Unofficial Partner Podcast
Unofficial Partner Podcast
UP487 The Big Idea: Cliches, Tumbleweed and the Cost of Boring
Today's guests are Laura Randall, Creative Director, and Jack Kenney-Herbert, Director of Sponsorship at Sid Lee Sport, the agency declaring war on what they call "sponsorship tumbleweed." That's their term for the boring, forgettable activations plaguing sports marketing - endless skills challenges, carpool karaokes, and grey sofa interviews that cost millions but deliver little for the client. They've created a list of seven ideas they'll never pitch again.
Join us as they dissect why sports marketing has become so predictably dull and what to do about it.
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We just realized that we were seeing the same thing presented to us, in meetings, the same thing in stadiums, the same thing across LinkedIn. And yeah, we just realized that the world of sponsorship has become so boring and. Work that was being turned out wasn't good. It wasn't bad, it was just forgettable. And that's possibly the most expensive thing you can be as a brand, and I don't think enough brand managers actually know that.
Hello there. It's Richard Gillis here and welcome to Unofficial Partner, the Sports Business podcast. Today, it's the big idea and we're talking cliches and bad work, boring, forgettable, creative, and the 10 million pound mistake that many sports sponsors make Today's guests are Laura Randall, creative Director and Jack Kenny Herbert, director of Sponsorship at Sid Lee Sport. The agency declaring war on what they call sponsorship tumbleweed. That's their term for boring, forgettable activations, plaguing sports marketing. Endless skills, challenges, carpool, karaokes, and sofa. Interviews that cost millions, but deliver very little for the client. And the number that we use is 10 million pounds, which is derived from work by Adam Morgan and Peter Field who have tried to answer the question about the cost of Dole using IPA data. On rational versus emotional advertising and media spend figures their cost of dull research, which you can link to in the show notes
UP:Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport, a mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations. With the who's who of the global industry? To join our community of tens of thousands of people. Sign up to the weekly Unofficial Partner newsletter and follow us on Tik TOK. At Unofficial Partner.
Richard Gillis, UP:right. We should say where we are, shouldn't we? This is a very, very flash office. I like it a lot. Where are we?
Laura:Faringdon Faringdon. Yeah. Near Leather Lane Market.
Richard Gillis, UP:And why are we here? What's, What is Sidley Sport? Tell me about it.
Laura:So we launched in April, moved from Sidley to Sidley Sport as a specialist sports agency to have kind of a three pronged approach. We started to see as myself, uh, a creative in various ad agencies over the last 15 years. And Jack, uh. Sponsorship director, who's also got a wealth of experience in sport agencies. We started to see that there was a real disconnect. Yes, creative agencies were starting to say that they could do sport, but they weren't doing it with the expertise that you need from someone like a Jack. So it meant that creatives were coming in with, with ideas that weren't viable, weren't an option within the rights package that that sponsor had. Um, so we really wanted to create an agency that. Brought together creative expertise. We can do all the campaigns, we can do all the branding but also sponsorship expertise in the likes of Jack but also had everything underpinned by, um, an effectiveness methodology. So we are big believers in fame, creating fame, driving work, work that actually gets shared, gets disliked, gets talked about. Not stuff that is just kind of going out into the ether, going out into that, I guess just, um. Wasteland of, of content that we're all making. We've all made, we're all continuing to make. But yeah, we really want to kind of go out there and put a stand and say that's enough.
Richard Gillis, UP:So the big idea is our series where we talk about creative in sport and sports marketing and we look at can every year and we go around and we look at different sort of campaigns and ideas and it's really interesting. Well, actually it's not interesting. It's actually quite. Dull. So it's quite uninteresting and I'm wondering why that is. I'm always quite what Interested in why things become cliches in sports marketing. Particularly around big events. Obviously, you know, you have big summary events, but you've got a calendar that drives a lot of this stuff and sponsors sign up and you hear about, okay, such and such has signed up to become a partner. And then you look at the sort of creative outcomes and they're all, yeah, not much really penetrate what, I'm just wondering why, what's your what? What's happening
Jack:Reason we're reason we're on this podcast. We have a lot to say about that. Yeah, I think as an agency where we're trying to take a position on what we now call sponsorship tumbleweed, it was all, it was all kicked off actually. Probably not, not trying to take credit for it'cause the credit is not mine. Collective effort. Um, but I think I was on achieving to work and for those people who know me, I'm not a great commuter. I get quite easily frustrated. and then. We're a growing business, so revenue is super important to us. And we need to be really strict about how we spend our money. Of course. And then I think I, I was on Slack and I was reviewing creative ideas for a pitch, I can't remember which, and I went through it and I saw like carpool karaoke, I saw partnership video sports. I saw a three player Chill SC skills challenge. And I was just like. Why, like why are we paying creatives to come up with this? And why are people still talking about these sort of ideas? Like take the Premier League for example. There must be, oh gosh, I, you know, clubs have between 10 and 30 partners each. And yeah, every single, well most of them at least will have three player appearances. Think how many of them are, are filming that sort of challenge based content or doing the, the three player interviews you see where. You know, we, we find out who the dressing room DJ is. Um, worst dress up. Yeah. We discover once again who's worst dressed who has the best banter and. It is just boring, isn't it?
Laura:It's something that I obviously have to contend with a lot as creative director, we get freelancers in a lot and because again, they've not come from that sponsorship background. They are thinking, oh wow, we've got three amazing footballers. Of course, let's see them do a skills challenge.'cause that to them is, is probably new content if they're working actually normally. Not in the sports realm. Yeah. But obviously to us we see it every day and, and I think that's a big problem. I think that's a big reason why we are getting creatives who, who aren't in the space enough to realize when the things are low hanging fruit. But also I think a big thing is clients, of course clients are always going to play it safe, like security is, is a, yeah. It's a blanket. We're always going to kind of snuggle into, like, you don't want to potentially do something that is controversial or different or too much against the status quo
Richard Gillis, UP:we get to this question about what goal means, and. Why is this commercially important? What the cost of being boring is, what do you think about that question? Let's talk about that.
Laura:We just realized that we were seeing the same thing presented to us, in meetings, the same thing in stadiums, the same thing across LinkedIn. And yeah, we just realized that the world of sponsorship has become so boring and. Work that was being turned out wasn't good. It wasn't bad, it was just forgettable. And that's possibly the most expensive thing you can be as a brand, and I don't think enough brand managers actually know that. Especially seeing as the main reason that most brands are in sport is for brand awareness, and yet they're creating work that is. So safe. So within their comfort zones and so familiar to them, which you can understand, I completely get why they do that, but it's already out there and then consumers don't engage with it. Or worse, they don't even notice that your logo was on it, which has made the whole thing completely pointless for you as a brand and a huge waste of dough. And it can be easy, I think, for it to sound like I'm just being a CD or I want to be as creative and as brave as possible for my own. Ego or whatever, but boring is bad for your bottom line. And that's the thing that we keep coming back to So there's been a huge piece of research that gone in that's gone into this recently by our partners at System One. And they've estimated that the cost of dull is, I think approximately 10 million pounds. And what we mean by that is that it will cost 10 million pounds more, to get the commercial impact of an exciting and emotionally impactful piece of work.
Richard Gillis, UP:so just on that, so you have to spend more on media, sort of amplification of the campaign or of the idea of the execution and therefore. If it's a sort of idea like everyone else, with just a brand attached to it, that's where that cost is. So a creative idea that cuts through it, it just does it more organically. It's shared, it's, there's a response to it, which is more commercially useful, but also more
Laura:Exactly. You're having to buy recognition. You're having to buy likes, you're having to buy awareness which yeah, something that is genuinely likable, pleasurable, shareable. It's common sense, right? Like you don't need to buy that. It naturally gets shared around in people's dms and that's the dream. I mean, a few examples we've talked about internally recently there was a Cadbury's video that we saw featuring obviously the, one of the Lionesses, Lauren James. They obviously got 10 minutes with her as part of their sponsorship with the lioness. I'm guessing they got her to sit on a gray sofa wearing a gray hoodie. Uh, and she just talks about the highs and lows of her career, but it's all okay'cause she's kind of holding this Cadbury's hot chocolate in front of her for brand recognition. And I just think that is the perfect example of where sponsorship has gotten lazy. And yes, it's for a myriad of reasons. Yes, working with athletes is limiting. I know they won't agree to do anything physical, understandably, but. Their SOB stories have been told before. So getting them to tell it with a cup of hot chocolate in their hand isn't gonna brand love for Cadburys or move the needle for them in any way. And I just think that's, that's the most interesting thing for us that we're starting to see everywhere. And, and like I say, I get it brand managers are trying to be safe and keep their jobs, but it, you would keep your job more if you were to make something that moved the needle, something that actually it. For your bottom line didn't cost 10 million pounds extra for you to get the engagement and the brand love that you want. Rio Reland is another example, so I think.
richard_1_06-18-2025_101027:I love Rio Ferdinand's. I was looking through your, the, the creds and the Rio Ferdinand in various, the various stages of Rio Ferd. Let's talk about that.
laura---e-her-_1_06-18-2025_101028:It's so, it's so funny. You could do so much Ferdinand. People love him and fair enough, he's been done to death and he's everywhere. You can't turn. Whatever it is. Kind of like Ian Wright, he's on every podcast, every ev, every piece of content. But still, there's, there's room to grow with Rio still. And yet, when we were at, um, the Champions League in Munich, um, I think there was Rio Reacts and Rio meets, and it was two different brands doing two different pieces of content, both on is actually the same. And again, like putting them side by side, as I'm sure you saw in our creds consumers. Can't differentiate the brand. They don't take away a brand. They don't stand out. And yeah, they made something nice. Yes, it didn't offend anyone. Few thank God, but in turn it didn't make anyone feel anything. And I think that's the big problem in advertising. Everyone is so scared of making the next Kendall Pepsi ad that they make a million Lauren James drinking hot chocolate ads. And that's the thing that I think we. We really want to try and first of all, get everyone to acknowledge and get everyone to realize that there's a, there's a bigger job to be done. And it's not just for creative sake, it's for your bottom line.
richard_1_06-18-2025_101027:The celebrity, you know, sporting celebrity question because you can sort of see how you get there because the, the trope or the research over a long period of time has been that a famous face pops, it cuts through and therefore a lot of the attention, and we've got this other thing about, you know, the athlete as brand and you've got the, the money people who are interested in stars not leagues and you know, so you've got a whole load of different things pointing towards Rio Ferdinand and Lauren James. And we're using those as a proxy for all sports celebrity. But you're right, we've mined them, some of these people, and I just think when I see, you know, Ronaldo in front of something else, I think, well, I, I can't imagine what I would ask him if I was on the other side of this. What I would need to know more from Namar or Christiano Ronaldo or, you know, these, a famous face because they are just, they're empty. They're husks. You can't get anymore from them.
Laura:Exactly that, and I think that's unfortunately the problem we are in at the moment as an industry is that. Yeah, the internet is a wash with content. Everything that's been made has already been made and it, it, everything exists Like Rio Ferdinand telling any joke, any story, any kind of anecdote about his past already exists. So, yeah. And any question that could have been asked to Rio Ferdinand has probably been asked. So it is the challenge to us. We need to think outside the box. We need to work out what is the. What is the format that's been done to death? How do we reinvent that format? How do we do something different so that when people see Fernan on their screen, they don't think, oh, it's here it is. It's re talking about, yeah.
richard_1_06-18-2025_101027:I, I think I, I can feel a campaign here make, make Rio great again. And I think there is a, you know, there's a whole different areas of Rio that I want. I wanna see him responding to various things, but only in very short clips. And I, I wanna see him run through the whole gamut of, emotion, but, uh, okay.
Richard Gillis, UP:So let's talk about tumbleweed. I really like this idea because you've basically, you've identified seven ways that sponsorship goes, tumbleweed ideas that you'll never pitch again and you'll never see in a Sid Lee sport deck. So shall I list them and then we'll talk about them? Go for it. The skills challenge. The surprise and delight, the carpool, the emotive interview, the first PE coach, the Spotify playlist, the fan own foosball table, right? Those are things that are never gonna appear in a sadly, uh, proposal. So why just let's unpick what tumbleweed is and get into that.
Jack:Laura and I decided that actually we'll go our heads together and look at what all the cliche things were. And while the tumbleweed has snowballed into a sort of. External marketing campaign for us, which Laura is leading.
Laura:I think it comes down as well to the fact that it's good. It's easy for all of us to bitch and moan about what's bad with the agency. Right. It's fun. Yeah, it's great fun. I love it. I'm really good at it. But, um, you need to do more, right? You need to actually work out what your next step is and what collectively we as an industry should start doing. So I don't think we can do that until we all start to acknowledge the problem, acknowledge the areas that. That, yeah. Aren't exciting, that are letting us fall into the pitfall of boring. And yeah, that's kind of where we've started. So we've, we've created these, these seven sponsorship tumbleweeds. The ideas, like I say, that are forgotten, the ideas that aren't good campaigns aren't bad campaigns. They're just forgotten campaigns, which is probably, probably the deadliest of them all. Right. And there were
Richard Gillis, UP:probably, there was a time when, the first one was interesting. It's just the, there is something that happens. That they become sort of industrialized, don't they? They become Right. Okay. Exactly. Well, that becomes the norm, and then you've got a process. I how people get to those ideas because as you say, we've sit, we've all seen them, so they're in the air and. There'll be a lot of people saying, yeah, but this is what the client wants. This is what the client has bought, essentially. And then you get to the question of what sport is doing in terms of its market, you know, in terms of the broader marketing job. Mm-hmm. And sometimes I, I look and I think actually. Yeah, clients have bought the cliche sometimes, you know, they want rugby man, they want Twickenham man if they're a rugby, if they're an insurance brand or a bank and they, they want Guinness and they want Brogues at Twickenham. That's a small part of what rugby is, but that's the bit that they think talks to their audience. So you can see that there's a sort of, okay, well once you start with that insight, you are going in a certain direction already. So I'm interested in where you think the cliches are and where the, the road, the red flags are essentially. Mm. In terms of just the, the process.'cause sponsorship is, as we all know, it's, a very controlled, it's all about rights, what you can and can't do. So if you're starting from that premise, how you then inject creativity and new ideas into it is a question that I.
Jack:Just to clarify like your, your point, which you mentioned about sponsors in Twick. You know, not, not all sponsors have to be completely wedded to content creation. That's only obviously gonna work for. Certain brands in certain categories. For example, if you're a a B2B business, actually what might be so much more important to you is hosting opportunities and money car buyers that you can bring key stakeholders to Twickenham and enjoy the Guinness and brogue sort, whatever it was you said. And the creativity. Creativity there. Isn't necessarily a content creation, it's how you can make these experiences particularly memorable. In, in the, the tumbleweeds that you listed, I think the seventh was the table football table uh, in van zones. So we, I mean, we've all been guilty of it. We had. Three partners who had table football tables in their fan zones last summer. So, you know, we're not sitting here saying, we've not done all of this. It's popular people, they'll be involved. Yeah. I mean, it worked. You don't have the football table. It works people, there'd be people on the streets. Yeah. Look, I, I went, I went, I was in the, um, I was in the one in Berlin and I was like, wrong, go look. And I looked in every single partner and I looked in all of their, um. All of their, uh, experiential units, and I think almost every single one had either a table football table or I can't remember its name, but like football tron, you know, that round circle where you kick the balls and Yeah.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. My pet hate is table tennis in the office. Mm-hmm. Oh
Jack:yeah,
Richard Gillis, UP:yeah, yeah. It just drives me nuts. It drives and, and I'm like, where did that, that started out as a cutesy idea to keep, gen Z, millennials happy, then we're into a table tennis, and now everyone is saying. I can't do anything. Everyone is, you know, and why are not working? Yeah. Imagine working with that being, why are you playing table tennis and you've got that constant noise. So it's sort of interesting the genesis of these things.
Jack:Yeah. I mean, it, it worked. That's the thing. It works. It's not a bad idea. You're gonna get people through the door, but the whole idea is that you want fans in the fan zones to have memorable experiences, you know, provided by the brand who partners with the tournament. So. You know, is a fan gonna come home and be like, oh, I played some amazing, like table football in the, I know BYD fans. No, they just know that they went in and they played table football. So,
Richard Gillis, UP:so is the problem that no one's attaching, like your list there though that I read out, they are branded content ideas, aren't they? They're not big creative advertising as I understand it. Ideas?
Jack:Well, that, that's the thing that. You know, the problem doesn't just lie at the feet of, um, creatives or agency staff is, you know, there's a, there's a lot of instrumental factors within the industry that sort of led us down to where we are now. First of all, sports partnerships are, have really expensive. Right. And they're only, they're only increasing in value, as you know. Right. So are under, you know, more and more pressure to, you know. Drive revenue each year. Um, and that's passed on to their partners of course. So naturally, if you're spending, I dunno, seven figures on a sports partnership that's coming out of a marketing budget or a sponsorship budget, so naturally that, that pain's gonna be felt in other areas of the business. So you're probably not gonna have as much to spend activating the partnership. So you know, what you really need is clients and partners with double down. You also have. I mean, rights holder IP is, I mean, that's their value, isn't it? That's how they can charge brands so much money because they're allowing them access for their intellectual property. They're allowing them access to their players who you know are most valuable asset I. Um, so as such, they are ultra protective or some are, and what you can do with players what you can do with talent, what you can do with IP is becoming increasingly limited. When I first started working out in the sports industry, you know, clubs, if you had a free player appearance, physical, is that, why is he free? Players? Oh, um, it's, it is to protect the, um, the players' ip. So if you, it is not always free, your players, it depends on the rights holder, but typically in the, in the UK and Europe, if you work with a rugby team or a football team or. A hundred franchise or something. It's to protect the individual player's ip. So if you want to film just like single player content or a single player advert or just bring a single player to a, an event, typically you'd need to agree an ambassador deal, um, because it's so obvious that, you know, the focus of the campaign is based on that single player and the, the brand is benefiting off it. So the reason you might have three is to sort of spread that
Richard Gillis, UP:and it's almost, is it, is it to protect the player or is it to protect the team? Because actually if I'm Manu United, I know that everyone wants Bruno Fernandez. Thank you Sean.'cause I was struggling to, Manu United is a terrible example. But if I, if I sponsor Spurs, I want Sunny in there, or I used to want Cane in there. And actually what you are saying is I'm gonna need to get some unfamous. Well, that's the thing is players in there as well.
Jack:Yeah. Yeah. It is. Like, it manages it on both sides. It keeps player agents happy because they are not seeing essentially their, their client put in front of a camera on behalf of a brand and not getting paid for it shared. But also it spreads the load amongst so's
Richard Gillis, UP:team. It's actually making sure that the club gets paid and not just the player. So if I wanna sponsor my, Tottenham. I could just do a deal with some, or if I want to do a deal with a hundred franchise, I will get, or a, you know, an IPL franchise. I'll get Coley that will do a job. And that's actually a cheaper way of. Well, no. Get access to the ip.
Jack:No, because if you did a deal with son, but not with Tottenham, you wouldn't have access to anything. Tottenham. You couldn't, you couldn't picture. But
Richard Gillis, UP:he's famous. If he's famous enough to live beyond his shirt, then I think yeah, you're obviously gonna
Jack:be tapping into his fandom, of which many, most will be Tottenham fans or Tottenham followers. So yeah, you could do that. But I mean, what, you know, the fact that we're discussing it just proves how valuable inter intellectual property is and how protective and rightly so, clubs or player agents or players themselves are. And that's why creatives and agencies face like a real difficulty when it comes to creating new and innovative ideas to activate sponsorships. It's all well and good. Laura and I sat here being like, ah. You know, the player interviews are boring. It's done to death. Like yeah, they are boring. But the reason is, if you're given like 45 minutes with players, you've gotta film get, like a lot of product shots. So it's like a 15 minute gap. You've got very small budgets, you know it's gonna get views. You can absolutely see why, and we've been guilty of it, why you end up, you know, activating it in that way.
Richard Gillis, UP:We are talking here in quite a narrow lens of creative'cause we're talking about branded content and the job being that something attaches to the brand. In some way. So you are, you know, the, um, Lauren James thing is, is, is interesting'cause just by holding a cup of hot chocolate, we are hoping that something is attaching I'm wondering what the chances of that are and whether actually I ever notice
Jack:So said brown or, and if Yeah, exactly.
Richard Gillis, UP:And so you then get into, well if that's the incentive set that you are presented with, you then end up with press conferences with. Bottles in front of me and, you know, lay logos at the back. So it's, I'm just, there's a, there's a, I, I guess my question is, where does the idea reside? Where does the big idea reside? Because always the argument was that sport is always at the downstream of the actual creative, and you are looking to take MasterCard priceless and make that. Come alive in a European football sort of,
Laura:yeah.
Richard Gillis, UP:Exclusive VIP type arena. And I'm wondering how much actual mileage or breadth you've got as creatives at a sports agency to shape the big idea.
Laura:Yeah, completely. It's a, I mean, it's something that you've talked about as well, Jack, about how you feel we should be involved almost in the, when they're discussing rights, like what it should be that you're actually able to activate against. Because Yeah, otherwise you are just left with a 10 minute slot with Lauren James on a sofa. Pigeonholed into the, into the scenario you are. So you've gotta say so really
Richard Gillis, UP:interesting isn't, yeah,
Laura:exactly. And you do need to work your ass off as a creative to come up with questions that are going to make that content fresh and different. And I get that. That is a really difficult challenge, but there are, I think the thing that you need to do is look at the brands that are doing it right. So. We've been working recently with Tommy Hilfiger, and I think that the work that they have done to announce, um, their partnership or their sponsorship of the new F1 movie is so interesting. So they, um, let's talk
Richard Gillis, UP:about that. What happened? Why? cause it's a sort of, it's the film. Brad Pitt film. Yeah. And it's, it's Apple, but Tommy Hilfiger is sponsoring the fictional team. Team that doesn't actually exist, does it?
Laura:Exactly. So, uh, Tommy's experience, Tommy's heritage in F1 is huge. They've obviously most recently been sponsoring, uh, Mercedes with Lewis when he was there. They then left. Kind of coincided with him leaving. And they then moved on to sponsor Apex gp, the fictional team in the, in the film. But that of course means that billions of people are probably going to watch this movie. And within it, the car livery is covered in Tommy Hilfiger branding, the helmet, the race suits. Um, but within that also the. The c the uniform that he is wearing, the, the wardrobe that Damson Idris, the, the main star alongside Brad Pitt is wearing, is head to toe Tommy. So their branding within the film, and it's probably going to be the biggest film of the year. It's a huge Apple blockbuster is just everywhere. It's a super, super smart way of. Getting, did you turn up at the Met Gala? Yes. Which is like my most favorite bit about the whole activation because Yeah, like they could have announced that in many ways. And we, we have, we've been working with them to announce it through films through out of home, through yeah. Billboards Everywhere. And it's, and it is a beautiful campaign, but the way they actually announced it was by capitalizing on probably the biggest eyeball moment in fashion and in culture, which is the Met Gala, getting him to show up in the Tommy Ray suit. On the red carpet thousands of camera flashes capturing that exact moment as his race suit is ripped off and underneath, he's wearing custom. Tommy, like that's such a smart way for Tommy to have announced the fact that they are a part of this, a part of this massive sponsorship deal. And that's what's so interesting, like, yeah, you've got the Lauren James sat on a sofa. Elements that probably are just like your, your hygiene stuff, the stuff that you've got to get done. But think outside the box. Think beyond that. Like something that we talked about a lot with the Lego uh, driver parade.
Jack:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the formula one. One, yes. The formula one,
Laura:one like that was over my feed everywhere that weekend. Because it was such an, I'm assuming Jack, that they must have had that written into their
Jack:Yeah, they, yeah, because they were working on it for about a year, I think for their big moment. So they were brave. Like they're already spending an awful amount of, an awful lot of money on their partnership, and then they would've spent an awful lot more. On that activation, but look at the value that it gave for them. Yeah.
Laura:You had drivers, you had Lewis, you had Lando, you had all of them posting about it.'cause it was just for free, an amazingly fun day. Like they didn't get paid to post it, but they did'cause it was just pure fun. And that's similarly to the, the Damson red carpet reveal biggest publications in, in fashion. Vogue was posting about it, not because they were paid to, but because it was such an iconic moment. So it is thinking outside the box and, and yes, I'm not, I'm not discounting the fact that you have those. You have those requirements that it is a lot more restricting to come up with good creative ideas on, but then think about your sponsorship. Think exactly how Jack said these are seven figure deals. Um, yeah, make sure that you are, you're being the brave client and, and activating in exciting ways.
Richard Gillis, UP:And i'm trying to work out what makes something boring and. A lot of the time people blame things like brand purpose, you know, they say, right, okay. If you start from a brand purpose position, if you're starting from a sustainability question or a DEI positioning, it's really hard to make entertaining. And then when you lay sport into that. You start to get to the sort of tropes of inspiration mm-hmm. And, you know, superheroes and, and all of that. what do you think about that bit of the jungle?'cause it is that is impacting it and it, again, I'm not going to sort of, we don't wanna get into a sort of quasi political conversation about the sort of death of DEI, just talk to me about the broader thing to why things become dull. What are the component parts, do you think?
Laura:Hmm, I mean, I think there's many reasons. I think a big one is, is like I've said, safety, but then I do think if you, if you talk about what you're saying with purpose, I think you can, you can do purpose in an exciting way, and I think it's, it is one of the biggest criticisms of exactly like you say, sustainability, global warming. All of that is kind of being heavily criticized because. Unfortunately, it's, it's almost not packaged up well enough. It's too dooms, right? Like, it, it almost needs a, it's a ridiculous thing to say, but it needs a rebrand. Like, because it's the biggest issue we could possibly talk about or care about. But for some reason, yeah, it's, it is a bit boring. And I think the same goes across the board. And I think you can do purpose in an exciting way. If we look at brands like, um, I mean. The biggest one to me that always shouts from my memory is this girl can back in the day. That was a huge piece of kind of iconic purpose led in terms of female confidence purpose led piece of advertising that really cut through and that even to this day, we're all still talking about. So I think it's about what I'm
Jack:that personal every Spain we've asked the women, that's been really good. Yeah. And really stood out as well. So it can still happen.
Laura:Yeah, totally. And also another Arsenal do loads of great stuff. Arsenal did the, uh, the Nomar red, which was all about knife crime, where they changed their shirt to the white shirt. There's, so it's, it's, again, it's, it's really just making sure that everything you do is different. And I think we can talk about AI in this as well. Yeah. We, I, I notice so much already that I'm getting so many ideas sent to me that are churn out through ai um, copywriting. I think if you go on LinkedIn, you can tell how many posts are written by ai. I said the,
Jack:uh, the.
Laura:Yeah, the M dash thing. Yeah, I saw that the other day.
Jack:So it's prompt.
Laura:Yeah. Yeah. If, if you've got an M dash, you know, it's an AI thing, basically AI wouldn't have been able to come up with the Damson iris on the Met Gala carpet. He just wouldn't, it just wouldn't have been able to. So it's making sure that we really challenge ourselves. We've now got this artificial intelligence that is competing with us on baseline ideas. So we just have to make sure that the human element that we bring is, is the elevated, is the new, is the stuff that obviously AI is. Created by churning out things that have already existed. So we need to make stuff that hasn't already existed, and that's the exciting challenge.
Jack:Yeah, as we've both touched upon, it's not easy to make stand out ideas and activations and given the various constraints there are within sports sponsorship. But when, when somebody nails it. You know, people are so, it is so tempting to, you know, copy and paste that formula, isn't it? So when, when BT Sport first started investing into football broadcast rights, we had the BT goals recreated, and, you know, that was ama like those, those were genuinely viral videos that everyone obviously seen. That one. Have you seen that one? It was a real, you know, typically quite a boring right? Would be, you know, used to be access to archive footage, but. You know, through their Premier League deal, they obviously had that you, you know, signed up talent or used legends that they had access to. And then created like something that genuinely worked. People really talked about it did a great job for them. But you know, here we are, what, like 10, 12 years on and brands are still doing it. It's like, what's the shelf life and a good idea, do you think? I'll have to defer back to Laura for that.
Laura:I
Jack:ask it because it's surely you get a single, if you are looking in sporting terms, you get, you get a single season use. Right.
Richard Gillis, UP:Well, season is a long time in, scroll time. It's like, okay, well, I, okay, great. Brilliant. I just don't think any, yeah, me again, I don't think any
Jack:brand should do it again. I mean, there was. I mean in, in the, in this industry because like the real standout campaigns, I think are quite few and far between. There was a great one with, um, Coors Light and, um, shhe Ani who's. Well, you probably know baseball player. Yeah, yeah. He, he is like really super famous. He can like pitch and hit just as well as each other, which is really rare. But he, um, he basically, he hit a homer and it hit one of their, um, their billboards. I can't remember what arena it was, but, um, and it blacked out one of the corners and then cause light did this lights out campaign. And they. You know, all of that in Stadia ip. Um, well, and branding. Suddenly they blacked out the same bit where he'd had, they had it on the cans and it was so good and people still remember it. And I think they took what could be quite traditionally boring branding rights such as, you know what you can do in Bowl, et cetera. And then they took it and even put it on pack. They had, you know, the same little black square, which here blacked out the home Run on pack was awesome. If anyone did that again, they would just, it'd be rubbish, wouldn't it?
Laura:But I think that's why the, any good idea does a great idea. Doesn't have a shelf life. That's why we're talking about that idea. That's why we're talking about this. The girl can, that's why we still talk about But you
Jack:couldn't reuse it though.
Laura:Not reuse it. But in terms of a shelf life, we can still remember ITing it by shelf. It is a
Richard Gillis, UP:version of celebrating. Celebrating it. Isn't it the superb Superbowl when the Super Bowl back down the dunking in the
Jack:dark. Yeah. People still talk about that and Oreo still gets airtime. But if another brand did. Ah, like, so, you know. Yeah. Rubbish.
Richard Gillis, UP:So what's the opposite of dull? Is it, is it edgy? Is it dangerous? Or is it, can it, can you, is there a sort of rational versus emotional thing going on here and,'cause sometimes I want just the information and you know, I get my. Milk. Not that I drink oat milk, but when I did drink oatmeal, it was lecturing me on all sorts of things. It was, it was incredibly noisy packaging. The advertising I hated because it was in a sort of tone of voice that drove me nuts.
Laura:Yeah, I, so I agree. I think it can be easy to think that what we're saying is you need to be edgy, you need to be, you need to be ridiculous, you need to be annoying. Like the go compare man. That's, I think obviously the opposite of boring is subjective and there's no point I think any of us trying to. Even as a cd, it would be insane for me to be like, that's boring. That's not, it's very subjective. But I think it's, that's a, that's again where Sidley have this effectiveness methodology. We want to make sure that everything goes through. Our strategist, um, uses system one a lot and it's a really great testing platform for us to put all of our ideas through to make sure that, so what is System
Richard Gillis, UP:one? Let's explain what that is. Oh God.
Laura:Do I need to Google it? Lemme Google it. So system one
Richard Gillis, UP:is about the, it's about sort of judging whether something works or not it's an effectiveness model, isn't it?
Laura:Exactly. So, um, you can put your ideas into it, you can put scripts into it, you can put mood films into it, or you could put the finished piece in and it will, um, I guess, gauge people's emotional response. Based on them watching it. So it will tell you whether they got brand fluency, whether yeah, they, they connected the ad to your brand. Yeah, whether they felt happy, whether they felt sad, whether they felt indifferent, which would probably be the worst, worst emotion they could possibly feel. And it gives you a rating off the back of that. So we use it a lot. Even in script phase to work out what it is that we need to maybe be tweaking, especially in, in terms of brand, brand fluency, which is something we're talking about a lot when it comes to sponsorship. If, if awareness is our biggest KPI, then of course that needs to come through a lot. So I think that's a huge tool that us as marketers can be using to make sure that. Yeah. This isn't such such a subjective topic.
Richard Gillis, UP:Well, I think, yeah, I think we're a really interesting moment because of ai, when everything is going one way, actually standing out is commercially valuable and the creative bit is really valuable.
Jack:Mm-hmm.
Richard Gillis, UP:So that feels like a'cause I can see already in sport that's the opportunity I guess, but it's proof you are getting at how do we establish a business case for creative
Laura:and how do we make sure that they create talkable ideas. That's the biggest aim here. You want people to be talking about it. Something we say a lot internally here is, did you see that thing, blah blah. Did, did you see that thing Nike did? Did you see that thing that little did? Yeah. That is the biggest kind of, yeah, big, big green tick on your work. If you did that, then you've, you've won, but unfortunately, too many sponsors are, are putting stuff out that none of us would ever internally talk about. We'd maybe talk about it as a. Did you see that thing that they did? That was,
Richard Gillis, UP:but I think though, as we were discussing by the way, people didn't see the, the eye roll. I don't, I don't wanna be on the wrong side. Did you see that one had that
Jack:eye roll on a Monday morning? I, I think, I think that, you know, we did see it sometimes I think though. But what we're talking about, uh, things being easily measurable and the importance of data as part of the reason. We're now where we're at.'Cause everyone wants to prove value from a partnership, especially if they're spending a lot of money on it. What is the most easily accessible data? It is like social media views, um, engagement rates. It's media equivalency value. Yeah. Um, you know how much their logo is out there, whether that's on broadcast, whether that's on digital display, whether not digital display, sorry, whether that's on social media. And that's why, like if you want to get, you know, if you want to pad these numbers and you want to have impressive results to, or the rights holder wants impressive results to share to their partners or the partners will share to their board or whatever, it leads you down this path of this like rinse and repeat ideas that the club will get behind or the tournament will get behind on their channels. It will drive views. People will engage with it. And then actually you're getting these great numbers, but is it really value though? Because it'd be interesting to go and see. I would love somebody to do a survey and, and show a, a fan group. I don't know, 10 different caral karaokes. Just about every auto partner's done one in some guys or Rio
Richard Gillis, UP:Furnan in
Jack:various Well, yeah, like, yeah. Who, who are Rio reacting to? What brand is that? Stages of Rio Furnan. Yeah. I think though, um, emotional
Laura:responses of Rio. One
Jack:thing we've not talked about, there is Laura's dead, right? In, in terms of how brands can be stricter, their creative and challenge it. And there's very way, various ways you can do that. But the rights holders, those, you know, the bodies that they're partnering with, they have to help facilitate that too. They essentially hold the right to say no for everything, like any creative idea. And a lot of partners you know, have these sort of. Legacy rights schedules in place, and this is just how we do it. That's how we've, we've always done it. And, you know, the ING department, uh, become more and more important because they're the real, you know, you know, the value is in, is in the players and the talent. But it, you know, it can be done differently. We're, we're working with the Boulderer League, for example, uh, on a potential partnership. Um, and, you know, it is easier for them than new, but essentially their commercial discussions are, you know, a preface with, there is no rights package. Tell us what you like and we'll build it. It's a clean slate or we have. Clubs, like, I dunno if they still do it, but Southampton for example, they, you know, part of the issue is you have these, like Molly, they don't really want to engage with the brand, so they're trying to capture content and then it, you know, impacts the outputs. But they, their partnership department have meetings with the actual players so they know each other and they have a rapport and as a result, the players are just happier and deliver better results for the partners. So. Well, rugby, they no longer have like a rigid partnership package structure. They've, you know, taken it back and are sort of building it up again depending on what brands need. And I think, um, more and more rights holders need to do this.
Richard Gillis, UP:How are they categorizing it in terms of that, where,'cause it, it was always obviously industry ca you know, the. Banking partner, the tech thing, they say, you know, you can, and the joke being that how many times you can sell the same thing to, you know, slightly different brands in different categories. That one, you know, people get to. Well, does category exclusivity actually mean anything anymore? Or is it just about who's got the best idea he's gonna pop around this, this tournament? So, you know, you get a summer, got a lot of people, brands are gonna be jumping all over the, uh, women's euros, who wins that? Is it about what category they've bought or is it about how they've negotiated the rights? Or is it just about who's gonna get the, who's out there first? What's the most interesting?
Jack:I think it would, it would just be, um, in terms of the category, I mean, that just depends what sort of brand they are, right? If, if they, if they're an airline, they'll have the airline category. But how they could differentiate themselves, I think it is what, you know, Laura's been, been saying all along. It's new, new ideas. That's not they, you know, all partners will have a presence at the fan zones. Perhaps create something a bit different that doesn't involve football table, football tables. How are they going? Do you know
Richard Gillis, UP:what? I've never been
Jack:to a fan. I'll take you. We can go and, no, don't, it feels like, it sounds like a sort of,
Richard Gillis, UP:they're really open prison. No, no, no. They're really, they're really, they're really fun. Fun. Full of football fans. Yeah. Full of football. It sounds like the sort of place I would pay not to go, you know, they're, they're, does that maybe about you being to fans, don't, anyway. Yeah. They're horrific. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Laura:it, it's full of, it's full of things that it, like us, it's of people who I try to
Richard Gillis, UP:actively avoid on it, on everyday basis,
Laura:but also it's things that people like us spend months and months trying to make as great as possible. So it's great to know that you hated it in there.
Richard Gillis, UP:Well, it's also something that the rights always have sold as a, as an asset. And obviously the brands have come in and said, yeah, okay. And then we'll. And then they say, right, okay, owe you blokes.
Jack:Away you go. But it is a seriously valuable, I say, isn't it the footfall you get through these places in a major tournament's, enormous. It just, what, what's the point in paying so much money to be a partner and then have, have these spaces where you can activate just to do something that's completely not memorable? And I think, you know what? A prediction and Laura will know better than I, but the partners for the women's, for the women's zeroes. I think we're, where are we now? We'll soon see the, the T BBCs coming out. Right. And we're gonna see a lot of like breaking barriers. A lot of empowerment missing. Lot of empowerment. A lot, a lot of that.
Richard Gillis, UP:It's inspiration. Yeah. To reiterate
Jack:is our important messages, of course. But Leah Williamson's gonna be earning a lot of money. Could they be told more creatively? Is that, you know. Otherwise it's just another women's football ad. Right. And it's not gonna cut free.
Laura:Yeah. It's a really, I think women's football is a really interesting topic because I think it comes back to, I mean, we don't need to, I, I don't need to be the feminist in the room who brings this down a feminist route, but, uh, I think women overall, it, we all know we're bored of the empowerment. Root, like I just want an ad that celebrates female football in the same way as it would male football. We don't need, yeah, we don't need to point out the indifferences. And yeah, it's, it's conversations that a lot of people in this industry have been having for years. But something that we've experienced firsthand when trying to create for, um, specific sponsors over the Euro is, of course they're pan-European and actually those. Those kind of, yeah. The tiredness around empowerment isn't the same across Europe. Yeah. So they are 5, 6, 7 years behind. So there are, it's Yeah. No, that's very true. It's coming back to the fact that, yeah, of course we are coming at this from a UK lens where we are very, I mean, very progressive is strong, but we are progressive in terms of the rest of the market. So it's, it's something that we know that brands have also got to consider. It's not as easy as, yeah, wanting to cut through and be the bravest. There are so many political and Yeah, yeah.
Richard Gillis, UP:Issues. What do you think on your list was the Spotify question, which again, I am on record as slightly taking the Mick out of major rights holders about music strategy. Okay. And I find it because quite often it goes wrong in quite funny ways, but so FIFA for example, and it's, you know, FIFA music or whatever, and, but talk to me about when should a brand have a Spotify list? What. I'm just trying to think of a reason why they would get to that answer.
Laura:I'm actually fine with a brand creating a Spotify playlist. Do it like I, actually there's, there's one that I put on a lot, you know, Chi, is it Chiquito Bananas? I.
Jack:No, I've never known any brand. I mean there's,
Laura:there's a brand, I'm sure they're called Chiquito Bananas. And once I remember seeing a Q qr, there's a blue badge on the side of the banana. Yes. It's a blue and yellow. I remember seeing QR code, you guys also there. Tiny little
Jack:stickers on those bananas. Yeah. But I
Laura:remember seeing a QR code on the banana and I was like, what? You did it? What the hell is this? I'm gonna do it. I need to know, I need to know where this is gonna take me. And it opened up the funniest like most carnival like kind of Brazilian style playlist and I loved it. Great. I'm gonna say, unless you
Jack:a create. A creative director. I just can't see people
Laura:doing that. I know, I agree. Q coding and I'm like loving and using the playlist. But I guess that was just pure chance that I did that. But I guess my opinion on it is you shouldn't be coming to us to come up with that idea. It should be something that yeah, like some brand manager is really excited about internally in Chiquito headquarters, but you not
Richard Gillis, UP:think the phrase cultural relevance would've come up at some point in that conversation. They said, right, we need bananas to be
Jack:culturally relevant. And also it, it is a media buy really, isn't it? It's not like a innovative idea. And it sits in the same bracket that we also had as, can't tell you how many times people have suggested, oh, like you should do a partnership with, uh, E uh, EAFC.
Laura:Yeah, get your brand on the, that's how
Jack:you're really gonna connect with the, the younger audience or something. Yeah. I mean, it, it is cheap to do that. It's going to maybe cost even more, or similar to your current sports partnership, so. I not suggest that.
Laura:I think it comes back to they're not bad ideas. They're perfectly fine, but do them yourselves. Don't pay agencies hundreds of thousands of pounds to come up with ideas like that because it's not an idea. It's just kind of fodder that. Yeah. Yeah. So we have Jane in accounts could come up with, so we have this, Jane,
Jack:any, any, uh, creative, so Laura or other members of the creative team Brief, they now get served this menu of things like, we don't wanna see any of this. Please have come back. Are there any band
Richard Gillis, UP:words in the agency?
Laura:Uh oh my God, we should Authentic. Authentic, yeah. Yes. That is bad words. Our
Jack:chief strategy officer as a, yeah. Sort of one man. Well, two men now campaign against the use of the word authentic. I think, to be honest, we could all do better to not have all the like, marketing fluff and buzzwords and stuff, and it's just nauseating, I think.
Richard Gillis, UP:so, I, I want. Two ideas, and it can be from one of either of you. The best are your favorite ideas and maybe your best. Let's talk about the your favorite campaign, which has a sports component that starts from a sports perspective. I'll give you a moment to, to just have a think about it. Most people go a Nike route here. Yeah, yeah. I'll just warn you, but who wants to come in with a, an all time favorite sports creative campaign? I can,
Jack:it's Nike. I just need the name of mine, so please. Uh, uh, so maybe we have to read it. Honestly, Nike, there's a reason why didn't think Nike. They created, they created the first good football ads. Yes. Yeah. And that, that format of having like. Talent from various different leagues all over the world coming together inside the cage, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I gen, I genuinely remember when, when was this? It must be about 2000 or something like that at school. We recreated the cage. That would never happen. Now you'd never get kids recreating tv. But now, I mean, even night that football ads is so boring. It's just like, well, that's the, the, the sort of night Reebok adida, all of their ads are the same. Like there's no way that they won't have some sort of. Player or fan reacting to a social media video and you get the emoji like thumbs up, like racking up on the screen. It's just
Richard Gillis, UP:boring. Yeah. Do you think that football fans are represented well in advertising? In terms of, I never recognize football fans from, you know, I know what football fans are and some, you know, it
Jack:is just hard, isn't it? Because there are football fans who. You know, but live the club. And we'll travel home in a way to watch. And then there's also people who also will say that they're football fans, just because like they might have goal alerts and they'll follow what's going on and they think they could. So I think it's really, it's really, I think it's really hard to represent that group, especially where. It's so, it's so tribal, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Much more so than what in the uk especially any other sports.
Richard Gillis, UP:Yeah. There's a sort of building society version of a football fan, and then there's the sort of, you know, bloat with a flame out of his ass at the, uh, euros and it's trying to sort of balance these two images of football fans. Yes. You're
Laura:so right. I've thought about that. Right. I mean, I, I. I've already mentioned it and I feel like it's quite an obvious one, but I It's a banana.
Richard Gillis, UP:But banana,
Laura:yes. That's the best is peak for me. I'll one day aspire to as good as Chiquito. Um. I always come back to this girl can, and it's not necessarily, I think if you were to look at it now, you wouldn't be blown away. But I just think at the time, everything about it was exciting as a creative to see. And it's still something that I would say in terms of attitude, tone, messaging yeah, visual style editing technique. All of it was just amazing and it genuinely, I think, changed it. It came at kind of the start of. Of a big, kind of female body dysmorphia curve. Yeah. And I think that really launched that. So I think if you were to look at that as a campaign and the effect it had and where it placed in society, like that's an undeniable one. A big one is obviously, uh, like the Nike era, I think of, um, like dream crazy. Like all of that was amazing. I completely agree with Jack that I almost feel like Nike have become victims of their own style. Mm-hmm. It's hard because I don't think there's so much copy, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. It's,
Richard Gillis, UP:There's a halo around it in terms of that era of Nike advertising. And now obviously the, the story is, oh, well they went too far towards performance marketing. They forgot the big idea. They forgot the big campaigns. Now let's go back that way. And, and again, I think that's probably a reductive sort of analysis, but there is truth in it somewhere. Mm-hmm. But I think it's, you know, I think it's a sort of fascinating conversation. What's next for you guys? What, what's in terms of the summer? You've got campaign work coming out.
Jack:We've got, um. After saying how much is boring in the, in the industry, we've got bit of a target on our bats now. I mean, over to you Laura. Let's not roll out, let's not roll out clients of Rio. We can't do any interviews.
Laura:Lauren, James and Cadbury's aren't gonna be knocking on that door. Yeah, no. Um, it's obviously a summer of. Of a lot going on. We've got women's euros, there's a lot of F1 stuff that our team are doing. We, a big partner of ours is Uafa, so we'll be working with them into next year, starting to work, work out what season two of Champions League looks like. So, yeah, a big, a big thing for us is. The last few months has been launching and working out what we stand for and the change we want to be, because there's too many agencies like us that exist. How can we make sure that, that we stand out and that we have a really big point of difference and that's something that we, we want to keep pushing and, and, and, yeah, trying to be the, the voice of, I think
Richard Gillis, UP:perfect. Right after this conversation, people will be looking out for the work.
Laura:Sydney sport. Yeah. No pressure.
Richard Gillis, UP:Fantastic. Thanks very much for your time. Really enjoyed that.
Laura:Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank
Richard Gillis, UP:you for having us.