also recommended that marketers measure the impact of sports sponsorship on employee engagement.
For example, the brand measured that 10% of its workforce participated in the Cancer Research UK event that it sponsors, Race for Life, and consequently understood Standard Life’s values better.
Tim Burnell, chief marketing and communications officer at Investec, agreed it is important for brands to measure internal employees’ exposure to their sponsored brand.
He also urged marketers to measure the value their brand adds to the sponsor and their goals.
“Has their attendance gone up? Have they reached some communities with their outreach program that they had not reached before? Have we helped them reach their sustainability goals?” Burnell questioned.
When calculating return on investment, marketers must also factor in the cost of labour that is needed to sustain the sponsorship alongside the cost of funding, according to Danielle Lee, director of brand and marketing at Metro Bank.
“We definitely needed a dedicated role to help bring our value to the table and bring Metro Bank’s D&I policies into the cricket community,” Lee said.