week nine

'Sponsorship and event management'

The week’s reading of chapter thirteen covers wide ranging critical areas of public relations practice. The strategic communication thinking recognises the cause and effect relationship between our communication activities and the achievements of organisation's mission.

Sponsorship can be separated into three types –

• Philanthropic,
• Corporate, and
• Marketing.

Philanthropic sponsorship is basically a contribution to a community-based cause, which can develop a positive view of a company in its publics.
Corporate sponsorship is when a company sponsors an event not linked to their business, such as a drinks brand sponsoring a sporting event, to gain high-profile exposure.
Marketing sponsorship is used to create increased revenue by giving cash and goods to, e, a high profile celebrity or person like a film star.

Ambush marketing is when a company tell stories about itself of being associated with an event when it has no official, legal or moral rights to do so. The most common paths for event ambushing are:

• Advertising in event publications
• Signage sales
• Sponsorship of an individual or sporting team.
  

The readings urge that sponsorship also provides potential sales for businesses through marketing their brand or product in ways that are highly visible to a target or mass group which may contain potential consumers.

For example, Toshiba shared these objectives and attempted to achieve this through exclusivity, image association, signing rights, trading and media coverage.
Event management is also a key part of a PR practitioner’s job, which covers a broad range of events. According to my reading, events management needs strong leadership, defined objectives and a strong event theme and image. Event management is shown to be a tactic, which requires the maximum attention to point detail and extensive planning of all things. There are numerous incentives for holding events including media coverage, product demonstration and revenue generation. To gain all these incentives practitioners must be creative enough to manage the events. In order to achieve the best media coverage a media release is generally issued that talk about the event and sponsorship. Media functions are stuffed within the main event and event handbooks are distributed to the media with the sponsor’s logo. Events involve the implementation of strong crisis and issues management practices and also a focus on risk management. It is helpful to predict failure and negative occurrences and pre-preparing a plan to solve these.

Even Event management needs extensive planning, evaluation and consideration in order to achieve the successful execution of an event. The range of case studies discussed in the readings also exhibits the point of PR’s creativeness in sponsorship and event management is a must for a hit show.


The potential for marketing tactics always hurdles up the sponsorship proposals. It is something a PR practitioner must be aware of as a successful ambush may diminish the effectiveness of the main sponsors.

Apart from Reading, the week’s presentation also provided me with some nice example about the reading. But I still remained confused till the end of the debate about the issue of fight. Both the sides discussed about the good and bad impacts of sponsorship. I want to raise one question, ‘if you don’t have a sponsorship at all, my dear negative side, then how would you be able to see your favourite sports matches?’ I still have no answer for this.