All About: Sponsorship Evaluator Tool

With the number of channels on the increase and the time spent on them on the decline, Lodestar Universal McCann (UM) has come up with a tool that can help its client to understand where to title sponsorship for a television show would actually deliver on its promised returns. It picked up a couple of awards at Emvies 2010 as well. Here's what we could find out about the tool:

1 According to Shrikant Shenoy, media director at Lodestar Universal McCann, the whole purpose of coming up with the tool is the fragmentation of TV audiences. "The advertiser now needs a larger number of channels to achieve the same reach. While viewers are spending less and less time, ad avoidance has been on the rise," he said. "Traditional spot advertising is inadequate to meet the demands of this environment. Two spots a week even on a top rated TV show are likely to score more misses than hits." He believes sponsorship promos are the smart answer to the viewership challenge, outshouting spots by a huge margin. "Promos deliver high frequency at low cost. However selecting the right sponsorship makes all the difference," he stated.While a title sponsorship is invariably the way to go, it’s also the marketer’s biggest buying decision, and often, is a route ventured down on the basis of gut instinct. Hence, Lodestar UM came up with the Sponsorship Evaluator Tool to help the advertiser to select properties for sponsorship based on predicted performance and promo potential.2

2 The tool was developed by evaluating all possible factors that could impact sponsorship potential. These included programming factors like promo scheduling and channel of telecast, media factors like support on TV and other media, and audience factors like time spent on the programme genre.

“These factors were subjected to regression modeling. A series of tests were carried out to ensure the model did not have too many or too few independents, that is the model was neither under fitted nor over fitted,” explained Shenoy, who devised the tool and set up the statistical framework. The analytics team worked closely with key members of brand teams to feed market information into data formats that could be easily read by statistical software. A huge bank of data points on details of sponsorship executed was collated. A series of iterations was conducted on the raw data before arriving on the final model. The model was subjected to a battery of tests to ensure that that it was statistically sound.

3 Sponsorship Evaluator helps the marketer assess upcoming properties on television and predict their performance in terms of viewership and promo potential. Based on selections fed into a user friendly interface, the tool's software calculates a prediction interval that the TV rating of a future property is likely to fall into. Sponsorship power is also measured in terms of promo GRPs delivered.

This was put into effects for the third season of the reality show 'Khatron ke Khiladi' which airs on Colors. While the slow offered good prospects for male-oriented brands to be associated with, there was some concern about whether the new host Priyanka Chopra would be able to deliver as many TRPs as her predecessor Akshay Kumar. Kumar, of course, is well known for his skill in martial arts, and this was cited as one of the reasons for the success of the show its previous seasons. There was also the looming threat of the Champions League T20 which would, it was feared, draw away young male viewers.

"We put the show to the Sponsorship Evaluator test. A good performance was forecast. Sure enough, the opening day TVR of 5.5 was well within the interval predicted by Sponsorship Evaluator," said Shenoy. Consequently, two of Lodestar UM's brands Garnier Men and Mahindra Scorpio - associated themselves with "Khatron Ke Khiladi Level 3'. 

4 The Sponsorship Evaluator Tool was presented at the case study presentation at Emvies 2010 and was awarded a Gold in the category of Best Media Research and the TAM award for the Best TV Research (paper). the agency said it is still to introduce the tool to its other clients, besides Garnier.

What it means for...

MARKETERS

• They can select properties for sponsorship based on predicted performance and promo potential 
• Greater assurance of return on investment

MEDIA AGENCIES 

• A stronger media plan
• Greater likelihood of clients buying into ideas