Lazy

A lot of odd stuff comes up on eBay, teenagers selling their souls, lesbians selling their virginity and now it seems that hardly a day goes by without another Sailing project announcing it will be flogging it's title sponsorship rights on eBay. Team Adventure, Team Kan-do and The Sausalito Challenge are all up there for grabs.

In spite of the usual PR blather about this being a new an innovative way of raising sponsorship, it strikes me that this is actually a bit lazy. It's like sticking up a big sign saying 'Sponsor me' and.....not much else, not exactly the sort of proactive sponsor hunting that most of the top race programmes engage in. It is in fact a return to some of the less sophisticated sponsor hunting of years gone by.

Admittedly I'm not a regular user of eBay, but it also strikes me as rather an odd place to be marketing what are, in the main, Commercial Sponsorship Opportunities. If you were the head of Marketing for a major corporation, looking to place $10 Million plus in some sort of sports sponsorship, would you really be looking for such opportunities on a online auction site? And would you actually regard teams that were using eBay as credible? Well apparently at least one company has with a low ball, if you can consider $19 million low ball, bid on the Sausalito AC effort.

Still nothing has actually been generated other than publicity, which may have been the main goal all along. I say the odds are long, it is a lazy way to go about things, and at the end of the day, none of these campaigns will have generated any money. I guess only time will tell on this one.

Banksy

04/21/2004