Winning Together: How Brands and Properties Find Success with Partnerships

At TicketManager’s Partner Summit in New York City this fall, executives from Mastercard, Verizon, and the New York Jets joined a panel covering best practices in strategic partnerships. Below are highlighted remarks from the discussion.

On the topic of what sponsorship achieves for the brand and business…

Alison Giordano, Senior Vice President, Global Sponsorships & Consumer Marketing, Mastercard

Mastercard is a B2B company. We activate through our banks and merchant partners. We also do B2C activations to keep our brand strong. All of that springs from our marketing strategy, which is passion based, and it’s about delivering experiences to the fans and getting them closer to the things they care about most.

We have a very broad portfolio from sports to entertainment to the food space to film to music, etc. Every deal we do has different objectives. Sometimes the objective is reaching a fan audience or a group we are currently not reaching through our existing portfolio. Sometimes there is a reputation angle. We have some core values that we are looking to align around—whether that’s sustainability, diversity and inclusion, etc.—that have to cut across everything we do in terms of how we activate and bring things to life.

Nick Kelly, Vice President-Partnerships, Verizon

Verizon doesn’t need brand awareness. For us, it’s about retaining the customers we have and preventing churn through all of the experiences that we offer.

One thing we have continued to evolve in our approach is stripping out a lot of signage elements. The ROI model that many of us have is broken because it is driven off of media-visible signage. We are trying to evolve out of that through social amplification of the experience in real time. We are explaining to the customer how they access those experiences so that it doesn’t feel unattainable. We have pivoted from just creating the experiences to explaining how “this could be you.”

Jeff Fernandez, Vice President, Business Development & Ventures, New York Jets

The people from the property side have to be able to put the time into not only understanding the brand and its objectives, but also having intentionality around driving results. That means coming up with ideas, not being afraid to pilot programs, etc. The intentionality has to be on both sides to be able to dedicate the resources and the time and the brainpower to figuring out how to do something different.

For example, we have access to a tremendous amount of data and we now manage our own data warehouse, which is not something we did two short years ago. The NFL does a good job of consolidating all of its sources of data and making it available to teams, whether that’s through Fanatics, Ticketmaster, NFL Fantasy or anything else.

Having all of this first-party data allows us to develop single-user profiles on most of our database to be able to communicate with people at the right time with the right message. The more information you have, the greater your ability to have communication and a conversation with somebody in the way that they want to have it, which is very valuable.

On the topic of ticket utilization…

Mastercard

We don’t gift tickets. We utilize every asset for customer engagement through a hosted experience. We see these opportunities as a way to grow relationships and grow business.

On the consumer side, we work through our banks, so that is where you will see cardholder access to tickets. That is where you will have hundreds, or even a thousand cardholders gaining access to an experience. There is some level of hosting, but it is more one-to-many versus one-to-one.

Verizon

We have 120 million customers and we have the ability to giveaway tickets to every game on an NFL Sunday. As a loyal Verizon customer, you have the opportunity to sit in a lower bowl seat. Last year we gave away 80,000 tickets. We work with the teams to add a surprise-and-delight element when possible. We don’t guarantee that to the customer because we don’t want to overpromise and disappoint.

We have tiers above that for customers on a premium level. Those customers are going to have a host who you probably know because they are your sales rep or someone on your account who you have a relationship with.

On the topic of enhancing experiences to build connection…

Mastercard

We are in the business of experiences. Every experience that we look to deliver to a fan will be priceless for them. We work with our sports marketing agency to bring our brand to life and bring that priceless experience thread through every touchpoint. For a hosted experience, and even for a cardholder, that means everything from the moment they arrive on the ground and get to a hotel.

We bring our colorway. We create small moments throughout the journey of the larger experience to ensure they are feeling and hearing Mastercard. We take a multisensory approach for our brand, including our red and yellow logo and our colorway; our scent—when you come into our hospitality space there is a specific scent that gives you that full sensory experience–our sound, which you might have heard at point-of-sale when you use your Mastercard, our anthem—which we infuse into the car ride—so that there is a remembrance.

It’s about giving experiences that money can’t buy, whether that’s walking inside the ropes at a PGA Tour event, or playing the Old Course at St. Andrews the day after the Open Championship, being a player mascot at the Champions League final, etc.

We think about fans holistically. Whether you are a man in his 40s, a mom with kids, a member of Gen Z, we are looking to reach a number of different audiences, because our bank and merchant customers are looking to engage with everybody.

On the topic of diversifying portfolios to reach new fan bases…

Verizon

We are set on hitting 85-90 percent of Americans. With the NFL and the local market teams we have agreements with, our Live Nation partnership and now adding FIFA, we are hitting just about everybody.

A new partnership would have to truly hit a bullseye I know I’m not touching. There are very few opportunities that can deliver that. It would either skew to an under-represented population or to such a niche sport or activity where the participants and fans don’t do anything but that.

We have taken a measured approach to the women’s space because we want to show up in a meaningful way. We don’t want to just throw our name on a jersey or a field board.

We are supporting the Women’s World Cup through our FIFA agreement and have created a program called Behind the Lens, which will support the women who are capturing sports. That is an area where we can make an impact with women who are using our technology and are under-represented, whether it’s a video or camera operator or the social media manager on the sidelines at practice, etc.

Helping the women who are capturing these events and telling these stories from a different perspective is ownable and we can make a difference. We can measure our impact against are we growing the number of women in that space as opposed to did we get our media value off the growing ratings of NWSL. As I mentioned, we don’t need awareness, so success should be about making an impact in the sport.

Also, there is not always a sponsorable solution to reaching a gap consumer, which for us is Hispanic and Latino customers. When we looked at our Live Nation partnership, we didn’t have a targeted availability to reach that segment. We had to create our own Latin music platform from scratch because there wasn’t a sponsorable opportunity available.

We can’t always find a partner who has everything we need turnkey. Sometimes we have to build it ourselves. That can be empowering and great, but we’re not necessarily in the entertainment business to the point where we should be building concert series and sporting events. It often will turn into a situation of talking to partners and asking them to take what we built and continue to do it themselves.

On the topic of impacting employee morale…

Mastercard

Coming out of Covid, we have seen our human resources organization lean in on the sponsorship front. We leverage many of our ambassadors—both female and male—to produce pieces that we push out to employees.

We also use our ambassadors for chalk-talk types of experiences, where we will have them visit one of our offices around the world. There is a live broadcast and our people can ask questions. People will show up to the office that day. They want to be there for that live interaction. We have been able to forge a great partnership with HR to leverage sponsorships year-round.

In addition, we have created an opportunity for an employee to be a social media ambassador for the brand at different events around the world. They serve as a reporter for the employee base and the content is highlighted across multiple internal websites to get people excited.