Champion of sponsorship

When England’s rugby players step out in South Africa this week, live on ITV, the programme sponsor won’t have long to wait to see if they have backed a winner. ITV’s coverage is being sponsored by Heineken Export – despite suggestions that, for true synergy between brand and programme, the 57 old farts might have plumped for Heinz baked beans. Heineken will be one of the first TV sponsors to benefit from a continuous research project just commissioned by ITV from Millward Brown, the research company best known for its advertising tracking studies. The initial findings will be available virtually overnight.

Since April, Millward Brown has been applying its tracking techniques to sponsorship as well as advertising. ITV says it is the biggest single research project it has ever undertaken. The continuous survey, measuring brand awareness and image from both sponsorship and spot advertising, will last at least a year.

“We want to unlock the secret of sponsorship” says Tim Brady, head of sponsorship at TSMS. “Some ITV sponsors have had huge increases in awareness and we want to put a value on it.”

Last year ITV took 20m from sponsorship and this year the total market – including Channel 4 and satellite channels such as Sky Sports – is forecast to be worth 40m. Research that shows more clearly how sponsorship relates to advertising, in terms of impact and image, could pay for itself many times over.

ITV has researched consistently the impact of its sponsorship deals. From the early days with Rumpole and Inspector Morse, through the football and rugby world cups, it has regularly commissioned – and published – studies demonstrating that sponsorship can significantly boost brand awareness.

It was prompted to commission the latest research by the discovery that – despite its own investment in research – several of its sponsor clients had got even better information about the impact of their sponsorships. Millward Brown’s regular tracking of brand awareness was registering large increases that could not be explained by any TV advertising. When it investigated, it discovered the brands in question had been using TV sponsorship.

“We kept getting Millward Brown quoted back at us by clients,” says Brady. “When Coors Extra Gold was launched, it sponsored the Robbie Coltrane Cadillac series. It was a big success, but – like other sponsors – they wouldn’t tell us the full details because it was their research and they wanted to keep it to themselves.”

Millward Brown itself also had to maintain confidentiality. Managing director Rosie Ware says: “We were registering big increases in awareness, but also very favourable impacts on brand image. Naturally, those findings belonged to our clients.”

Though she cannot name the brands, Ware is revealing some findings in a presentation this week to launch the new sponsorship tracking study. There are some brands she can name. When Legal & General started sponsoring most of the ITV weather forecasts, it had not advertised on TV for some while. Immediately, Millward Brown registered a large increase in awareness that coincided with the start of the sponsorship.

The new sponsorship tracking study shows that even when a brand is advertising heavily, the additional exposure is valuable.

Kellogg’s Frosties has been sponsoring Gladiators. While 64 per cent of people were aware of the Frosties’ advertising, the sponsorship added a further seven per cent to the brand’s “advertising” awareness.

The new study also asks detailed questions about viewers’ appreciation of the sponsorship – for example, whether they enjoyed the way the brand was promoted around the programme.

“The value of the tracking study is that we can use our 20-year experience of tracking advertising and brand awareness to register the long-term impact of TV sponsorship,” says Ware. “And once we have enough data, we can start modelling and eventually develop a currency, to put a true value on sponsorship.”

For its advertising clients, Millward Brown conducts about 100 interviews a week, asking not only what ads people have seen and how much they can recall of them, but what products they buy, what image they have of a brand and what brands they have an affinity for.

For ITV’s sponsorship study, it’s conducting three times as many interviews. This is partly because it’s covering about ten sponsorships at a time, but also because the researchers have to cover certain sub-groups of the population – and they also need to find sufficient people who’ve seen the programmes. Using CATI – computer-aided telephone interviewing, which feeds the answers straight into the terminal – the results can be available the following day.

But why does it need to be so fast? It’s not as if a sponsor can suddenly cancel – or increase – the company’s sponsorship exposure. The answer, says Brady, is that some long-running series can be recommissioned for more editions at quite short notice – for example, Vanessa, which is sponsored by Death By Chocolate.

It might also be possible to adjust the sponsorship’s creative approach during a long-running series. If, for example, viewers were becoming bored – or were particularly excited – by some aspects of Heineken’s Rugby World Cup sponsorship, ITV and the sponsors would find out in time to do something about it.

The research could also provide a new weapon in the battle to persuade the Independent Television Commission to relax the restrictions on TV sponsorship. Already ITV has produced research showing that viewers have few concerns about the way sponsorship is presented. It still hopes to persuade the ITC to allow it to compete for sponsors on equal terms with the satellite and cable channels.

For example, ITV’s coverage of the Coca-Cola Cup cannot be sponsored by Coca-Cola, because the name is part of the event’s title. Yet if it were shown on cable or satellite, Coke could sponsor the broadcast and the event. ITV would like a level playing field.

But now ITV is up against a new body, which is also lobbying the ITC for changes to the sponsorship code. Chaired by Sky’s Mark Wood, the ITC Licensees’ Sponsorship Group represents GMTV and most of the main cable and satellite channels. It argues that there should be greater flexibility in the guidelines on sponsors’ credits and wants to “bring together, and promote, the most up-to-date research on the effectiveness of TV sponsorship”.

Whether that includes the ITV-Millward Brown tracking study remains to be seen.

Torin Douglas is BBC Radio’s correspondent.