Transcript
Making up the budget for an event is not that easy. Sponsoring is for some events crucial to get the bills paid. But how do you get marketeers to put the money on the table? Sean Obedih knows the secrets of seducing sponsors. He is founder of sponsorshive.com an online market place for event sponsoring.
Hi Sean, thank you to come into our show.
Thank you for having me.
We are going to talk about sponsoring. But as an event organizer where do we start?
Well, where do we start? Basically, I think sponsorship possibly seen as the most difficult area to secure. Especially for smaller events and for brands as well they have steak in what’s going on because they want to communicate their brand to people but sometimes have difficulty in actually choosing a partner to go about that process. So there’s lot of inefficiency in terms of how sponsorship is managed and how it’s actually acquired. That’s what we believe we can help to use technology to actually solve that problem.
Ok. And when you start to make a page for sponsors, how do you do that? How do you structure your page?
Well, I think just like anything else we tend to see is, we work with different event organizers and one of the things we tend to see is that most people do not know how to sell the event very well. It should be easier because you know what your event is but sometimes it is very hard to articulate that to or explain to the world what they get out of sponsoring you or sponsoring your event. So it has to be relationship based. So it’s easier to actually pick up the phone and call your friend who runs such a company or who runs such a division but when you actually translate that to a bigger brand it doesn’t work. So the factor is still relationship based. It’s in itself is a problem because not everybody knows everybody.
And I can suppose, sponsor doesn’t like to sponsor just because he knows you but he wants to get value I suppose.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And actually in terms of scale, that way it doesn’t work very well. If you want to scale your sponsorship, if you want to reach different segments, maybe a tech crowd or a marketing crowd or whatever segments you wants to actually reach. For the time being there's no platform that allows you to do that. And that’s why I think it’s an opportunity but also it has been a problem for last two years.
And what is the impact of - you are talking about technology - but what is under the impact of technology on the whole sponsoring, make sponsor deals?
Well, technology allows us to actually much do the matching. So the brands can actually sit in their offices and pick whatever segment they want to target for their week or their month of whatever period they want actually communicate their brand. It could be a new product has been launched and with that product they have to communicate a certain message to certain people. Sometime technology allows us to do it and actually target different people and get different feedback depending on what segment to end.
And that's what sponsorshive, your platform, is doing?
Absolutely yes.
Can you tell us a little bit about sponsorshive?
Well, sponsorshive is a platform or a market place that allows anybody with an audience to actually monetize their audience. But also for the sponsors that can actually pick and choose what areas to get involved with or what events to sponsor. But one of the problems that I was mentioning earlier, the problem is actually to pick and choose or actually decide how to go about different emails and phone calls that come into their inbox on a daily basis asking for sponsorship. So taking all those inefficiency away it allows buying the brand not only but also to have a systematic way to managing sponsorship but also for event organizers that actually…
And your platform is only UK based or is it worldwide?
It is UK based for the time being, because it was launched only three months ago.
Congratulations with launch then!
Thank you. It was a soft launch. But our plan is actually to serve the European market. Because we’d be the European market is really badly served because at first because of different languages that makes inefficiency in terms of if you are speaking Dutch or French or English it tends to be language based. However, it should be pretty much, it's all the same aspects because all the event organizers have the same things or they want the same things. Yet the different brands they want to communicate different areas. So we believe that by having a European based platform, it can actually reach out to different parts of the European countries.
And what is that sponsors are looking in events? Because a lot of events if they offer sponsoring what does the sponsor get? Is it the banner at the entrance of the event and that's it? But I think maybe that's not what they are looking for...
No. That's not what they are looking for. And the banner side of the thing is the old way of sponsoring. So we are actually saying sponsorship hasn’t caught up to the mobile age. It hasn’t caught up to the socio age. The way people attend events now has changed. And what we tend to see is that everybody now attends events with an iphone or an ipad. And they tend to actually be twittering or using different types of social networks, talking about what's going whether it's the speaker or whether it’s a brand or somebody that they just met. So that conversation we believe is very important in terms of capturing or sometimes even embedding some of the messages within that conversation, because you can get instant feedback on your brands and perceptions for examples. If you are sponsoring an event and you've given away product we can actually find out what people are saying and talking about, your product during the event or even after the event or before the event. So as a brand that's very useful, because you get insights that you won't actually get when you just put up a banner hoping for the best.
Yes, indeed. I find this as an very inspiring interview Sean and I really want to thank you.
No, thank you. Thank you for having me.
And you at home. Thank you for watching our show. I hope to see you next episode.
