A new eMarketer report shows that although sponsorships may be hard to define, they’re still getting a big share of marketer’s investments.
The report, which uses research from GroupM and IEG, says sponsorship spending, at $19.2 billion, will comprise 14% of total marketing spending in North America in 2013. Sponsorships can include anything from simple logo placements to brand created articles and other content.
Here’s the infographic from eMarketer:
No surprises that sports took the lion’s share of marketing spending this year, a whopping 69% of the total market, followed distantly by entertainment at 10%.
It’s also not just enough to sponsor an event or activity. Companies are leveraging their sponsorships with input from other channels, using social media, on site activities, PR and direct marketing to achieve a holistic approach to promotion. Here’s how much they used different channels:
Finally, not everybody measures the success of a sponsorship the same way.
“I had all the wrong metrics before,” said Ron Faris, head of brand marketing at Virgin Mobile. “And the metrics before were impressions served. And all that stuff is just crap. The metric that I’m married to right now is all about the share. I also think the number of retweets and earned impressions are also really important. But I’m not going to bank on a lot of clickthroughs of views of my content.”
Here are the different metrics used by companies to measure the impact of a sponsorship:
