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People & Places In The News
PRODUCTPLACEMENT SYDNEYANDBEYOND
Adozen years ago the market did not exist in the UK, but now TV programme sponsorship is worth £100 million a year. And with the explosion of digital channels, opportunities will surely grow and that figure will inevitably rise.
Sponsorvision is one of the more innovative companies in the market place, offering a ‘one stop shop’
to clients where they con-
ceive, create and bring to
air sponsorship tie ins.
The company was founded in 1992 by former
ad agency men Blair
Krempel and Phil Reedy,
and the biggest feather in
the cap was the deal that brought Cadburys togeth-
er with Coronation Street
in 1996, which is still oper- ating today. They also
helped tie in the Sun with
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
“One of the things that encouraged us to set up Sponsorvision,” explains Krempel “was that we could see the general malaise in the industry towards TV sponsorship.
“Nobody wanted to do it from a cre- ative or a strategic point of view, because they’d rather make 30 or 60 second films than five second break bumpers. The ad industry didn’t really understand how spon- sorship, as opposed to advertising, worked.
“Advertising is a very self-centred piece of communication, while sponsorship is more about understanding the values of
something else, and riding the relationship that this other thing has with its consumers.”
While they were initially slow to catch on, advertising and media agencies did eventually glimpse the brave new world that lay ahead, and most now devote some personnel to this lucrative side of the business.
But experience must count for something, as matching a par- ticular product to a TV pro- gramme is fraught with potential pitfalls, as Krempel explains.
“You have to understand how the communication objec- tives you’ve got for a brand can
be achieved through a particular pro- gramme,” he says. “And the relation- ship that programme might have with its viewers.
“It’s quite a complex thing, and it is quite pleasing when you start on that road and match a client with a pro- gramme, but that’s only the beginning. The creative process is absolutely criti-
cal in demonstrating to the viewer why the rela- tionship exists, because the only way a viewer is going to accept sponsor- ship is if they understand the relationship.”
Krempel contends that bad tie-ins can actual- ly have a negative effect, far worse than an ineffec- tive campaign in the more traditional areas of adver- tising. With issues like this, and the question of editori-
al integrity at stake the world of pro- gramme sponsorship is clearly one that requires a leap of faith by all parties.
“The value that it offers to pro- gramme makers and broadcasters is rela- tively little compared to how the industry existed before,” Krempel adds.
“But things are changing. We’re into a digital television landscape now, we’re into multi-channels, and sponsorship is going to have an ever increasing role in supporting content across a range of media platforms.” ■ Anwar Brett
These days the amount of skill and effort that goes into creat- ing the full inter- active gaming experi- ence seems more akin to creating a feature film.
That at least was the case with last year’s BAFTA Interactive Award winner in the Sport section, Sydney 2000. Designed for PC CD-Rom and Sega
Dreamcast by the appropriately named Attention to Detail (ATD), and pub- lished by Eidos, its success has already secured ATD the rights to develop a game based on the 2002 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City.
“That will be on totally different hard- ware,” explains Chris Gibbs, managing director and co-founder of ATD, “so we have to get to grips with the new technol- ogy, and push the game content forward
as well. It’s an ever moving target for us.”
As for Sydney, it must
be nice to reflect that the spin-off game is as successful as the event on which it was based.
“We invest- ed more time,
“We’ve been making games for 14 years, and this was by far and away the biggest project in terms of its scope.
Going to Sydney before the games, using stadium plans to create their venues and even following the camera angles selected by the official broadcast- er, ATD took similar care when ‘animat- ing’ their characters to create the most realistic of gaming experiences.
“We used a system called motion cap- ture on various top class athletes in the UK for each of the 12 events. They came into our studio and spent a day there, and we tried not just to get the running or the jumping, but also the warm up, the cele- brations and the despondency.
energy and
research on
Sydney 2000
than anything
else we’ve
done,” Gibbs
continues. www.atd.co.uk
“And all that characterisation comes through. If you just stand back from the screen and watch someone else playing it looks very realistic,” says Gibbs. ■ Anwar Brett
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