FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
ootball shirt sponsorship is normally reserved for marketers with the deepest pockets. Manchester United has reportedly signed a world record £300 million deal with
Nike, while thirty million pounds is the cost per year of having your brand splashed across the front of Arsenal’s shirts for the next five years. So what are your options if you’d like to become a kit sponsor, but don’t have the marketing budget of the likes of Nike or Puma? There are hundreds of thousands
of registered youth sports teams in the UK. These teams, according to Phil Worms, Marketing Director of cloud computing company iomart Group plc, offer a sponsorship opportunity that has so far been overlooked. “In Scotland alone there are over
3,500 registered youth football teams - that’s quite a market there because every young player knows an adult who will be interested in buying products and services either as a
In a multichannel world, a little imagination can go a long way.
Phil Worms, Marketing Director at iomart Group plc, tells Figaro Digital
how the hosting company scored with a campaign to sponsor kids’ football teams
consumer or for a business. We looked at what other people are doing in this market which, if I’m honest, isn’t that much. The most common approach tended to be newspaper- type promotions where you have to buy the paper for ‘x’ number of weeks and cut out scores of coupons in order to get a shin guard, some socks or a pretty poor quality kit. We didn’t
want to do anything like that because it’s far too tortuous and not very fair.” What iomart decided to do was
develop its initial idea - sponsoring youth teams - into a competition unlike previous kit giveaways. Christened ‘Host Your Kit’, a nod to the company’s server hosting capabilities, the competition required young teams to explain why they deserved a new sports kit. All they had to do was send in a video or email application form - the funnier and more creative the better - and the best ones won a brand new kit. As Worms says, “We didn’t want just a one line response like ‘my old kit is rubbish’ or ‘my dad dyed my kit pink’.”
iomart invited a local sports
retailer to help out and entries were invited. “Within 24 hours of the launch we’d already had 150 applications from clubs.”
2013 was the second year of Host
Your Kit and to reach an even wider audience it was expanded to include basketball as well. In total, 800 teams have entered and 70 team strips have so far been handed out.
BACK OF THE .NET
52 issue 20 january 2014
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