College Football Playoff Gets First Partner

ESPN and Dr Pepper today announced that the soft drink brand will be the first official partner of next year's inaugural College Football Playoff, in addition to serving as the presenting sponsor of the new College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy. Championship Partner designation represents the highest level of sponsorship and activation. “Dr Pepper is proud to continue its l...

New on SponsorPitch: Deal Database + Deal Pages!

As some of you have already seen, SponsorPitch has been beta testing two new features over the past few weeks. Today, we're excited to roll out the deal database and deal pages to all users. The idea behind the deal database came from a longtime SponsorPitch member who suggested a better way for searching through the tens of thousands of sponsorship deals that are catalogued on SponsorPitch...

Superstar Loses Sponsorship With Company He Part-Owns?

It is no secret that lifestyle apparel brand, Quiksilver, has been reducing its roster of athletes and event sponsorships in recent months so it may not actually be an April Fool's Day joke that 11-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater is reportedly splitting with 23-year sponsor, Quiksilver. Either way, ending a sponsorship is a little different when the athlete being sponsored owns, or at ...

Papi, Samsung Score With Presidential Selfie; W.H. Objects

Weeks after Samsung pulled off the $18 million selfie heard around the world, the telecom giant celebrated a new deal with the Red Sox' David Ortiz by helping facilitate the presidential selfie during the Sox' White House visit on Monday. In two days, Papi's selfie has been retweeted nearly 40,000 times and naturally got a big RT to Samsung's 5 million+ followers. While one might presum...

$50M In Sponsorship, Not Enough?

Despite kicking off with a $41 million title sponsorship and an additional $6.5 million from MasterCard, Citi Bike may be facing a serious financial shortfall. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, which reports that price hikes or additional sponsors are needed to rescue the popular bike sharing program, the largest of its kind in the U.S. The root problem though, if Fast Company is to ...

Horizon Adds To Capabilities With Events Acquisition

Horizon Media, one of the fastest growing media services companies in the world, is placing a bet on live events with the acquisition of InsideOut Sports + Entertainment. InsideOut, which owns the PowerShares Series and is run by tennis star Jim Courier and founding partner Jon Venison, bolsters Horizon's existing event and entertainment marketing capabilities. "The importance of live event...

Airline's Sponsorship Activation: Dress Our Flight Attendants

In what may be a sponsorship first, a major airline is using its new role as official airline of Miami Fashion Week to source design ideas for its flight attendant uniforms. Designers participating in Miami Fashion Week are being asked to submit designs for Eastern Air Line's skirt, vest, blouse, pants, jackets and knee length dresses that "convey the Miami/Caribbean/Latin American look." Th...

Luxury Automaker Looks To Cross Final Frontier With Space Sponsorship

Richard Branson’s pioneering commercial spaceline, Virgin Galactic, has its first official partner. Announced aboard the USS Intrepid, the partnership will see Land Rover vehicles become part of daily life for the Virgin Galactic team and for all ‘Future Astronauts’. According to the release, "the space experience will now begin with Land Rover as they arrive in New Mexico for training, and con...

Engagement: Everybody Wants It, BUT Nobody Knows What It Really Means

If you work in sponsorship you know that engagement is something of a trigger word that tends to get marketers all worked up. According to a new study though... - 88% of customers say they don’t want to engage with brands. - 75% of CMO's interviewed said they don’t know how to engage with customers. The good news, there does seem to be something of a formula for building it. According...

Digital Marketing's Last Holdout: UHNW?

While digital marketing deservedly gets most of the attention these days, there's at least one demographic where events and partnerships may still be the marketer's clear cut tool of choice. Ultra High Net Worth (defined as those with net assets of $30 million+). That's according to Wealth-X's most recent edition of the Wealth-X Luxury Sentiment Survey, which looks at how luxury brands employ m...