Your Measurement Tool Box:
Sponsorship evaluation services reviewed...

Sponsorship Evaluation Services

by Lindsey Wyckoff, Staff Writer

“Live from the KDPaine & Partners/Verizon Wireless Arena we have the KDPaine & Partners' Battle of the Sponsorship Suppliers, underwritten by Wheat Thins and Starbucks, the official snack food of KDPaine & Partners, with additional support from Staples, the official office supply company, FedEx, the official overnight delivery system, Diet Coke, the official diet drink, "sneaker net,” the official network and Serena, the official 7-year-old of KDPaine & Partners.”

Perhaps not these exact words, but something like them have passed your ears at least a dozen times in the last few years. From Little League teams to the World Cup, from naming arenas to naming road races, sponsorship, or, more accurately, experiential marketing, is the marketing method of choice these days.

There are a lot of reasons for this. In a 1998 study, 63% of CEOs said that one of the major outcomes they expected from marketing was “enabling consumer interaction with the brand.” And, as communications is increasingly impersonal and electronic, the chance to actually touch, feel and experience product is ever more important.

In our over-branded society, the impact of sponsorship is not easy to determine. Being inundated by brands at every turn has caused many consumers to simply tune out. This is why sponsorship evaluation is becoming an increasingly important field. The focus of sponsorship measurement has moved beyond simply identifying audience make-up and their opinions. It is equally important to look at the emotional connection between the audience and the sponsor.

A recent survey by IEG and Performance Research revealed the top three objectives of sponsorship. Increasing brand loyalty came out on top followed by generating awareness/visibility and changing/reinforcing image.

Seventy-six percent of companies spend less than 1% of their total sponsorship budgets on research. (See the IEG/Performance Research 2002 Survey.) What these people don’t realize is that in a down economy, if you don’t measure it, and therefore you can’t show ROI, chances are good that the program will be killed.

How to Find Someone to Measure Your Event

Unlike advertising and PR, when you search the web for companies that do sponsorship measurement, there’s not much out there. (This poses the chicken and egg question: Are there that few companies because companies aren't spending money measuring results, or are they not measuring results because they can't find anyone to do it?)

IEG is out there and is the leading resource on sponsorship. They are an excellent resource for expertise, books and seminars on how best to evaluate sponsorship opportunities as well as results.

We actually did find a few sponsorship measurement vendors, but before we introduce them, here are:

The Measurement Standard's Basic Rules of Sponsorship Measurement

1. Know what you need to know.
When designing a questionnaire, start with the press release you'd like to be able to put out with the results. For example, with the hypothetical KDPaine & Partners' Battle of the Sponsorship Suppliers, we’d like to be able to say that “88% of those who participated in the ‘Battle of the Sponsorship Stars’ felt more inclined to subscribe to the Measurement Standard.” (And we'd be very happy with those results.) So, we would know that we needed to find out not just that someone remembered that TMS was a sponsor, but that they left the event feeling more inclined to change their behavior—subscribe—as a result. The next measure would of course be to track subscriptions in the month after the event to see if they increased.

2. Get a professional to design, or at least review, the questionnaire.
The survey instrument is the single most important part of any sponsorship measurement program. If you ask the wrong question, you most certainly will get answers that are either wrong, unusable or—worst of all—look like they ought to mean something, but don’t. If you have a local university nearby, see if they have a survey center that can draft the survey instrument.

3. Decide whether you want to measure on-site or take away impressions.
If you want initial, short-term impressions, you need to interview people during the event. If you want to know what they remembered about your brand when they got home, you need to call them when they get home.

4. Gather data systematically.
Do not limit your interview to those people who “look nice.” In order to create statistically valid data, everyone in your sample must have an equal opportunity to participate.

5. Don't ever ask a question you can't act upon (and the corollary, don't ask a question you don't want to hear the answer to).
The key to effective surveying is to keep the number of questions to a minimum. This eliminates all the “jeeze it would be nice to know” questions, and lets you focus on those that you can act upon. If you know that you're facing a deadline for a sponsorship commitment, then what you need to know is if the event attracted the audience you are trying to reach and if similar events have paid off for you (you don't need to know whether they liked the color of the t-shirts that you were giving away). On the other hand, if you're making plans for an upcoming event and need to know whether banners are more effective at creating memorable impressions than totebags, you need to be asking the attendees not just if they remembered your sponsorship, but why.

6. Budget appropriately.
If you think it’s always cheaper to do it yourself, think again. Even if you’re measuring in-house, you still need to account for travel expenses, the costs of obtaining a list, and the costs of phone calls, mail and person-hours to collect the data.

Sponsorship Measurement Vendors

Now that you’ve read through all those caveats, you may well be ready to simply turn the entire task over to someone else. If that’s the case, here are two companies that stand out in the field.

Performance Research
Performance Research is the only company we’ve found to be totally focused on measuring the effectiveness of sponsorships. Their most recent Research-in-a-Box is a simple way to perform on-site phone or email surveys with little effort on your part. You provide them with basic information about your sponsorship, they come up with a customized questionnaire (and design a database collection system if necessary), then they collect and organize the data. You can choose a report in PowerPoint or statistical format.

The pricing is as straightforward as the approach: an email survey costs $4,800 for up to 1,000 respondents and a telephone survey is $7,400 per 200 respondents. For $1,900, Performance Research will train and provide your staff with materials (and, of course, the survey) to conduct effective on-site research. They also offer a whole host of other measurement services, from telephone surveys to focus groups.

Taylor Nelson Sofres
Taylor Nelson Sofres is the fourth largest market information group in the world, so no matter your location, there is most likely a contact nearby. Most of their clients are multi-national companies with marketing budgets to match. TNSsport is the sport sponsorship evaluation division; it provides services to such clients as Amstel, Heineken, Pirelli, Mobil and Toyota. In conjunction with ESPN, TNSsport runs the ESPN sportspoll. TNSsport conducts a wide variety of surveys as well as broadcast, print and online media analysis in order to evaluate the sponsorship experience as a whole. In addition, they offer services such as sponsorship protection programs, highly customized packages designed to protect the rights of sponsors. These packages range from making sure that competitors are not cutting in to coverage through misleading advertising during the broadcast of a sponsored event to making sure that media coverage is received as promised. Once the specifics of the surveys are hammered out, such as number of respondents as well as length and depth of questions, TNSsport tailors a package to fit your needs.

Joyce Julius & Associates
Joyce Julius & Associates’ The Sponsors Report uses a software system to monitor and analyze media exposure of a sponsor. The software tracks each mention of a sponsor's name, as well as each clear and in-focus shot of their logo during the initial broadcast and subsequent reruns. After the data is tabulated, it is combined with the cost per 30-second advertising rate for the particular broadcast to achieve an estimated value of the sponsorship. Since the process is performed by software, Sponsors Report is able to maintain a relatively low cost based on the number and length of broadcasts monitored. They have various package deals, such as the INDY racing series packages, which includes the 15 INDY events as well as analysis for $1,800. There are also more customized packages based on the number of events and broadcasts sponsored. (However advanced the software, the pitfalls are similar to any AVE based analysis. A logo in the middle of a field or on the roof of a car cannot necessarily be equated with the value of an advertisement.)

With so many sponsors out there, it is increasingly important to take a step back to see if your message is breaking through. There are more ways to determine ROI than by tallying the number of eyeballs present at an event or analyzing the audience demographics. Even if your measurement budget does not yet exist, most sponsorship measurement companies offer samples of their reports online. With proper evaluation, the property will have a selling point for future sponsors and the sponsor will have proof of ROI.

Contents | To The Editor