SponsorPitch, The Official Sponsor of Sponsorship (TM)

Here's a question: can you be an official sponsor of an "unofficial" property?

Somewhere along the way, advertising and brand creatives started coming up with "official" sponsorships as their trademarked ad slogan.

In fact, the trend has gotten so popular that there's even a big time lawsuit between Oprah and Mutual of Omaha over the use of the federally trademarked advertising slogan "official sponsor of the 'aha!' moment."

Here's a few examples:

Official Sponsor of the Aha! Moment, Oprah and Mutual of Omaha

Official Sponsor of Tomorrow, Intel

Official Sponsor of Birthdays, American Cancer Society

and our favorite:

The Official Sponsor of the Internet, theofficialsponsor.com

Yep, there is a website that will allegedly let you sponsor pretty much anything.

In their words:

Our other function - besides bringing back the old, classic jokes - is to be the self-appointed registry of the various Official Sponsors of all things whimsical, eclectic, fanciful, natural, and most of all, public domain. We will register almost anybody as The Official Sponsor of almost anything.

Out of curiosity, we shot them a note to register as "The Official Sponsor of Sponsorship." We haven't gotten a confirmation yet. So it's official... kinda (we made it more official than that, but more about that below). The best part? In an age when Timex is shelling out $35MM for naming rights to a practice facility, the rights fee for "sponsorship" come at the bargain basement price of a $2 paypal donation. More properties should set rights-fees to accommodate the bootstrapped start-up!

In all seriousness, what's the lesson here for your brand? It seems you actually can officially sponsor something unofficial, as long as you trademark it first. So we went ahead and did that too! Now there's a whole other set of ifs, ands and buts relating to TM, but we won't get into that here.

In the meantime, what are the next official/unofficial sponsorships? Any good ones we're missing?

We are very excited to be the official and exclusive sponsor of sponsorship and this is one partnership we fully intend to activate!