“Sponsorship is the future of business”

Jackie Fast, Pinpoint: How challenging the norm is the only route to success in selling sponsorship.

Only someone who has successfully navigated the choppy (and occasionally murky) waters of sports marketing and sponsorship can make such a claim with any confidence.

As Jackie Fast points out in her book, advertising and marketing has changed.

Media consumption and channel proliferation has made it harder for brands to fully engage with their audiences but if advertising has changed then it is only fair to say that sponsorship too has changed.

A logo on a shirt is never going to be enough.

In fairness, it never has been enough.

There is greater demand on sports properties to demonstrate something beyond “equivalent media value” and greater pressure on brand owners and managers to make their sponsorship money work.

Jackie Fast sold her sports marketing business, Slingshot Sponsorship, having worked with Sir Richard Branson, Spotify, IBM, Renault, Haymarket Consumer Publishing and Shell to name but a few.

She still very much believes in the benefits of sponsorship and her book, Pinpoint: How challenging the norm is the only route to success in selling sponsorship, (buy HERE) looks at the world from both the perspective of property and the brand – giving common sense direction and useful engagement and retention strategies.

There are few books available on the subject of sponsorship – a “must have” if you’re a marketing strategist.

(It was a real pleasure to get Jackie on the show in a week where she was particularly busy in her capacity as board director of the European Sponsorship Association – hope to get her back on the podcast again later in the Spring.)

Follow her on www.jackiefast.com and on twitter @JackieFast

Listen to the podcast on iTunes HERE and on Soundcloud below