The Power of the Big Idea

The sports sponsorship world has heard it time and time again. In fact, it is rarely called a sponsorship anymore, but a partnership. Gone are the days when putting up a signage and giving club tickets moved the needle. In today’s sports partnership world, integration, authenticity, and creativity are key in driving results and a return for partners.

Traditional assets (signage, radio, tickets) still have a tremendously valuable place in these partnerships, but they are increasingly used to supplement and support the central focus of the partnership. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts has been a proud partner of the Penguins for years, and is integrated into our PensPoints application (loyalty program rewarding Penguins fans for certain behaviors). During the month of February, Dunkin' Donuts used their traditional Penguins assets – dasherboard signage, radio, social media, paired with their other media buys, to promote how Penguins fans could win points at Dunkin' Donuts, and thus driving sales of their product.

Although loyalty programs aren’t anything new to most properties, creating new and unique inventory has become increasingly vital to the success of these new partnerships. As part of this ever-changing landscape, teams are forced to come up with new and unique inventory (experiences, in-game promotions, social media engagement) to supplement the traditional assets of a partnership (signage, radio, tickets).

Enter – The Big Idea Meeting. The Big Idea Meeting is a standing meeting we have every week that brings a representative from each department (marketing, social media, game operations, etc) into a room together to literally try and find the next big idea. The partnership sales person who is leading that Big Idea Meeting is tasked to set the agenda and educate all team members of the partner’s company background, objectives, where they are at in the sales process, and any other information the team needs.

Once the sales person starts the meeting, it becomes a zoo, which is exactly the goal. Wild and spectacular ideas are encouraged to get the creativity flowing. We really take the “no idea is a bad idea” mentality, and some of the craziest ideas lead into a golden opportunity. It’s the job of the sales person to capture all the ideas to sift through later to determine what would be both feasible and optimal for the potential partner.

The Big Idea Meeting was created out of a notion that the partnership team, more specifically, the sales team, is not the most creative team in the organization. And we wanted to leverage the many talents and expertise of our colleagues to:

1) help come up with new inventory,

2) create completely integrated partnership packages across different departments, &

 3) promote inter-department collaboration during the sales process creating buy-in from other teams and avoiding dreaded “force-feeding” conversations that typically divide sales and marketing teams ("it’s in the deal, we have to do it now").

Now take the creativity of the Big Idea Meeting, support it with traditional assets, and partners are now able to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and drive a strong, successful partnership.