eBusiness Weekly
Ricardo Fort, Coca-Cola’s vice-president of global sports partnerships, oversees one of the largest sports and entertainment sponsorship portfolios in the entire industry, a massive collection of worldwide assets for one of the world’s most venerable consumer brands that includes large-scale alignments with the International Olympic Committee, Fifa, Major League Baseball and the NCAA, among others.
But the Covid-19 pandemic has cut short many of the brand’s 2020 sports activation plans, with key events such as March Madness, the start of the MLB regular season and the Tokyo Olympics all either cancelled or postponed.
A veteran global sports marketer with prior stops at Visa, Groupe Danone, Kellogg, and Unilever on three different continents, Fort is now seeking to nimbly guide the brand into the industry’s tentative recovery.
Among his more recent moves is an extension of the company’s presenting rights for Nascar’s officially sanctioned esports property, as well as a separate deal with emerging live-streaming platform #BeApp that calls for Coca-Cola to serve as the title sponsor of 100 concerts from artists’ homes between now and July, and includes a charitable component for the International Red Cross.
Fort spoke with SportBusiness US editor Eric Fisher on how the Atlanta, Georgia-based company is navigating the public health crisis and eyeing the future prospect of better days.
How has your management of the brand’s sports marketing portfolio changed amid the ongoing pandemic?
It’s about understanding where sponsorships and marketing sit in the overall big picture, particularly as it relates to taking care of people and making sure the operation continues to run, which are our priorities.
On the back end, as it relates to marketing and sponsorships, we’ve been quite busy in many different areas. One thing that is interesting is that the timing we work from for projects is usually very long.
Today, for example, we are busy working with Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics, working with Qatar for the Fifa World Cup. Those projects haven’t been impacted whatsoever.
We continue to work with our teams in China, in the Middle East and so on. For the events happening now, ones that were postponed or cancelled, we’ve been spending time working with the partners and rights-holders to figure out how we can help them in re-planning. We’re working with our local teams in Japan (about the 2020 Summer Olympics postponed to next year), in Europe for the Euros that were also postponed.
We’re working with our teams to redesign the plans and figure out how we’ll use the communication we developed in the future.
How does that change your overall sponsorship strategy and the kinds of opportunities you prioritise?
There are some changes, but they’re not as dramatic as they might be for other companies. Because we are a sponsor of all these events, and have been for a long time and have contracts that will last ideally well beyond the crisis, we always take a very long-term view on everything we do. So, yes, the (Tokyo) Olympics were postponed.
We know they will happen next year. We have a contract with (the IOC) until 2032.
There are a few things in the short term that we had to adjust. But most of the work we have done, and I’ll use the Olympics as an example, is timeless. So we can still use most of our work for Tokyo next year. Of course, we’ll have to look at how consumer sentiment is going to evolve to make sure the messages we’re going to communicate next year are still totally relevant. But I would say most of it will be perfectly fine to use next year. So we’ve put a lot of things on hold, but we know that when we are back that we’ll be able to use most of it again.
There are some things in the short term related to operations that you have to pause and restart next year, things like the Olympic Torch Relay or the work that we do with the Tokyo Organising Committee in concessions. For those types of things, the plans are ready, we know what we need to do, we’ve put everything on hold, and when the time is right, we’ll be back in implementation mode.
What kind of change do you foresee with regard to evaluation of marketing efficacy and measuring return-on-investment?
We measure the return on investments in our sponsorships in a couple of different ways. There are a few measures related to the business performance, so we are capable of forecasting and tracking the sales volume, increases in revenues, business growth, profitability, and we do this by country, by brand, and have a pretty detailed model of how to predict and to track the actual results of activations.
And then there is the other side of the ROI model which is about the impact of the events, the relationships we have, and the way that people see the brand. Do they like us more? Do they feel better being seen drinking our products, and all of that?
We have a list of indicators that reflect the sentiment of people towards the brands so we also measure that. These are things that we measure for every event, and we are going to measure again next year. So the approach to ROI hasn’t changed. It’s just a move in the timing of how it’s happening.
What is your level of optimism that the Tokyo Olympic Games will indeed come off and be what you originally intended them to be this year?
I’m very optimistic that when it happens, it’s going to be a great sign of the recovery of the world, and it’ll be a good way to celebrate the end of the crisis.
We are very optimistic with that. — sportbusiness.com
