Sponsorship is booming business

Thinking of football (a thing what most men like to do) gave me the idea of writing a blog about sport event sponsorship. Big companies all over the world connect their names to olympic games, world cups and european cups (football), super bowls or immensely popular sports competitions (like the NBA basketball). Huge sponsorship contracts are signed to be the exculsive sponsor of a specific event because of the large exposure to the outside world. Several corporations come into conflict with each other because of sponsorship deals.

As an example, at the 2006 world cup in Germany, the FIFA accused the Dutch brewery Bavaria of 'ambush marketing' because of the orange lederhosen which the Dutch supporters were wearing. The American beer maker Budweiser had signed a big contract with the FIFA to be the official world cup beer and therefore the bavaria-lederhosen were denied at the stadiums.

Sponsorship of big sports events is quite effective in my opinion. When I think of several sports events in the past, I also remember the sponsors. The exposure a brand obtains by sponsorship is quite big, however considering the costs of the sponsorship, it might be more profitable to spend that money on tv commercials or online campaigns for example. I suppose both of these options have its pros and cons...

Blogging and twittering for my study

The past year I've been learning various things at Tilburg University. Next to doing exams I've learned how to write papers, do interviews or set up a survey. The course Media Use in Organisations however is assigning their students to blog and use twitter. Both of these social media are new to me. Obviously I've heard about blogging and twittering, but writing my own blog or twittering about everything I'm doing didn't seem any fun to me. After starting up my twitter-account at the beginning of this week, I've been browsing the site for some time and found some friends to follow. The following days I caught myself checking the site for several times each day... I was getting used to twitter already!!

When I started the course I was wondering what twitter had to do with media use in organisations, which became clear when I started using it. Twitter is big, a lot of people use it and is therefore an increasingly interesting communication channel for marketing. Next to the marketing side, twitter can also serve members of an organisation in communicating with each other about several work-related issues. Conclusion: Twitter is VERY relevant to media use in organisations.

Well, this is about it for my opening blog... I will continue writing blogs on this page concerning media use by organisations (internally as well as externally). Interesting...