Did Campbell’s and HBSE Just Break the CPG Sponsorship Mold?

There is a great deal to unpack from the recent announcement that Campbell’s has become an official sponsor of five sports properties: the New Jersey Devils and their Prudential Center home in Newark, the Philadelphia 76ers, Joe Gibbs Racing’s NASCAR team and the Washington Commanders.

Although that would be major industry news on its own, the fact that those partnerships were done as part of a single deal encompassing 16 Campbell’s brands makes it groundbreaking.

The multi-year agreement was signed with Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which has majority or minority interest in four of the properties and shares an owner (Josh Harris) with the fifth (the Commanders.)

Cross-property partnerships, while not completely uncommon, are still rare among diversified sports holding companies like HBSE, with the synergies created by common ownership often butting up against practical realities including geography, disparate fan bases and internal turf battles.

But what makes the Campbell’s/HBSE alignment unique is the corporate partner’s approach. According to Sports Business Journal, “CEO Mark Clouse said his company has long wanted scale in marketing and a simpler approach than negotiating and executing deals brand by brand, property by property.”

In a blog post last month titled “Rights Holders Face Strong Headwinds Securing CPG Partnerships,” I cited this exact issue as a key reason we don’t see more activity from the category, writing, “Companies such as Nestle, Unilever, Mondelez, Danone and Campbell Soup (soon to be known simply as Campbell’s) have for decades left partnership evaluation, spending and execution to individual brands…(R)elegating it to individual brands not only makes it exponentially more difficult for rights holders to find the right contacts, but it also misses key opportunities to identify multi-brand synergies and economies of scale while leaving decisions to less senior brand managers who often are not in their roles for more than a year.”

To hear Clouse tell it, Campbell’s is ready to flip the script. “It’s taken us some rewiring on both sides to make sure we’re set up to act and behave in this way,” he told SBJ. “But both of us had the appetite to try to unlock that and I think we’re very excited about this new way of approaching our relationship.”

While taking an enterprise-wide approach to partnerships is a positive step, Campbell’s approach raises some interesting questions:

Scale. Just how important is scale to the company? Is it enough of a priority to rule out partnerships with rights holders that don’t offer reach in multiple markets or appeal to a broad base of customers across dozens of brands and products? And if scale is so critical, why not seek a truly national platform—such as expanding its 26-year-old NFL partnership beyond the soup category?

Implementation. What specifically is the “rewiring” that Clouse referred to? SBJ reports the agreement is “the first sponsorship deal done by Campbell’s under a new initiative, dubbed ‘Kitchen 1869,’ an attempt to spur growth through enterprise-level marketing deals, brand alliances and licensing. What is the infrastructure behind Kitchen 1869 and who will be responsible for activating and measuring the new partnership’s effectiveness across all 16 brands? Similarly, who will coordinate delivery of rights and benefits on the HBSE/Commanders side of things?

Replicability. What are the chances that other companies—both in the CPG category and beyond—adopt a similar strategy and what would the implications be for large property ownership groups and national and global properties versus single-market or niche-focused sports and entertainment rightsholders?