Introduction – a Glass Half Full
There has never been a more exciting time to activate your sponsorship programs to get your brand in front of the most engaged and active audience. It’s all about creating an experience that brings your brand to life in a memorable way – and you can only do that by making the most of every available touchpoint.
When I started brand empowerment and sponsorship activation, I already had reservations about using composite logos. As a customer, I noticed many brands shared one trait: they all used composite logos extensively in their activation campaigns. World Cup campaigns, UEFA Champions League, Wimbledon, big-name concerts — you name it, they used them.
It gets worse.
Multiple sponsors – even of the same property – used composite logos side by side for their promotional campaigns. And all paid a fortune for the privilege of being associated with some of the world’s most famous events. Even today, when there are excellent ways to target your ideal clients and create an engaging and memorable sponsorship campaign, they still do it. There is still a blind faith among some sponsorship practitioners that fans and consumers will love their brands just because they associate them with something fans and consumers like and follow.
When we try to understand the logic of using composite logos, we have to go back to see how they came about in the first place.
Background
Lawyers are often are the target of many cruel and tasteless jokes. Many of them are hilarious. I am even married to a lawyer, so it’s not easy to have something against lawyers per se. However, it’s also hard to understand why you would trust a lawyer with the creativity of your sponsorship offer (as a rights holder) or your sponsorship entitlements (as a sponsor). By all means, trust them with your commercial contracts, legal advice, mediation, and risk assessment, but creativity? I do not think so.
Incredibly, this is precisely what happened with composite logos. Lawyers (do not ask me how many) have come up with a foolproof, legally restrictive, and completely unimaginative graphic device to include in sponsorship contracts. The goal seems to be to minimise the risk to the rights holder’s intellectual property while giving the sponsor something to use (for a lot of money) to activate the same sponsorship property. The lawyers’ creativity placed two logos (the rights holder’s logo and the sponsor’s logo) side by side in a 50/50 ratio, with a dividing line between the logos and a master class in creative copywriting. “Official Sponsor” “Proud Sponsor” “Official (insert legally defined category here)” – you name it, they could not leave it alone. All of this was put into a composite logo box. Some did it even more creatively and came up with portrait versions. Yes, one logo above the other, separated by the “Official Whatever” text.
Even today, it is not only the lazy rights holders and sponsors who are satisfied with composite logos but also unimaginative and lazy advertising and marketing agencies. And why? Because if you have created a client’s ad and promotional campaign based on your own agency’s creative themes, it can be very awkward when an imaginative client announces that he is taking advantage of a high-profile sponsorship. Do not worry; they’ll slap the above composite logo in the bottom left or right of the ad, and hey presto – sponsorship activation. It may not be relevant or show a connection between their creative theme and the sponsorship property, but who cares?
Solution
Fortunately, many marketing and sponsorship professionals take the art (creativity and empathy with the target audience) and science (appropriate systems and processes) of sponsorship seriously to ensure it is a compelling way to enhance a brand. The same goes for the rights holder’s brand. Imaginative sponsorship activation can do wonders for the value of the rights holder’s brand. This nirvana of sponsorship can only be achieved if both parties (rights holder and sponsor) work closely on contract signing and ongoing sponsorship management.
In addition, the rights holder must offer the sponsor much more than just a composite logo. Top sponsorship properties are powerful and offer many promotional and brand reinforcement opportunities. But they are also expensive and require increasingly strong justification on ROI.
- Logos: all colours (full colour, flat- colour, and special app versions) in portrait and landscape formats.
- Tournament or event mark.
- Vectorial artwork and graphic animations of the sponsoring property’s promotional design, typically known as the visual identity, which the sponsor can use for packaging, online banners, branded templates for social media, event activation, giant screens, mobile devices, fan parks, and tactical ads
- Open discussions to create experiential event opportunities related to the property.
- A range of music treatments that reflect the property’s sonic identity.
No composite logos. These should be assigned to the historic trash can for lazy sponsorship.
