Are You Looking at My Endorsements?

Are You Looking at My Endorsements?

Choosing the right image for your brand during major sporting events is a bit of a gamble when players' other "assets" could make the front page, writes Margaret E. Ward.

Strapping young athletes feasting on Pringles and Pepsi; Churchill-style fight-them-on-the-beaches pep talks for lager buyers; millionaires striding the plains of Africa hand in hand with local youngsters.

Yes, it's World Cup time again when the biggest brands court the finest footballers in an orgy of advertising that justifies the estimated $1.5 billion it costs to organise the month of matches.

How do brands choose players that best represent their product during mega sporting events? Excellence, competitiveness, high performance and professionalism are the attributes blue-chip firms crave when they throw top-dollar endorsements at players - footballers with a good jaw line, hunky looks (but some self-control when it comes to the ladies) are added benefits.   

Show Me the Money

What makes for a good-value sports endorsement deal? Are the hefty cheques worth the risk of an endorsed man spreading a brand across the front pages rather than in the sports pages? (Yes, the risk is more   associated with men until we start hearing of female sports stars admitting to bedding 25 or more men).

How can brands justify the more than €1 billion that was spent on advertising around the last World Cup? That's a serious gamble on individual personalities.

PR man Michael O'Keeffe knows both the pre-match dressing room and the boardroom. An underage international soccer player with Ireland and then a senior footballer with GAA glamour brand The Dubs, O'Keeffe is MD of Pembroke Communications, which has a specialist sports PR and sponsorship division and recently negotiated a €5 million deal between Dublin and Vodafone.

Keep it Clean

"The likes of Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi or Roger Federer have global appeal and exude all the qualities a top sports brand or corporate crave to be associated with," says O'Keeffe.

"Here at home, players like Joe Canning are hot properties. Consistent, top-class performance and a clean-cut image make him one of the few stars in Ireland who can transcend county or club loyalty."

Yet one of the more interesting fallouts from the Tiger-chasing-his-tail shenanigans was watching which of his sponsors distanced themselves quickest.

"A scandal can have knock-on effects, as we witnessed with Woods and even with Thierry Henry to a lesser degree," O'Keeffe admits. "But injury or loss of form can also devalue a player and the rewards from a sponsorship deal, as perhaps has happened with Padraig Harrington.

"Sports people can also devalue themselves through over-exposure. This happened with Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara a number of years ago and several well-known GAA players may have worked with too many brands, diluting their worth to a sponsor."

Spread the Risk

Brands must also decide whether to entrust all their eggs to a basket carried by a single player or pitch in with a team or even an entire competition.

One of the sideshows in this World Cup will be the battle between Adidas and Nike. Adidas will sponsor 12 of the 32 teams, including strong contenders like Germany, Spain and Argentina, but Nike counters with favourites Brazil, Holland and Portugal - and England through its takeover of Umbro. However, Adidas will also sponsor the entire event - a guaranteed place on the victory podium.

Adidas spends $125 million a year on sponsorship deals and no wonder. In the lead up to the 2006 World Cup, it reported a 37 per cent rise in sales.

In Ireland, particularly in the GAA market, bigger brands like Ulster Bank or SuperValu have tended to opt for competition sponsorships. O'Keeffe says: "Sponsoring a team or a single player can sometimes alienate fans of opposing teams and a brand with a nationwide presence may be reluctant to sponsor just one team."

Pembroke estimates that the Irish sponsorship market is worth €130 million a year - with 90 per cent of this sports-related. But in straitened times, how does that lavish spend sit with the bean counters?

Build Relationships

"The crudest form of evaluation is still awareness research and media value but sponsors are becoming more interested in customer acquisition numbers and building longer-term affinity. Increasingly, rights holders must prove the value of sponsorships and show how sponsorship can deliver for companies," says O'Keeffe.

The World Cup certainly has no difficulty delivering the eyeballs. More than one billion are expected to watch this year's final. Signalling the launch of one of its biggest marketing pushes ever, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent claimed the rewards stacked up. "When we last had the World Cup, we saw some very encouraging results across the whole world, particularly in Europe and Latin America."

Just don't give the players too many crisps and Coke before kick-off.

Margaret E. Ward is a journalist and managing director of Clear Ink, the Clear English specialists. The company runs "Think like a journalist" courses for marketing and PR teams every month. Bookings on www.clearink.ie.