Pippa Collett – Vice-Chair, European Sponsorship Association

You’ve been a key figure in a number of developments at ESA. Could you tell us, for example, a little bit about the introduction of ESA’s Sponsorship Assessment & Evaluation Guidelines?

ESA is an organization that leads on sponsorship across Europe and, as sponsorship is a relatively new marketing discipline, there is much that needs to be done to provide guidance and tools to help practitioners. The Sponsorship Assessment & Evaluation Guidelines came out of a real passion of mine that I developed whilst at Shell around evaluation. When you’re spending the sort of money that you are on a Formula One sponsorship you do need to understand, in a little more depth than merely a valuation of the media exposure, how a sponsorship is performing against its KPIs. That’s really where my concern for understanding the outcomes of sponsorship came from.

ESA is clever enough to harness its members’ passions and use that as the driver for making things happen that help the association and its members across Europe.

And what has been the thinking behind the development of the Sponsorship Agency Selection Process?

Well again, ESA leveraged another of my passions to create something of value to the sponsorship industry!

I have been on both sides of agency selection and there is a lot of bad practice, across the marketing sector. The idea was to develop a set of guidelines that would help educate sponsors on the appropriate way of finding the right agency and indeed, to allow agencies to think through whether they should actually enter a pitch or not.

I have heard horrific stories of twenty agencies being asked to pitch initially. That’s asking for a huge amount of resources on the part of the agencies and an even bigger, but hidden, investment in resources on behalf of the brand to get through all twenty responses. It is not morally right for a brand to go fishing for ideas in this way without recompensing the agencies for their creative input and time they put into developing their pitch.

So the guidelines aim to set out a very clear process so that both sides of the table can understand what is the correct way to go about pitching work as opposed to, at one end inviting twenty responses and, at the other, arbitrarily selecting a friend’s agency without due diligence. That agency may not have the resources or the right approach necessary to solve the specific challenge for which an agency is required.

Could you tell us a little about the intentions and thoughts behind your new book, ‘The Sponsorship Handbook’?

My colleague William Fenton, who is also the editor of The World Sponsorship Monitor, and I wrote the book as an industry primer.  It’s aimed at new entrants to the industry, whether they are youngsters on the first step of their sponsorship career or alternatively someone who has suddenly been handed a sponsorship role within a large organization and then expected to be an expert overnight.  We cannot promise an instant transformation, but we do believe people will find it educational and thought-provoking.

We have included a lot of case studies to illustrate various points and half the book is written for rights holders, the other half is aimed at sponsors. We did it that way deliberately because we feel it’s important that both sides understand their sponsorship partner’s perspective and key drivers.

You have an MBA from Cranfield. Is there one thing you learned in your studies that has been most beneficial in your professional career since? And, likewise, is there one thing that comes from experience which you think can’t be taught in a classroom?

Taking it the other way round first, one of the things that became painfully apparent to me after I’d done my MBA is that there’s nothing like experience to inform your education. So a part of me believes that I did my MBA too young and could have got more out of it, had I done it later. I’ve often toyed with the idea of going back and doing it again because I think I would get a lot more out of it second time around!

However, I was exposed to both in a theoretical and practical knowledge that have since paid dividends. Particularly for subjects like finance and accounting, had I not done an MBA, I may never have got the opportunity, certainly in my immediate career with American Express and Shell, to actually understand how to read a profit and loss account, read a balance sheet, or to appreciate the implications of financial market movements.

Another thing that I learnt the theory of, and was then able to see in action, was organizational behavior. Unless you’re actually aware of it, it’s a bit like body language training. You start to realize that things aren’t happening randomly. Aspects of company culture,, formal and informal networks and official and unofficial leadership structures all drive, or retrain, business activity and once you’re tuned into those you can then harness them appropriately.

What are your targets for 2011?

To meet our financial plan would be the first one!

Also, to continue learning. I am devoted to continual professional development to keep me at the top of my game. Assisting in the education of others in our industry and beyond is also important to me and helps to constantly challenge my own thinking.

And frankly to have fun!  Life is too short and too tough not to have a bit of entertainment along the way!

What is the most challenging part of your work?

I would say that balancing the various demands is the most challenging. I’m not very good at saying no and probably should be better. Prioritizing is a key skill – the art of courteous refusal is still a development need!

Also I’d much rather be working with a client than running the business. I’m much more interested in sponsorship as a multi-faceted marketing discipline than in finance, put it that way!

What part is most enjoyable?

I think the intellectual challenge of constantly being faced with new businesses, new industry sectors and new issues to resolve, and developing robust solutions, supported by appropriate processes and practices.

What do you find most useful and interesting about the concept of iSportconnect?

For me, at the moment it’s about keeping up-to-date with the latest news. I can see that it has the potential to grow into a really great network of sports professionals in time.

 

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Pippa Collett’s

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