👋 Hey, it’s Alex. Welcome back to Sponcon Sports, my weekly newsletter dedicated to sponsored content strategy in the sports industry!

In this newsletter’s debut, we talked about how sponsored content, like unsponsored content, must match the expectations of your audience when they hit the follow button.

What happens when you ignore that principle? Here’s an example from this week’s episode of The Bachelor.

What person wants to eat fried chicken at a pool party in their bathing suits, especially on national TV, when you’re trying to make a good impression on your potential future husband?

The integration was forced, and the internet didn’t hold back its disgust.

It’s a good reminder of why we need to be thoughtful about how and where sponcon shows up in fans’ social feeds.

In Today’s Edition:

• How To Maximize Sponcon Inventory 🗃️ 

• Fox Debuts The Caitlin Clark Cam 📹️ 

• Real Madrid Announces Its First Sleeve Sponsor 👕 

🏊️ DEEP DIVE
The Secret To Maximizing Digital Partnership Inventory

When it comes to digital partnerships inventory, we need as many ideas as possible. More than what can be sold!

We also need variety within those ideas to account for the diversity of brand categories sales teams are targeting for potential partnerships.

Three key issues stand in the way of achieving this goal.

• Content teams worry that if they provide a ton of ideas, too much will be sold, and, in turn, they'll be buried in work.

• Given all the departments that the content team supports, there’s not enough time to dedicate to digital partnership ideation.

• Most sports teams and organizations don’t have a digital partnerships specialist on staff who could help solve these issues. One of the many reasons you should hire one.

Aside from adding headcount, which I understand is not easy, there a four ways you can create an always-on approach to ideation that doesn’t call for more brainstorms.

One thing you’ll need in place before using these techniques is a menu book of inventory. This can be in PowerPoint form using slides like the one shown above, or on an Excel spreadsheet. Each idea in this menu book should be vetted and approved inclusive of all activation details (frequency, channels, brand integration, projected costs, sign-on deadline).

I assume most organizations have a version of this menu book in place.

Reply to this email if that’s not true and I’ll write about how to put a menu book together.

Digital Inventory’s Golden Rule
Put this rule in place and it will increase trust between content and partnerships teams, leading to more ideas proactively being added to your inventory.

Note - this specifically pertains to after your prospect intro meeting where you may toss out high-level thought starters from your inventory to see if there’s any interest in seeing a formal pitch.

Even though all assets in your inventory have been vetted and approved in the past, there are too many real-time factors that can impact what content teams are comfortable activating.

Algorithm Changes: Social platforms are constantly changing what “works” which could result in channel strategy adjustments (adding or subtracting from partnership deliverables). For example, TikTok is now boosting views on horizontal videos over a minute long. If you’re trying to get postgame highlight reels reapproved, your content team may recommend adding TikTok as a new channel for that asset. A few weeks ago, that would not be the case. You would have missed out on added value for your partner.

In-Season Bandwith and Learnings: Once the season has kicked off there’s less time to execute new digital inventory. This hopefully is partially due to having added more partners in the offseason. You need to seek reapproval for digital assets in this case because frequency could be impacted. To add more sponcon, your content team, for example, may need to reduce a series from once a week to twice a month.

Also, once you’ve added new partnership assets into your in-season flow, you may learn a specific channel is oversaturated with content. This happens a lot with sponcon that goes live only after wins. In this case, if you have a prospective partner being pitched a win-only content series you should seek reapproval because it may be best to remove or change social channel deliverables so that performance doesn’t suffer due to too much content posted in one place in a short time.

Timing: Depending on when a partnership begins you could miss the window to shoot custom content during a preseason media day. If a partnership begins halfway through a season, you’ll need to seek reapproval on an adjusted cadence in year one because it’s not necessarily half of the full season allotment.

Naming Convention Variety
As mentioned earlier, a variety of ideas is crucial because of the diversity of brands we target for partnerships.

The best way to “increase” inventory without coming up with new ideas is by listing content series name options in your menu book that can fit different categories.

Consider this example from The Premier League showcasing the speed of Luton Town’s quick start against Brighton & Hove Albion F.C., which produced 8.1M views and over 251K engagements.

Step 1 - Add this post to your inventory list and be sure to include the link so your team can see the concept as inspiration.

Step 2 - Write down every name you can think of that could make a strong connection to a partner, enticing them to sponsor a series of these posts.

For instance, this post could inspire a series named:

• Moments in Time - watch category

• On The Money - bank category

• Momentum Shift - auto category

• On The Move - travel category

• Electric Moment - electronics category

• Run It Back - fitness category

• Powerful Connection - phone carrier category

• Sent With Speed - fintech category

• Must See Moment - glasses category

• Goal Rewine - wine category

This approach transforms a single idea into ten!

In-Season Testing

Sometimes you need to test a new concept before it can be sold. Partners may not buy it because there’s no data to support why it works.

Similarly, you may have a more cost-heavy project, like an all-access show, that you want to first learn if your followers enjoy the concept.

The Orlando Magic and the Indiana Pacers have done this recently.

The Magic made an in-season addition of these halftime and postgame boxscores to their game day Instagram Story flow.

This is an awesome opportunity for a partner who wants to be part of every game day. This could easily work for a variety of partners based on what they name it.

You could also try something different and have two partners sponsor this series, especially since you can tag both via the branded content tool. Have one partner sponsor the top section (Halftime and Top Performers) and the other partner sponsor the Stat Alert at the bottom.

Imagine, Top performers presented by Fast Twitch Energy and Stat Alert delivered with AWS.

Meanwhile, the Indiana Pacers rolled out a Locker Room Time Trial series on TikTok. There’s a ton of potential here in terms of product integration. Plus, it could all be shot in one day.

The results from this test would have me pitching this hard for next season.

On TikTok alonge, the 15-part series produced 3.7M+ views and 160K+ engagements and averaged 249.4K views and 10.7K engagements per post.

Invite Partnerships To Content Meetings
You need to have a partnerships representative in your regularly scheduled content planning meetings.

Like the reapproval rule, this will increase trust on the partnerships side, but there are many more benefits.

The biggest impact is that it reduces the communication gap between the two teams. By being a part of these meetings, the partnerships team will hear new ideas well in advance and can help you bring them to life by:

• Identifying new or current partners that could be a fit.

• Providing feedback on what must be in place to sell the idea.

• Spotting unsponsored ideas that have the potential to be sold.

The more time you have to sell an idea the better. It could take months to have a partner buy an idea even if they love it.

The real added benefit here is that the partnerships representative in these meetings will start to learn what the content team is passionate about and bring ideas of their own to these meetings that align with the content team’s goals.

The Takeaway
Navigating digital partnerships inventory calls for a mix of creativity, strategy, and collaboration. This approach helps keep the content team from drowning under work, all while stretching our idea bank to cover the vast sea of brand categories.

💼 CASE STUDY
Sponsored Content of the Week

Hats off to Fox for trying something new!

They debuted a "Caitlin Clark Cam" for last Saturday's game between No. 3 Iowa and Maryland.

The footage was streamed live on the @CBBonFOX TikTok account and followed the women's college basketball star throughout the game. The feed used natural crowd noise and no commentary.

The iso cam was sponsored by State Farm, which has a partnership with the Hawkeyes’ senior guard. As the sponsor, their static logo was present throughout the live stream.

This was a great first attempt and the results back that up. As I watched there were over 4.5K concurrent viewers and and 75K+ engagements.

To improve the iso cam, the frame certainly needs to reduce some clutter with smaller graphics. We want to see more of the action on the court.

That said, one of my favorite things was that the graphics were dynamic.

• The stats are updated in real time.

• The Caitlin Clark Cam graphic included a rotation of a “Watch on Fox” call to action.

• When Clark scored, a “BUCKET” graphic appeared at the top of the frame.

In the future, there’s certainly an opportunity to use rotations with the sponsor logo placement as well.

For example, the State Farm logo could rotate to show their name in text or even a brand message. Or you could have multiple sponsors on an iso cam and sell rotations by the minute, quarter, etc.

Saturday's debut of the "Caitlin Clark Cam" marked the first time Fox streamed a live basketball game from its TikTok account.

I hope we see more later this season, especially during March Madness - I’m looking at you ESPN, CBS, and WB Discovery.

🔍 SPONCONSPIRATION
Steal These Ideas

Love this nod to @tuvok12! The Chicago Bulls hit the streets and rated strangers shots in partnership with Starry (sponsor of NBA All-Star Weekend’s Three-Point Contest).

You need to wait until the end of this video announcing HP as Real Madrid C.F.’s new technological sponsor and the club’s first-ever sleeve sponsor.

Indycar had its drivers take on the Coors Light Challenge where drivers had to slide or roll a Coors Light can along a table to earn points.

From the set design to the series name, Ice Cold Tweets presented by Pacifico is a great concept from the Los Angeles Chargers.

Speaking of series names, the Los Angeles Lakers are calling photos of the game “Bank Shots” to better align with their partner, Fifth Third Bank.

🚨 ICYMI
What To Watch For

Into The Sabreverse: The Buffalo Sabres partnered with Pan-American Film Division to launch “Sabres: Buffalo -vs- the Multiverse”, a graphic novel series written by Travis Carlson, co-founder of Pan-American Film Division, which reimagines the story of Buffalo and the Sabres as a fantasy adventure. The project is geared toward encouraging literacy among students in Buffalo Public Schools. 

She’s Heating Up: How the New York Liberty are capturing attention during the offseason, including a collab with Hot Ones for their schedule release video [Marketing Brew].

Cashing In With UGC: I was today years old when I found out people could submit their favorite photos, raw clips, and edits (like this) to the GoPro Awards to get rewarded with social media features, GoPro gear, and cash.

Celebrating Black Excellence: The Miami Heat launched its Black Creators Program this week. Throughout their four February home games they’re inviting four local Black creators to put their spin on Heat content, including game day video, photography, design, and more.

Yes, Chef: “The Brooklyn Way,” presented by Webull - a collaboration between the Brooklyn Nets and acclaimed chef Kwame Onwauchi - premiered last week and explores what makes the borough so special.

Heads Or Tails: Hublot tapped into its partnership with The Premier League to give lifelong Liverpool fan and content creator, Fu Izzy, the chance to flip the coin under the lights at Anfield before kickoff against Chelsea. A great example showcasing how brands can leverage sports partnership assets for earned wins [h/t Safraz Ali].