Core Launches Ireland’s First Ever National Sponsorship Index
Core, Ireland’s largest marketing communications company, has launched the National Sponsorship Index (NSI), Ireland’s first ever benchmark for sponsorship effectiveness.
The NSI sets a national standard for sponsorship, weighted against commercial impact and rated by those who matter most – the fans.
Measuring the vitality, potency and effectiveness of the Top 50 marquee sponsorships in Ireland, this pioneering work brings transparency to Ireland’s sponsorship market and shows how sponsorship drives positive business metrics. The NSI is the result of three years of development, testing and analysis by Core, in conjunction with Dr. Tony Meenaghan, Professor of Marketing at the Smurfit Graduate School of Business in UCD and Ireland’s foremost expert in the area of commercial sponsorship.
The Top Three sponsorships in the inaugural National Sponsorship Index, powered by Core, are:
- Electric Ireland: Darkness into Light
- SuperValu: Tidy Towns
- Aviva: Aviva Stadium
The genre breakdown of the National Sponsorship Index Top 50 is:
- Sport: 19
- Music: 11
- Culture: 10
- Cause & Community: 5
- Venue: 5
This non-partisan analysis of the sponsorship market provides marketers with intelligence into sponsorship impact across different business sectors, sponsorship genres and a range of consumer demographics, thus arming marketers with the information they need to understand sponsorship impact on a national scale.
Research assists marketers to drive increased commercial benefits and the National Sponsorship Index specifically provides clarity as to which levers drive commercial impact in sponsorship and how to maximise the effectiveness of these levers.
By pinpointing where sponsorship is delivering for a brand and providing clarity on how commercial impacts can be enhanced and maximised, the index will empower better and more commercially impactful decisions within the Irish sponsorship industry.
The index shows that sponsorships can have an uplifting impact on commercial metrics (+30% growth in performance), and outlines how that uplift is more than doubled (71%) when consumers feel that their experience has been enhanced and / or a benefit has been transferred to the property itself.
That the top two spots in the inaugural National Sponsorship Index are cause and community initiatives demonstrates that sponsors who make genuine and sustained contributions to partnering with important causes generate a deep impact with audiences.
In terms of the Top 50 rankings, music properties feature prominently, especially the Electric Picnic Festival and Longitude. Electric Picnic sponsorships include Electric Ireland, Heineken, Three, Just Eat, Red Bull and Bacardi.
The power of Cultural events as a sponsorship platform is also evident. Aldi, FBD, Bank of Ireland and Eir’s sponsorship of the Ploughing Championship all make it into the Top 50, while film is present via Virgin Media’s sponsorship of the Dublin International Film Festival.
Jill Downey, Managing Director of Core Sponsorship, says: “We have been working on this initiative for almost three years and our aim was to help solve a key challenge for marketers - to demonstrate the commercial impact of sponsorship for Irish brands and to understand how these impacts can be unlocked. We have determined not only that sponsorship has a proven impact on brand metrics, but exactly how to quantify this impact and understand the levers that drive it.
