Many years ago when I was running a PR agency, we had a global drinks client; one with multiple household name brands in its portfolio.

One day they asked if we could help them to launch and activate a new sponsorship for one of their brands, with a very famous Premier League football club.

Great. Except it wasn’t, because there was hardly any strategic basis for the partnership. No real synergy between the brand and the club or its audience (far from it, if we’re honest), and no serious rationale for why this partnership was happening.

Sadly it was too late to affect any of that. The club had done an excellent sales job on the CMO, convincing him that this was an opportunity too good to pass up, and the deal was already done.

Our job was to try to retroactively find a way to make sense of the partnership and activate it, using a very standard set of rights and one of the weirdest/worst sponsorship ads ever created (not by us, I hasten to add).

The video below is nothing to do with this story, but it was on a similar level of strangeness and lack of authenticity.

Not an easy task, and the whole thing ultimately didn’t achieve much apart from some basic and very expensive brand visibility. Needless to say, the partnership wasn’t extended beyond the initial term.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for any brand even thinking about sports sponsorship to be proactive and strategic about it. 

Don’t just react to opportunities, or at least figure out if it does make strategic sense before you sign on the dotted line.

It’s easy to get a bit seduced by an exciting proposal landing on your desk, but once you’re in reactive mode you’re unlikely to make a good decision, and it’s highly likely that you’re missing a far better opportunity that you’re not even aware of.

When I work with clients, I guide them through my own Smarter Sponsorship Framework, which ensures a level of strategic rigour to avoid these kind of expensive mistakes.