Why We Joined the Sports Innovation Lab Sponsorship Leadership Board

At Blinkfire Analytics, we have a passion for technology, innovation, and problem-solving. This passion, plus the opportunity to collaborate with some of the best, brightest, and most innovative minds in the sports and business industries, led us to join the Sports Innovation Lab Sponsorship Leadership Board. 

We’re proud to not only lend our insights and expertise to the industry, but also participate through dialogue, research, and disruption in a way that enables unique opportunities.

Joining the board, which includes Fortune 200 brands, leading sports teams and leagues, and global agencies empower us to continue to lead and drive innovation in the sponsorship and technology space.

Over the next year, our involvement with the Sports Innovation Lab and the Next Generation Sponsorship Board gives us opportunities to engage in market-defining and thought-provoking conversations on how the industry should leverage technology to inspire and improve upon the current paradigm of the partnership space.

These conversations will focus on the state of sponsorship today and where sponsorships could, and should, move into the future. Together with our peers, we are eager to shift traditional sponsorship thinking and standards by exploring new techniques and ideas on how to accelerate and grow. 

As excited as we are to lead and learn, we’re equally excited to listen. Surrounding ourselves with fellow board members will offer new experiences, idea exchanges, and concepts. Already, thanks to the fantastic, positive, and constructive feedback we receive from our customers, we’re able to develop our hypotheses from “we think that...” to “we know that...”. With this group of executives, the feedback loop will be even more rapid and effective.  

Through our involvement with the Sports Innovation Lab and our fellow Next Generation Sponsorship board members, I’m hoping we go beyond the comfortable yet archaic ways of the sports sponsorship space and forge ahead towards a more disruptive, effective, and productive sharing of ideas about the future of sponsorships. 

In 1960, Robert Keith wrote an article titled, “The Marketing Revolution” with an idea that seems somewhat obvious today but was quite groundbreaking at the time. Just as the Copernican system (the sun, not the earth, is the center of our celestial system) was revolutionary in the 1500s, Keith’s idea that the customer, not the company, should be the focus of marketing efforts, was game-changing. 

Through collaboration with our fellow board members, we hope to contribute to deeper insights and practical implementation on how to innovate the traditional thinking of the sponsorship space while also continuing to be leaders, driving changes that will stand the test of time (until, at least, the next marketing revolution).