Last month, Rory Natkiel opened a specialist marketing consultancy, Box Count, to help brands, agencies and rights holders organise more effective sports sponsorships.
Natkiel, who was previously the head of strategy at Sid Lee Sport, believes that the marketing science revolution has been slow to spread to sponsorship, and he set up his business to bring some academic rigour to the discipline.
He chatted to MediaCat about what makes sponsorship different from other forms of advertising, how sponsorship needs to change, and why he’s not just in it for the jollies.
What keeps you interested in media and marketing?
It’s funny. You speak to friends who maybe help run government departments or whatever, and you realise that what we do is not that important in the grand scheme of things. But once you’re in it, it’s endlessly fascinating. If I think about my own career, it has really satisfied my magpie’s curiosity. I came in through digital marketing, delved deep into SEO for a bit, then moved into content. Then I started to gravitate towards brand strategy and content strategy, and then over the last 10 years, I’ve been gravitating towards effectiveness and integrated comms.
It’s gratifying, in that the longer you spend doing it, the better you get at it, but there’s always something new to learn.
And I don’t have to put on a shirt and tie to go to work — that’s nice as well.
Why are you focusing on sports sponsorship? Better jollies?
That’s the classic perception of sponsorship, isn’t it? We all just go and get drunk at the test match. But I believe that we are about to enter a golden age for sponsorship for a few reasons. I know sponsorship has broadened, that live sport is becoming the last great monocultural activity where lots of people look at the same thing at the same time. That doesn’t happen in the same way in culture and arts. I think that’s increasingly important now because it also happens outside of the control of the platforms.
I was at a podcast event the other week with Rory Sutherland where he said nobody ever foresaw a media environment in which it was essentially four huge platforms controlling everything. So anything that exists outside of that is a good thing. Sponsorship may end up being broadcast on some of those channels, but they don’t have control over the branded spaces.
And sponsorship enables brands to show up and be integral to emotionally charged environments. It gives them the opportunity to speak to their audience about something that isn’t the product. And if it’s aligned with what they do as a business and their customer base, it should be a very natural extension of what they mean as a brand.
You’ve just started a sports sponsorship effectiveness consultancy. Why did you do that?
I spotted a gap. I’d always looked at the effectiveness conversation and thought, there’s all these amazingly clever people doing brilliant research, what could I possibly contribute? And then I got into a sponsorship-focused agency and noticed that people who came from the sponsorship sector would give me blank stares if I mentioned Byron Sharp, [Les] Binet and [Peter] Field. It wasn’t that they knew about them but decided not to use [their research]. They just hadn’t heard of it.
Similarly, if you look at the IPA database, it’s got sponsorship listed as a subcategory of out of home because of, I think, a legacy assumption that it’s just perimeter boards.
So on both sides, you’ve got a lack of understanding about what effectiveness is and what sponsorship now is, and I wanted to bridge that gap.
Is Box Count the only sponsorship effectiveness consultancy, as far as you’re aware?
Nobody else has coined this phrase, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who understand effectiveness and operate within the sponsorship world.
What are some of the texts or some of the people that have informed your thinking on effectiveness?
It’s the classic canon — Byron Sharp, Binet and Field, Orlando Wood, Richard Shotton. Paul Feldwick is a name that I think is often not included in that list, mainly because he doesn’t actually do research, but his book, Why Does The Pedlar Sing, is the one that I’d recommend to almost everybody. It has really shaped my thinking. He does this incredible thing of looking at everything, from the Smash Martians to Ginger Spice’s Union Jack dress and PT Barnum, to show why fame is a valuable tool for selling to people.
When I started writing, I tried to take that on board and combine it with my love of narrative history podcasts, to go back to where things started to learn what might happen in the future.
One of my Substacks was about why there’s this divide between the sponsorship world and the rest of the marketing industry, and I found in my research that it was because talent agents were first appointed by rights holders to sell [sponsorships], which they did very well, but they weren’t marketers. They weren’t thinking about penetration, market share or growth.
And then I’d say one person in particular who I’ve worked under is a guy called Phil Adams, who was the first planning director I ever worked with at Blonde, which was a digital agency. He comes from an engineering background and has a concept of planning from first principles — when you get a complex problem, breaking things down into smaller bits so that you can then come up with new solutions. He still writes amazing stuff about branding and strategy to this day.
Does sponsorship work in the same way as other kinds of advertising?
Same but different. The thing I’m coming to realise is that it may be a fundamental mistake to think of it as a channel. I’d look at it as a platform that can be activated through email, PR, TV, out of home.
Craig Mawdsley (a consultant who previously led AMV BBDO’s strategy department with Bridget Angear) actually spoke at our sponsorship effectiveness forum last week about Guinness’s sponsorship of the Six Nations. He said because they really buttoned up their measurement, they could see that when you introduced the Six Nations into the advertising, it performed better than the advertising without the Six Nations. And it more than made up for the cost of the rights. And the more integrated it becomes into your overall brand story the more commercially valuable it becomes. It might intuitively feel right that Guinness and rugby go together but that is because they’ve sponsored rugby for over 50 years.
You would never go, ‘Oh, Guinness is a brand that advertises on TV and it would be a meaningfully different brand if it didn’t advertise on TV.’ Its growth trajectory would have been different, but it’s not a defining characteristic of the brand. So, I think sponsorship can become not just a media channel but an overall part of your brand story in a way that traditional advertising can’t.
What do you think are the aspects of effectiveness that sponsorship needs to address as a priority?
I’ll say three things.
When a sponsorship is being sold, I think there needs to be much more focus on what rights would best meet a partner’s marketing objectives. If a brand comes along and says it’s got £5m, the salesperson will look at the menu of available inventory and put together £5m’s worth. I think a much more evidence-based approach to constructing the deals is needed.
And so much of the focus of the industry is on the deal that the activation is a bit of an afterthought. But, clearly, the activation is the bit that generates the effects.
Then, just better data sharing and measurement between brand and rights holder. The brand often does have a reasonably good idea of what the sponsorship is doing for them, but they’re less inclined to share it with the rights holder because they know that there’s a renegotiation coming up at the end of the deal and the price will go up if they know the true value of it. Guinness has got a very good, open approach to sharing their data with rights holder partners who, in turn, can do better work for them. I think you need to go into it in that spirit of true partnership, of testing and learning what works, so that renewal should be more of a logical next step rather than a negotiation over value.
Any activations you’ve seen recently that you think were especially effective or creative?
In my previous role we worked on the Tommy Hilfiger and F1: The Movie campaign. Some people will say ‘it’s easy if you’ve got the budget’, but the brief was to help Tommy Hilfiger create a standout moment in one of the biggest-budget movies of all time. Apple wasn’t worried about Tommy Hilfiger getting its moment in the sun, you know? So, I was really proud that in our first proposal we did a little mock-up of a red carpet pitstop costume change for Damson Idris, the brand ambassador. That was initially meant to be at the premiere, but the brand realised that it wouldn’t be feasible, so they said: ‘Well, what about the Met Gala?’ And that culminated in him rocking up to the Met Gala in a car from the movie, getting out in a diamond-encrusted Tommy Hilfiger-branded F1 helmet and doing a costume change at a mock pit stop on the red carpet.
Are you sporty, by the way?
I support Birmingham City, I’m a big NFL fan. I support the New England Patriots. But I’m not crying into my dinner if Birmingham lose at the weekend.
Got any tips for marketers looking for under-valued events to sponsor?
We’re about to do some research into women’s football with The Sponsorship Effectiveness Forum. It sounds obvious because obviously there’s been so much chat about women’s sport, but there are some brands that have pulled out of it a little bit because they say the eyeballs just aren’t there right now. I may be wrong, but I highly doubt that in 10 or 15 years’ time, we’re all going to be saying, ‘Oh, do you remember when everybody got into women’s football for a while? That was mad, wasn’t it?’
It’s only going one way, really. If you’re a brand playing a role in building women’s sport, I think the investment now will look very cheap in 10 to 15 years’ time.
