It is sometimes easy to forget how young the broadcast sponsorship
business is in this country. A decade ago the subject could still
trigger worthy newspaper editorials condemning the practice as the work
of Satan and a corrosive influence on programme standards - not only a
direct attack on editorial integrity but also an affront to the nation’s
morals.
The broadcast sponsorship market is still relatively small (it is worth
only pounds 50 million in the UK), but last week’s pounds 6 million deal
marrying Procter & Gamble to Granada’s Emmerdale confirms what many
people have suspected for a while now: the business has reached a new
level of maturity.
P&G will use the tie-up to promote brands from its detergent portfolio,
including Bold, Daz and Ariel, and will doubtless make much of the ’soap
sponsoring a soap’ angle. Some observers used this aspect of the deal to
suggest that it was not only a major departure - a big consumer
advertiser joining the market - but a rather neat and witty one at
that.
They were forgetting that P&G not only invented programme sponsorship
but that it did so by inventing the soap opera at the same time - the Ma
Perkins Show, sponsored by Oxydol, launched on US radio in 1933.
The big question, though, is what implications this recent deal will
have for the TV advertising market as a whole. Will P&G fund the deal by
taking pounds 6 million out of its spot advertising budget? And, more
particularly, its ITV budget? Loss of spot revenue was something that
television sales outfits used to be very worried about - and ITV people
were arguably the least forward-looking. They allegedly killed off
several potential deals by insisting clients sign contracts promising
not to shift spot advertising budgets from ITV once they’d tied up
sponsorship agreements.
Some agencies say that ITV’s approach - including sponsorship
considerations in the big annual airtime negotiation round - is still
wrong.
Is ITV still worried that it is helping to wean its biggest advertisers
off spot airtime? Gary Knight, the executive commercial director of
Granada Media, believes not. He says: ’We think it is new money to
television. Everything we’ve done in sponsorship is about creating a 360
degree proposition, where we attract above-the-line budget into
television but still relate it back to below-the-line activity like
database marketing and sales promotion. It is an effective way of
getting a truly integrated campaign. Sales promotion has grown massively
in recent years and the suspicion was that television was losing budget
to that sector. So sponsorship can protect budget as well as generating
new budget.’
Which, if true, is good news for commercial television. And won’t the
entry of a mammoth advertiser like P&G also be good for sponsorship
rates?
Some observers doubt that. Big advertisers tend to be formidable
negotiators - and supply still exceeds demand, even if the gap is
closing.
But such matters are perhaps of secondary importance. Everyone seems to
agree that P&G’s involvement in this sector is very good news
indeed.
Tess Alps, the managing director of Drum PHD, is a big fan of Emmerdale,
and as a former Yorkshire TV employee she has even pulled a pint or two
in the Woolpack. She says: ’It’s a cracking programme and it was
probably only a matter of time before someone snapped it up. This
reinforces the reality that sponsorship has become mainstream. It’s on
the agenda for most clients - anyone not looking at it must feel they
are missing out.’
Alps points out that sponsorship still represents excellent value:
’Although there is competition for some opportunities, there are still
some programmes and programme genres - docusoaps for instance - that
aren’t used. But maybe there isn’t the same potential there. In terms of
real viewer involvement and consumer attention, narrative programmes
continue to rank pretty highly.’
