Thinkbox announces major research into TV sponsorship
 

Thinkbox, the television marketing body for the main UK commercial broadcasters - Channel 4, Five, GMTV, ITV, Sky Media, Turner Broadcasting and Viacom Brand Solutions - has announced that it has commissioned a major new study to examine how TV programme sponsorship works. The independent study will include detailed examination of the implicit and associative effects of sponsorship and how it can best be evaluated and measured. Findings will be published in summer 2008.

The study follows substantial increases in revenues from programme sponsorships over recent years and is claimed to be the first research that examines this rapidly developing area in depth. Thinkbox has commissioned research consultancy Duckfoot to carry out the independent research and has also created a cross-industry Working Group which will offer continuous feedback on the research and help steer the general direction of the project. The Working Group will represent a variety of different areas of the advertising industry to ensure a balanced perspective. Members include Mediacom, Zenith Optimedia, ITV, Channel 4, Five, AE Media, Performance Worldwide and The Branded Content Marketing Association. The research will explore a number of the key areas of sponsorship on TV, including:   •  Unique benefits such as implicit and explicit effects over the short- and long-term   •  The relationship between TV sponsorship and TV spot advertising   •  How the viewing context and existing attitudes towards the brand affect perception   •  The three way relationship between the brand, the programme and the execution   •  The effects that different creative executions have on perceptions of the brand   •  The benefits of different forms of sponsorship and how they work with other editorial and marketing formats   •  Suitable metrics to measure the effects of sponsorship. Using the latest psychological research techniques, the research will identify the harder measures needed to demonstrate how sponsorship works, claims Thinkbox, both on a theoretical and practical level. It will also provide a practical framework to allow advertisers to use it more effectively. The research will be broken into a number of different stages. The first stage will be quantitative and will examine 1,000 respondents' attitudes towards a number of brands that have used sponsorship and an equivalent number that have not across a range of measures, including their attitude towards the brand, their emotional state at the time of watching, their awareness   of the brands' wider marketing activity and perceptions of creativity. Informed by the findings from the quantitative research, the second stage will employ Implicit Attitude Testing (IAT) to test live TV sponsorships. This will accurately assess how sponsorship impacts upon and shapes implicit associations of brands by competitively comparing brands with concepts and looking at how this links to the programme. The research will also feature a Lab Study based around the themes that emerge from the first two stages to explore how creativity impacts upon the influence of sponsorship. Also, a range of industry professionals will be interviewed to add informed, grounded perspectives on the issues raised in the fist three stages of the research. Thinkbox is now recruiting sponsoring brands to participate in the quantitative phase of its study and has called for advertisers to put themselves forward so the industry can better understand how sponsorship works. David Brennan, Thinkbox's Research and Strategy Director: "Robust research that helps advertisers understand and get the best out of TV is core to what Thinkbox does. We have built a solid reputation for rigorous and pioneering research and this is a much-needed study into a rapidly evolving but under-scrutinised area. "Sponsorship and other editorial marketing techniques have seen a massive increase in revenue in recent years. Now is the right time to examine them in depth to find out exactly how they work and how best to evaluate them. We know there's a clear link between sponsorship, future purchase intention and the bottom line, but no one has put the pieces together to explain how they work together. So, that's what we're going to do."