End the year with gratitude, kindness and shaka

2020 wasn’t easy. It has certainly been a year of many firsts and it’s going to take time for a lot of businesses to recover and get back to sort of normal, especially in the sport world. Business wasn’t down 30% or 40%, sport & entertainment business (excluding esports) wasn’t even existing for about 6 months. When live sports came back it was not the same. No spectators, moving to bubble locations in order to make it safer for athletes with the result majority of brands couldn’t find the ‘’appetite’’ with the current circumstances to pursue in new partnerships. SME’s like us have been hit hard and it was sad to hear news about suspended operations or redundancies of fellow industry professionals that we are sharing this space and have similar goals and aspirations.

Regardless, what we have learned during these difficult times from cases that had faced even more obstacles and from professionals working in the frontline of this epidemic is that the power of will cannot be broken and we will not stop. This year we got the time to reflect, reorganized, use the time for studying to allow us to jump higher. 

As we are moving closer to the new year (can’t predict what is going to happen) we can though breakdown the current trends and adaptations in the sport sponsorship industry.

eSports: Probably the only sport that didn’t stop and got very little affected in 2020. To certain extend eSports replaced for a while, traditional sport and mainstream channels like ESPN, FOX, NBC aired for the first-time completion such as NBA 2K20, Rocket League, F1 esports. Their ability to ‘’move’’ online users, from esports digital platforms to brands online sites are second to none that big retail brands such as Kit Kat, Levis, Gucci secure partnerships in the sphere of eSports when shops were shutdown.

Digital Replacement Advertisement (Virtual ads): The absence of sports for the majority of period this year, the difficulty to travel, the empty stadiums, made Virtual stadium advertising very powerful tool for brands. Virtual stadium ad- a technology that essentially replaces the advertising on perimeter boards around the edge of the pitch allows organizations to choose geo feed based on your brand’s target market. La Liga and Bundesliga have been using this dynamic platform since 2018 unravelling opportunities for brands to engage diverse audience in Europe/Middle East/Africa/South Asia/East Asia and Japan.Following the trend in2020 Serie A and ligue 1 clubs applied this technology to secure further regional sponsors. 

Club partnerships: In 2020 a significant number of teams have worked and put the extra effort to engage or grow their audience throughout various digital forms and social media to achieve their brand sponsorship targets. It is well known that Basketball, football clubs may have millions of followers but the level of engagement/interaction was generally low. By using quality content, user generated content and inspiring positive change through CSR activities have pushed cross promotional campaigns to higher number of engagement levels. Sweepstakes with team prizes and the affiliation with creative non-sports themed content, such as entertainment fashion technology made certain activation memorable.     

If you are brave enough to start a strong 2021, we’d welcome the opportunity to invite you for a virtual meeting. Discuss your sponsorship project and go through how we could support you grow with the power of sport and entertainment.

Or else, we made it simpler by start filling out this brand survey. https://forms.gle/xotUTFA1KURaxeF17 🤙