Anatomy of Australia’s best integrated sporting sponsorship campaign
FeaturesOctober 24, 2012
Matthew Galea
Fledgling Super Rugby franchise Melbourne Rebels has teamed with internet bank RaboDirect to win a Best Integrated Sporting Sponsorship award at the Sponsorship Australasia Awards. Matthew Galea reports on the recipe for their success.
In their first year of existence as a Super Rugby franchise, it was important for the Melbourne Rebels that their brand was being aggressively promoted as they looked to build a solid supporter base. That, of course, could never be an easy feat in Melbourne, where AFL reigns supreme above all other codes. It was of the utmost importance that the Rebels surrounded themselves with the right people, not just on the field, but also off it, by finding sponsors who shared their aims for the future, and their determination to make an impact in a market where the odds were against them.
Enter RaboDirect, an online bank that shared the Rebels hunger for greater brand exposure in a market where they too were competing with more popular and recognisable brands. A match made in heaven in the ”game they play in heaven”? Greg McAweeney, General Manager of RaboDirect Australia, believes so.
“We see ourselves as a challenger brand in our market, because we’re an internet bank and we’re competing against the big major banks, so we see ourselves as a challenger, and the Rebels do too,” McAweeney says.
“There’s nothing more challenging than setting up a Super Rugby team in Melbourne, which is an AFL-mad city, so their ethos is very much about community, and we were particularly interested in their five star engagement program, which we aligned ourselves with because that’s all about the players spending time with schools, with rugby clubs, with charities and business.
“We thought that was a really nice alignment, and we were very happy to support that.”
That support culminated in the hugely successful Rebel to Rebel campaign, which was recently recognised at the second Sponsorship Australasia annual award as the year’s Best Integrated Sporting Sponsorship.
One of the major objectives for RaboDirect, as McAweeney , was to increase the online bank’s brand awareness by making it more perceptible within the marketplace. Obviously being an online bank meant that RaboDirect had a limited physical presence in the ‘real world’, and sponsoring a club like the Rebels was seen as one way of addressing that problem.
“One of the objectives we wanted to accomplish was to elevate our brand status,” says McAweeney. “You can do that in many different ways, and one way of those ways is through sponsoring various entities, because it makes a virtual brand more tangible to its audience.
“Given rugby is an international sporting code, and televised all over the world, [sponsoring the Rebels] helped to make our brand look bigger and more prestigious.
“The other thing for us was that we wanted to partner with various different entities which would allow us to leave an enduring legacy in the communities in which we grow our business, which is true to our co-operative heritage.
“Grassroots rugby was very interesting to us, because the rugby demographic suits our target audience and our profile, for the types of customers we try to recruit.
“It was an attractive proposition for us . . . and a nice natural fit for ourselves, as the Rebels’ values were very similar to ours.”
With both brands looking to aggressively promote their messages, RaboDirect devised a multimedia campaign that would help to get increase the recognition of both brands.
“We had a multimedia campaign, where we had quite an evocative and emotional TV campaign and some outdoor and print advertising,” McAweeney said.
“That was really about stirring the emotions of people, it was about evoking the feeling that the Rebels were a challenger brand who were creating stories, creating histories, creating a legacy and allude to the success that might come in the future. We knew that we were in for a struggle, a battle, and that success wouldn’t come here overnight, but we were in it for the long run.”
The television campaign (below) was aired mainly in Victoria, as well as being used in Super Rugby broadcasts, and the results pleased both the Rebels and RaboDirect.
It was in the community that RaboDirect enjoyed most success in their sponsorship of the Rebels in their first season. The online bank was keen to be more than just a name on the shirt, and enjoyed massive success with its cornerstone community program, Conversions for Clubs.
“The idea was that we would go out to 20 Victorian clubs, and reward the clubs that could provide the most members for the Rebels,” McAweeney says.
“The top eight would get their own individual home game for the Rebels, which gave them great publicity for their own club, and they could also bring people from their club to the game and have a good night out.
“At the end of the game they would get a guaranteed $5,000, and they’d get a nice little top up ($100) for every conversion and penalty kick the Rebels scored on the night. On average, we were giving a cheque for about $6,000 per game. The reaction we were getting from those clubs was amazing, because they were so desperate for money.
“We would also send players down to the clubs, as each club had two Rebels players attached to it, and get them to interview the people for our YouTube channel, and learn about what they were going to do with the money to improve their club.
“It was a huge success and there was a great amount of goodwill generated from it, and we’re going to do it again this season and try to beef it up a bit.”
Gilbert Rugby have gotten on board the program for the upcoming season, and will provide balls and other equipment for the clubs, as well as the cash top up.
McAweeney says the sponsorship of the Rebels had been a massive success for the company, and that the award was due recognition for that.
“When you make a submission for these awards, you need to prove that you’ve met the KPIs (key performance indicators) that you’ve set yourself, so we had a range of KPIs and we do our own brand research as well as getting other data, and we wanted our brand recognition go up, which it did significantly, particularly in Victoria, which is a very important target market for us,” McAweeney says.
“It also helped deliver customer accounts to us. You’ll never earn the money back just on that, but that was one of our important KPIs. In terms of brand health, brand awareness, consideration and engagement, they all picked up sharply, particularly with the rugby audience who were really appreciative of our community engagement efforts.”
McAweeney says this type of sponsorship approach is a commitment made for the long term, stating that the results would take time, and had to be the product of a good working relationship between the company and the Rebels.
“It is a two way street, and it’s not going to work if it isn’t,” McAweeney says. “It was very interesting in the first year because they’re a start up themselves. It wasn’t like we were sponsoring a team that’s been going for years that has all the systems and processes in place, and obviously it was the first time we’d sponsored a rugby club.
“We were both going into this thinking we’d just make the best of it and learn by doing things and experimenting.
“You’ve got your contracts and rights and entitlements and all that type of stuff, but the way I look at it is, if each partner can talk to each other and give each other stuff that isn’t even in the contract and help each other out, then you know you’ve got a good partnership.”
After a refreshing approach to sponsorship, earning due recognition, RaboDirect will continue their commitment to the Rebels into the next season and beyond, as they look to take their community engagement to the next level in the upcoming season.
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