Sponsorship : can it work for online brands?

Sponsorship enables a brand to talk to its audience directly and say: “I’m like you. I do what you do. Come with me.” By building an affinity with its selected audience, it can influence the way they feel about the sponsoring brand, and the way they behave towards it. Sponsored content is currently a key growth area, particularly in sports. Rights holders are working with media organisations to engage consumers online as much as offline. Fans who wish to follow their sport or hobby can now do so through a vast array of microsites, blogs, forums, and web-based solutions, most recently through technologies such as apps. Marketers have acknowledged that while there remains a place for traditional above the line advertising and media campaigns, consumer fatigue is making these harder to deliver in a cost-effective way. Integrating these campaigns into sponsored content prevents the consumer pressing the fast forward button on the TV control by surrounding the programme content with the sponsor’s subliminal (or in may cases, not so subliminal) messaging.