ConAgra Bags Best Bagger Championships

If Joey Chestnut can down 66 hot dogs and 12 minutes in front of a global TV audience, shouldn't the world's best grocery bagger gain similar fame and fortune? ConAgra Foods will sponsor the 24th annual National Grocers Association Best Bagger Championship to be held Feb. 11, 2010, at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas, and as a result of the sponsorship there will be higher stakes on the ...

Inside the Women’s Professional Soccer Sponsor Summit

While acknowledging the headwinds of a down economy, the Women's Professional Soccer, by many accounts had a successful inaugural season, which included much more modest sponsorship expectations than its predecessor, WUSA. In the six months since play began, WPS has signed 5 non-endemic sponsors: Puma, Hint, MedImmune, Coast Guard and Advocare. Sponsors, Soccer United Marketing (SUM) and team ...

Deal Flow 10/12/09

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the National Hockey League Players Association and the NHL have signed a multi-year agreement naming Enterprise as the Official Rent-A-Car of the NHLPA and the NHL. Deal of the Day - Vote! Enterprise & the NHL - Good deal?(poll) T-Mobile has signed a one year sponsorship of the ING New York City Marathon. Boost Mobile, a division of Sprint that offers no contract ...

Pizza Boxes for Protection?

Sega has dialed up Pizza Hut for its newest version of the classic role play game Phantasy Star, Phantasy Portable 2. A major in-game sponsorship was announced today that will allow players to pick up figures of Japanese Pizza Hut mascot Cheese-kun as well as arm themselves with a Pizza Hut cardboard box shield and a pizza pan at an in-game pizzeria. Games site, IGN, writes: A Pizza Hut sho...

Do Brand-Owned Events Need Their Own Measurement Tool?

Sponsownership is a hot topic in sponsorship with the success of wholly brand-owned events like the Red Bull Air Race, Flugtag and Virgin FreeFest. Do brand-owned events need a unique measurement tool, independent of the classic sponsorship measurement practices currently available? Measurement firm, SponsorMap thinks so. SponsorMap Experiential, launched this week as part of the SponsorMap r...

Sponsored Apps the Answer for Print Media?

Ad pages at print publications fell by an industry average of 29.5% in the second quarter of this year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. One of USA Today's key strategies in an attempt to fend off the downward trend in print media is rooted in mobile applications. While most applications are either consumer paid, or created by brands and distributed for marketing purposes, USA To...

IEG Post Raises a Big Question About Our Industry

Being a powerhouse sponsorship consultant provides its obvious advantages when it comes to publishing content on the industry. Quite simply it gives IEG a great opportunity to provide cutting edge real-time insights to the rest of the industry, however therein lies the rub also - and a responsibility. There's an inherent conflict that must be treated delicately and with complete transparency....

Olympic Sponsorship Upheaval

In the wake of the 2016 Olympic announcement, it's been a whirlwind last few days for the Olympic movement. First came the near unanimous call for the USOC brass to step down and yesterday's report that the IOC plans to overhaul its marketing service group. But the most interesting news may have come from London, where The Evening Standard reports that Coca-Cola has protested LOCOG's negotiatio...

Deal Flow 9-11-2009

Mercedes-Benz has agreed to be the official car of this year's London Fashion Week. The automaker is already a leading sponsor of many other fashion weeks throughout the world, including New York Fashion Week. Herbalife Ltd., a global nutrition and direct-selling company, today announced that it has completed an agreement with one of Spain`s leading La Liga football teams, Valencia CF, to beco...

Is over-commercialization killing sponsorship's cred?

When I worked for Ad Agency FCB San Francisco, it didn’t take me very long to realize what the ad business was all about, and how, generally speaking, the client was simply subsidizing four different businesses while kind of hoping the agency’s work would somehow impact its bottom line. As I understood it… 1) The ad agency gets hired to produce creative (ads). 2) The agency or an outside me...