How BMO Shows Up and Earns Results Across Its Sponsorship Portfolio

Shelley sat down to discuss the latest developments in how the banking and financial services company activates its diverse roster of partnerships across North America and shared some of the eye-popping results of those efforts. Below are edited highlights of the conversation.

Jim: BMO has been an industry role-model in evolving its approach to partnerships to reflect internal needs and external conditions. What is the company’s current sponsorship strategy and how has that purpose changed in the last few years?

Shelley: Our strategy at its core really hasn’t changed all that much over time in terms of the fact that we have a great portfolio of properties that deliver on building BMO’s brand, aligning with high visibility assets and bold activations, and delivering outcomes to the business. We work closely with our lines of business to create client experiences and bank our partners.

A lot of the shift has come from representing the geographical changes we have made to our footprint for the bank itself, particularly in the U.S. With the acquisition of Bank of the West in the last couple of years we have doubled our U.S. footprint. We are now a top 10 bank in North America.

With that expansion we recently added new properties to our portfolio with the naming rights to BMO Stadium and the two teams that play there: Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) and Angel City FC. Those are the newest acquisitions in our portfolio.

The other shift strategically has been how we show up with our partners and how we activate them. To “Boldly Grow the Good in Business and Life” is our articulation of our purpose. In the last few years we have stood up programming that is reflective of the social impact pillars of our purpose: a thriving economy and an inclusive society.

We now have this programming operationalized across the portfolio. So in terms of how we are activating against these programs, we have the opportunity to tell all these stories and amplify the work the team is doing with our sponsorship properties.

Another area in terms of amplification is the introduction of our brand construct to be able to market our partnerships. We have the most incredible tool in our reoccurring character who we lovingly refer to as “the BMO guy.” He’s played by Emmy-award- winning actor Lamorne Morris and he really is the personification of the brand and our employees.

If we think about BMO representing a fan of all of the partnerships that we have, we are able to then use Lamorne as “the BMO guy” to represent how BMO shows up in our fandom, whether it’s his rotation of various jerseys or his ability to promote our fan cards—our affinity credit and debit cards in Canada and the U.S.

The other really big benefit of working with a personality like our reoccurring character is with our athlete partnerships. We are able to give our athletes another personality to play off of. When we put Alphonso Davies with Lamorne we get this magic that we wouldn’t otherwise have. It not only makes the content that much more entertaining, but also makes it completely and unmistakably BMO.

Jim: Can you share an example of an activation that leans into your purpose?

Shelley: The way we have articulated our social impact strategy is really unique to each of our property partners. In the U.S. we lean a lot into promoting a BMO program called Zero Barriers to Business, where we are showcasing minority-owned businesses in our local footprints, both in our venue and externally with the Chicago Bulls and Milwaukee Bucks. We also have introduced this program with our L.A. partners, LAFC and ACFC.

Another area is in promoting youth access to sport. We have an incredible grassroots soccer program that is national across Canada. We also have been able to extend some of that programming with our soccer partners in L.A. We are able to be a leader in growing soccer across Canada when we are getting in at the introductory level of play.

Jim: Partnerships were a major piece of BMO’s move into California, most notably with BMO Stadium, LAFC and Angel City FC. Are there any measurable results from those partnerships that indicate their impact on your market expansion?

Shelley: I feel like we have had these partnerships both for a very long time at this point and that they only just launched. If I start at the beginning, one of the jobs we needed to do with respect to sponsorships was act as a core component of the integrated marketing launch to introduce the BMO brand to a completely new market.

As we think about all of the levers that we have across marketing, partnerships were really unique in that when our job was to tell people who we are, that we are a bank and to teach them how to say our name, having a stadium effectively operated not only as a venue for these incredible partnerships and teams but also as a big flashy billboard that said, “Hey, we’ve arrived in this market.”

In terms of what we have seen in the short term, the impact has exceeded our expectations. We have doubled awareness in L.A. in just the first year. That’s awareness of BMO from a brand perspective. For context, we are outpacing our three-year goals for awareness-building in the L.A. market. And if we look at that compared to other markets in the new footprint where there’s an absence of a sponsorship partnership, L.A. is also outpacing those markets in terms of awareness. So we can see the direct impact these deals are making.

At the property level too, we have been really impressed to see our partnerships with LAFC and ACFC are already at the industry benchmark for consideration—the level of purchase intent; the people that are putting BMO in their consideration set—as a result of knowing that we are partners of these teams.

And then recently, during this past MLS season, we launched what is now a core asset of our LAFC partnership with the front-of-jersey sponsorship. We did this in a really big way in partnership with LAFC. They brought out one of their heavy-hitters for the launch—celebrity owner Will Ferrell to partner with us on the jersey launch content.

As you can imagine, we made a big splash as a result of that. We had $20 million in earned media value. We really set the bar for what it looks like to win a moment with the league. It was more than a moment. We took over the national soccer news cycle as a result of this launch.

The external impact was incredible. Internally, it was our most-ever-shared piece of content by employees as well as the most engaged LinkedIn post from our CEO. I share that only to say that the impact these partnerships have on driving employee pride is compelling, especially in a time of the natural growing pains that come from merging two companies together.

Finally, I want to talk about the community aspect of these partnerships too. One of the reasons that we are so value aligned with LAFC and ACFC is how authentically they show up in the L.A. community, in particular for the Latino and Hispanic segment.

ACFC in particular is an exemplar of this. They reinvest ten percent of all of their partnerships into the community. What that looks like for BMO is a partnership with Girls Play L.A. We are providing soccer access to young women across L.A.

Overall, these partnerships have just been really invaluable additions to our portfolio.

Jim: BMO has a diverse partnership portfolio spanning sports and entertainment properties. Can you tell us how that is managed in terms of how many people are on the team and how you receive support from other departments/areas of the business?

Shelley: I love talking about the team! We are, relative to the size of our portfolio, pretty small. There are about 20 of us that operate in four geographies. Toronto, Chicago, Montreal and a handful of folks out west. Everyone wants to move in with Leah who operates out of Napa Valley!

I’m biased, but the team is really best-in-class in terms of the partnerships and activations they deliver, working together with our properties. One thing that is unique about our team is we do this end to end. We outsource very little to other firms.

That gives us an edge, because we have these true subject-matter experts—both in the sponsorship space and in the BMO realm—understanding our business and being able to create those tightly aligned partnerships between our properties and our lines of business with the team as that center function.

That’s especially important when we are creating client experiences. We do more than 100 of these ever year across our portfolio, bespoke to our segments.

It’s also important with ticketing. Our team oversees more than 35,000 tickets across North America. I will take a moment to pump your tires for a second, because we use the TicketManager platform to be able to oversee that portfolio. That has been an amazing tool for us as we have two individuals who oversee 40 ticket managers across our lines of business, but the platform itself has allowed us to not only track and manage the tickets more effectively, but also gives us the insights to make decisions on ticketing allocation and assess demand. So we have that data-driven approach now to optimizing our ticket mix, which is awesome.

Jim: Your sponsorship portfolio across North America is diverse, but BMO also has made a push to be known as “The Bank of Soccer.” Across Canada, you sponsor all three MLS clubs, why the emphasis on soccer? What does that sport bring to the table?

Shelley: Soccer provides so many benefits in terms of the level of access that is unlike any other sport. Everyone has a personal connection, whether they played growing up or are associated with the game in some way. That nuance allows us to be involved at every level of play from a sponsorship and brand perspective.

I mentioned we have a national grassroots soccer program in Canada for developing new talent, all the way up to our partnerships across the three MLS teams. In extending that playbook to California and our partnership with LAFC, we are now one of the top handful of partners of the MLS across all brands.

Soccer itself is also growing in popularity, while other sports have reached their ceiling. There is also the momentum we are building toward having the world’s largest soccer event hosted in our backyard in a year-and-a-half.

We are excited for this moment that soccer is having, but we have been investing for the last two decades at five times the rate of our competitors. We have been working to grow the game of soccer. We were a founding partner of Toronto FC in Canada and BMO Field has become the home of soccer in Canada. Across our Canadian portfolio, we are the number one partner in top-of-mind awareness for the MLS.

We are excited to continue to see how soccer takes off. There is all this untapped potential and we are going to be there to meet the moment with our amazing foundation of assets across the soccer portfolio.

Jim: You are in such a competitive category, as well, so “owning” a sport must be very important to brand differentiation.

Shelley: Especially in a market like Canada, where there are so few players and we have to differentiate a brand that has been around for more than 200 years. Having that ownership stake is something that is both important to us and something we are very proud of.

Jim: BMO has long been focused on measuring performance of its partnerships, outside of the California properties, are you pleased with the impact you’re seeing across the portfolio in terms of gains in consumer sentiment and revenue driven?

Shelley: When we look at our two jobs to do—brand building and business building—across our key markets, I’m really proud of the fact that with our sponsorship properties alone we are reaching more than 50 percent of our consumer addressable audience.

With respect to our category, we by no means have the deepest pockets, but I believe in our ability to out-activate not just our competitive set, but other brands as well. If we look within our portfolio beyond just the market level, we have really standout performers. With the Chicago Bulls, we are second in unaided awareness only to Nike, but far and away above the venue sponsor and the jersey patch sponsor. With the Milwaukee Bucks, we are first, ahead of Nike and the other players there.

In terms of consideration, looking at what we hope will drive consumers to start a banking relationship with us, at the market level in five out of our six markets we are outperforming the competitive set even as a lower spender in our category.

The Bulls partnership is a great example of the impact on consideration. Even in the midst of not the greatest team performance, which we know can be a variable on some of these customer sentiment metrics, the Bulls are Teflon because of the incredibly powerful global brand that they have built. We are able to borrow that affinity from their fans and continue to see growth in that consideration area.

When we look at the business side, I mentioned we have 100-plus client experiences that we create in partnership with the lines of business, but we also foster relationships across the business with our partners to establish banking relationships that ultimately deliver millions in revenue back to BMO.

Jim:  What’s next for BMO’s sponsorship program? Are you looking to add to the portfolio? Is there an ability or a need to do that?

Shelley: One of our priorities moving forward is to continue to build upon and optimize our incredible portfolio. That will absolutely happen in terms of ensuring we have that right asset mix for brand and business building. But we are looking at what new opportunities could be on the horizon, especially as we look to build out our new geography in the West.

So much of our industry is based on timing. We are taking our time to figure out what the right partnership looks like, but we are shaking all the trees and have a lot of feelers out there at this stage.

In our current portfolio as well, we are looking at expansion of our product set as it relates to sponsorship and our consumer products. We have just launched our new fan cards with LAFC and ACFC, adding to our debit card portfolio with the Bulls, Blackhawks and Bucks.

Currently, in our U.S. portfolio, one in three debit card holders carries a fan card. So we are hoping to expand that to California with this launch.

From a soccer perspective, we are excited to ride this wave of momentum and excitement around the sport and to be there to capitalize on those moments.