When most people who want sponsorships think about their ultimate goal, it involves money. They’re looking for someone to fund their event, to pay for their tour, to raise money for their charity, and so on. When many business think about sponsoring someone, it ultimately involves money as well: even if it is an incredible cause, at the end of the day, they want to know how sponsoring will help them get more customers. Each party treats the sponsorship as a transaction. However, I believe it is important to shift the definition from “a cash and/or in-kind fee paid to a property (typically sports entertainment, non-profit event, or organization) in return for access to the exploitable, commercial potential associated with that property” (IEG, 2000) to something more equitable: a partnership.

Sponsorship as a Partnership

A sponsorship insinuates something more akin to a one-sided relationship: the sponsor gives money in the hope for more customers or being associated with a positive cause. A partnership denotes an agreement where both parties share the risks, responsibilities, and rewards. By approaching the relationship as a partnership, it also implies a long term agreement.

By examining how we approach sponsorships more closely, we can also identify a few other important factors that should be considered:

● Who do we want associated with our brand, event, or organization? You hear about companies dropping their advertising dollars or sponsorships of athletes all the time because they don’t want to be affiliated with improper behavior. Recently, talk show host Rush Limbaugh lost multiple major advertisers due to some of his controversial statements. However, sometimes as an artist or non-profit event, we don’t think deeply about who we are getting our money from and how our customers’ perception of us might change as a result.

● What kind of people do we want to work with? If you are planning a cross-promotional marketing campaign where you work closely with a brand, you’ll want to know their customers, their work-flow, communication processes, and their approach. Does it make sense for what you are doing?

● Is everyone getting fair value for their work? If you are getting a $20,000 sponsorship, are you providing at least $20,000 worth of deliverable returns back to the investor? Conversely, is the amount of work you’re doing worth the money/partnership or are there other ways you can get the same resources more easily?

● What are some creative ways that this partnership can be highlighted? You should be able to do more than simply trade logos on websites and your printed materials. How can you use your respective brands to drive customers towards one another? Is there a way that you can involve the employees of a sponsoring business?

Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer puts it best: “All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things being not so equal, people still want to do business with their friends.” By elevating the value of sponsorship to an established, friendly partnership, you’ll instill loyalty, and get more in return than a simple check could ever provide.

Simon Tam is owner of Last Stop Booking and author of How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements. Simon’s writing on music and marketing can be found at www.laststopbooking.com

Source: Music Think Tank

When Athletes Go Wild

Isn’t it amazing? As a kid you play all day on the basketball court, football field, baseball field, etc. Then you finally make it to the big time… and then one day… You’re back to being a stupid kid by doing the dumbest shit on the planet. Let’s take a look at the dumbest injuries in sports.

Storified by Mo Better · Tue, May 01 2012 22:54:18

Rapper David Banner is going direct to fans for support with the upcoming free (but please donate) release of Sex, Drugs & Video Games. In the process he’s attempting to show that urban artists can take control of their own music and media activities. The album includes such major artists as Lil Wayne and Chris Brown as well as emerging stars such as A$AP Rocky and Big K.R.I.T. The download will be available for free with a suggested minimum donation of $1.

Banner is using the campaign as the first stage of what he’s calling the 2M1 Movement as he’s hoping to get 2 million fans to download the album and donate at least a dollar each. It’s an interesting effort that seems to be much more than a publicity stunt and is definitely worth keeping an eye on if you’re concerned with alternative approaches to the music business.

Banner’s 2M1 Movement and initial release, Sex, Drugs & Video Games, is currently featured on the homepage of his website. The album will be released May 22nd via LiveMixtapes.com. In the above video he says that he is seeking to prove that “urban music is still a valuable entity.” He points out that though he’s asking for a minimum $1 donation, it’s worth a lot more due to the artists involved:

“ASAP Rocky, Lil’ Wayne, Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg, Game, Nipsey Hussle, 2 Chainz, Big K.R.I.T., Bun B, Don Trip, Maino, Kardinal Offishall, Doe Hicks, Luck and Savvy, Raheem DeVaughn, Kree, Ras Kass, J-Doe and Tank”

He also mentions that he’ll be collecting emails and will then be able to go directly to his fans adding a “big shoutout” to Louie C.K. for providing inspiration. On the website he states:

“What’s the ‘movement you may ask? THE 2M1 MOVEMENT IS TO START CONTROLLING OUR OWN MUSIC, MOVIES, AND CONTENT… PERIOD! WE ARE NOT SIMPLY CHARACTERS IN A VIDEO GAME being controlled by the invisible hand.”

Banner elaborated on these statements in an interview with DJ Booth, including the fact that he objects to people calling this and similar releases mixtapes:

“I’m not calling it a mixtape because we have to stop lying to ourselves by calling them mixtapes. These are free albums we’ve been giving away as of lately. It’s all original music and original raps. These aren’t borrowed instrumentals.”

Among a number of interesting comments, he also makes a point about the younger artists on the project as well as his views on the industry:

“These young cats are really focused and know exactly where they’re going. The thing that I hope to do is help motivate them and not only help them bring their vision to fruition, but help them avoid some of the negativity in this industry. Hopefully with this younger generation, we can control our vision.”

“In most cases when dealing with major labels, they wait until we get hot and then we sell our vision to them, and we stop doing the things that helped get us to that point. Why sell ourselves to them when we’re already a business owner? We need to learn to control our visions. We need to understand what we created and more importantly, understand the power of it.”

It will be interesting to see how hip hop and R&B fans respond to Banner’s efforts especially given the ongoing deluge of free album length music releases in hip hop. One concern is that he’s apparently offering the download on a mixtape site and asking for donations via his own site.

Given the psychological demotivating effects of having multiple steps to any voluntary project, the possiblity is that he’s undermining the process by breaking it up. In addition, the context of a free mixtape download site seems counterproductive.

Unfortunately, if such choices do undermine the donation process, it will most likely be read as David Banner making incorrect assumptions about his fans and those of the other artists on the release.

Source: Hypebot

Video is moving to the Web in enormous leaps; the promise of online video seems to be at our doorstep. Millions are cutting the cord, beloved television shows are returning through the seemingly divine intervention of online distribution, and people are consuming Web and mobile video in increasingly staggering numbers.

But all that video consumption is saddled with a burden that’s keeping it from reaching its full potential: the ads just haven’t caught up.
You all know the problem I’m talking about, and yes, you’ve seen it on our own site — on videos hosted by me, and probably even the video embedded in this blog post. You want to watch a video on the Web, and before you can get to that video, you’re faced with a 30-second ad that you can’t fast-forward or skip.
In some cases, the content itself may be only a couple of minutes long, so the ad represents a huge time commitment relative to the length of the clip. And before you can move on to the next two-minute video, you might have to watch the same ad all over again. Result: you’re angry at the publisher, you’re angry at the advertiser, and everyone’s brand takes a hit. The publisher and the advertiser haven’t made an ad “impression” — they’ve made an enemy.
We used to refuse to take 30-second ads in the earliest days of CNET TV, but even with 15-second ads, there are issues: the biggest one is repetition. If you watch three or four videos online, or watch a day of live programming like our CES coverage or the Holiday Help Desk marathons we used to do, you’ll see the same ad three or four or 20 times. The result: brand rage.
I’ve been producing and hosting digital video for almost seven years now, and in that time, our feedback inboxes have constantly been full of complaints about the duration, frequency, and redundancy of ads, and believe me, I feel your pain daily. I’m a consumer, too — in fact, I probably consume a lot more CNET TV than most people, and it’s not like we have a magical in-house mechanism for skipping ads! I feel it when I watch YouTube, Hulu, video on other sites like Yahoo and CNN; virtually everywhere video appears online.
The question of digital video advertising is especially relevant now. According to Comscore, Americans watched an all-time high of more than 8.3 billion video ads in March, as they consumed almost 37 billion videos–some 21 hours per month of online video content.
The issue will only get more acute as video goes mobile — and it is going mobile, and quickly. Cisco estimates that 70 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016, and it was already 52 percent of traffic at the end of 2011.
Those mobile minutes are even more precious than Web minutes. No one — and I mean, no one — will cheerfully tolerate a 30-second ad in front of a 1:30 clip on a phone, at least more than a couple of times. Not only are they annoying, they’re an unacceptable data tax in this world of ever-tightening bandwidth limits.
I’ve learned, over the years, that the reason for 30-second ads and ad redundancy is just inventory. Ad agencies and their clients create big, expensive video ads for television, and that’s the exact same inventory they’re using online and on mobile. In some cases, they’re willing to figure out a way to cut down their 30-second ads into 15-second versions, but even that is time-consuming, might diminish the message of the original ad, and, in the eyes of the advertiser, isn’t as effective as the full, cinematic, 30-second version.
But that is a battle we’ve been fighting now for seven years, and that’s just at CNET. It’s time for the paradigm of recycling TV content for digital to change at the root. We need new creative for digital advertising, and that’ll help the entire industry reach its full potential a lot faster.
Every company wants to crack the nut on digital video, and everyone from publishers to advertisers want to figure out how to make money on it. There may be ads, but there aren’t enough of them, they don’t make as much money as TV ads, and although digital video consumption is growing, it’s still not profitable enough to abandon broadcast. I’ve heard many a TV industry executive bemoan the fact that the money “just isn’t there yet.”
I believe that the money and the users will be there if we stop thinking about digital video as television on the Web or on mobile phones. There’s a ton of innovation happening in digital video distribution and there’s even a ton of innovation happening in the online video ad industry — from mouseover overlays to media-rich ad units to metrics and analysis to skippable ads. The Internet Advertising Bureau just launched a competition aimed at innovating on digital ad formats.
But we won’t get anywhere until we’re working with something other than re-purposed 30-second TV ads. Those can work, to a small extent, when they’re embedded in actual television shows online, as Adobe suggested recently at NAB. But even that data is misleading: users tolerate TV-like ads online, but they won’t tolerate as many as on broadcast, and tolerating them to get to shows or live broadcasts isn’t the same thing as enjoying them. If the ads don’t, ultimately, help the brand, it doesn’t matter whether people finished the whole thing (most likely on mute or while doing something else).
So, how do we make ads a worthwhile, engaging, and even entertaining part of the digital video experience? Three steps, but the first step has to be:
Content
Make different kinds of ads. The first ad agency that creates a digital production studio for ads customized for online or mobile video as the potential to own the future. Digital video on the Web and especially on mobile is simply not the same medium as television, even if the content, in some cases, is exactly the same.
Yes, new ad formats and content will be expensive. It will require investment. But it’s worth it, and there are ways to do it cleverly and more cheaply than creating broadcast video. Some companies are crowd-sourcing brand videos, whether as standalone content or, of course, 15- or 30-second ads. Simply create shorter ads–my colleague Rafe Needleman points out that, “you can make someone laugh or cry in 5 seconds. That should be the limit.” Second step:
Technology
As I’ve been developing my upcoming show, I’ve been thinking a lot about innovative digital distribution. Ads also need to take advantage of all technology we’re steeped in with digital video. Invent new formats like silent-ad overlays that aren’t as intrusive as pre- or post-roll. Or, create or hyper-local promotion campaigns that use geo-location and local video or even still-image ads. Create feeds for deals and news, or push alerts for new product launches. And duh, use social, early and often. First create an amazing new piece of digital advertising content, then make it shareable straight from the phone or Website. Viral ads are the best ads, after all.
Third, although this is still in the experimental stage, it looks like we can’t escape:
Integration
This is the trickiest new ad development of them all, and I’m curious to read your comments and see what you think about it. Even as Adobe is claiming that users are “engaged” with ads more than ever, it’s clear that 30-second ads may be watched, but only as a barrier to the really good stuff. So advertisers are pushing deeper and deeper integration into content: segments designed around specific products, promotional placement, asking hosts to read advertising copy or create commercial-like segments involving both the talent and the heavily branded product.
Integration is obviously a tricky balance; it ensures that users see advertising, and see it from a trusted source. When it’s too heavy-handed, though, it can cheapen all involved. And when you work for, say, a journalistic or reviews-based organization, it can start to raise uncomfortable questions with your viewers about objectivity and endorsement.
I suspect that product integration will intensify in the short term, partly as an interim solution until the industry can create new, more engaging advertising that people like better than they like pre-roll (or integration, for that matter). But I’m curious to hear your thoughts on product integration in digital video, for both industry and selfish reasons, so let me know in the comments! Ads aren’t going away, and I don’t want them to, because I want to make great, high-quality video, and somebody needs to get paid for that to happen. So, what kind of ads do you want to see?

Source: CNET

With gas prices high these days, wouldn’t it be great to have a car that gets 40+ MPG? Well today is Earth Day so which cities have the most Eco-friendly consumers?

Cars.com did a little research looking at where its searches originate for certain kinds of cars. The goal: look for cities with the most searches for eco-friendly cars. They made the definition of an eco-friendly car easy. It’s simply any new car that gets more than 40 miles per gallon. Could be hybrid. Could be just be a car with a really efficient gas engine. Easy.

The top 10 cities with the greenest car shoppers, based on Cars.com searches, are:

1. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, Calif.
2. Madison, Wis.
3. Monterey-Salinas, Calif.
4. Portland, Ore.
5. San Diego
6. Green Bay-Appleton, Wis.
7. Santa Maria-Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo, Calif.
8. Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, Calif.
9. Chico-Redding, Calif.
10. Zanesville, Ohio

We can easily see 1 through 9, but Zanesville, Ohio? Now lets look at the cities where people made the fewest searches on Cars.com for cars that get more than 40 mpg:

1. Odessa-Midland, Texas
2. Laredo, Texas
3. Fairbanks, Alaska
4. Albany, Ga.
5. Bluefield-Beckley-Oakhill, Va./W. Va.
6. Glendive, Mont.
7. Helena, Mont.
8. Columbus-Tupelo-West Point, Ala./Miss.
9. Casper-Riverton, Wyo.
10. Baton Rouge, La.

–Patrick Olsen/Cars.com’s Kicking Tires and Chris Woodyard/Drive On

Source: USA Today

How Did You Spend 420?

420 means many different things to so many different people. From smoking, to Hitler’s birthday, to the anniversary of the columbine shootings. So how did you spend 420?

Storified by Mo Better · Sat, Apr 21 2012 01:12:26

So it was 4/20… And I was sober…Doing so good without the intoxication…Its amzing how my timeline shows the sincerest friends and family that haved graced my life…Up and downs but they were their in my deepest darkest hrs…Even if it was one moment in time awww coolz!Jamella Fuller

Forbes has released the Forbes Five, its annual shortlist of rap’s wealthiest artists. 2012′s top earners—Diddy, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Bryan “Birdman” Williams and 50 Cent, in that order—were also 2011′s top earners, and rankings on the list remained the same in both years. (Confusingly, Diddy topped 2011′s Forbes Five, but Jay ranked first on Forbes’ 2011 “Cash Kings” list.) Since last year, the collective net worth of the group rose $95 million.

None of rap’s moguls are billionaires yet, but Diddy’s the closest to becoming one. He’ll launch a music-themed cable channel with Comcast, Revolt, in 2013, and sales of his Ciroc vodka are way up, thanks to the success of Ciroc Peach.

Tupac hologram mastermind Dr. Dre, who sold HTC a 51% stake in his Beats headphones for $300 million in August, still ranks ahead of Cash Money Records founder Bryan “Birdman” Williams. Cash Money’s $30 million distribution deal with Universal, signed in 2008, ends this summer. Birdman’s roster—Lil Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj—is one of the most lucrative in music, and he’s ready for distributors to re-evaluate its value: “Whoever gives the most benefit to my team, which is first, and to its success, that’s where we’ll end up at.”

Source: The Fader

It’s now 2012… On new year’s eve we all promise to lose weight, save money, treat people better, blah blah blah. Then there are some people out there that get either very creative or insane. Let’s take a look at 2012 resolutions…

Black Panther

Tigers

Giraffes

Panda