Monday, September 11, 2006
Impersonal sponsorship
Formula one seems to be missing a trick in the world of sponsorship and it's a really big one. In formula one personal sponsorship is almost unheard of. What trainers does David Coulthard wear? Well we don't know. We actually do know that Michael wears Filas but that's because they sponsor Ferrari.
Red Bull tried it but in the end got so frustrated that they had to buy a whole team (or two) just to get their message heard.
Much as the formula one establishment would like us to believe otherwise people really care about personal struggles. And to that end they care who wins the drivers championship but don't mind who wins the constructors (except in Italy).
Because of this the sport has somewhat withered under Michael Schumacher. Okay so the winning all of the time was a factor certainly but the fact that nobody outside the sport knew who anyone else was was probably relevant too.
Personal sponsors do this job for the sport as they get the story out there. And I'm not talking small concerns here. Why doesn't Nike sponsor anyone in Formula one? The reason is that no team boss will let them. Because Nike would want to put the swoosh on the car. And Ferrari wouldn't like it if there was a swoosh on one car and not on the other. And they especially wouldn't like it if there was a swoosh on one of the MaLarens too. And of course they won't like it because it takes away some of their power and also they wouldn't get a cut of that advertising space on their car.
In football the team owns the ads on the kit but the player gets to pick his own boots. And that difference is huge. So at the very least you might think the driver should get to control the ads on his helmet but no.
Why is this important now? Well next year or the year after a lot of people are going to be talking about Lewis Hamilton. A lot of people are talking about him now. But they are in the sport. And in the sport people are already refering to him as "our Tiger Woods" without seemingly realising that without Nike and Accenture we probably wouldn't have heard of him. It was them who latched on to him and made him the global brand. But in Formula One it might never happen. If he wins British people might watch more Grand Prix and perhaps black people worldwide too. But he'll never make the big leap for the sport without the billboards saying "go on be a Tiger".
It certainly does seem, though, that really big sponsors don't get behind personalities in the same way as Tiger Woods. But again, couldn't that just be circumstance - us not having any great personalities?
The man who owns TAG Hauer is Ron Dennis's business partner and owns the same amount of McLaren as Ron does. He's the silent partner which is why you don't hear about him very much but he's incredibly rich which is part of the reason that McLaren don't really go through lean periods (unlike Williams). His name is Mansour Ojjeh.
One thing I didn't quite understand is that apparently the TAG-Heuer brand was sold in 1999 to Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, and yet it's somehow still part of McLaren?
Anyway, I'm determined to find someone with a personal sponsor, although even then I think it does depend on the other sponsors a team has (so as there are no conflicting interests).
TAG group was always orignally a precision engineering group, who bought Hauer to diversify into watches.
TAG is still owned by Ojjeh. And Ojjeh still owns 30% of McLaren.
TAG gave up control of the TAG Hauer subsiduary, by selling 50.1% to LVMH. But I believe (although I don't know for certain) that TAG still owns the other 49.9%.
And you can see that it's McLaren that TAG Hauer sponsor here.
Interestingly enough TAG Hauer also sponsor Tiger Woods but that's another story!
JVC Personal Sponsors but that they are keen to continue their support.
And now the whole MF1 team is sponsored by JVC there are several team members pictured here with JVC sponsorship: http://www.midlandf1.com/main.php?sec=gallery.race.18
Apparently Michael earns $17m in personal sponsorship, but what is it? 47% of Alonso's income is allegedly personal sponsorship too. Anyway, I guess the fact is that Golf is an individual sport, so there can be no team sponsorship to counteract the personal, as there is in F1.
We sometimes can't tell the difference between personal and team sponsorship, especially because we rarely see two drivers of the same team standing together for long enough. So, this is a very good page: http://www.autosport.com/gallery/index.php/id/501
All the drivers' portraits and helmets. If you look closely you can see differences in sponsorship, but it's simply not enough to have one driver defining a brand in the global market scale of things.
As of 2004, Schumacher earns an estimated US$80 million annually, including all his endorsement deals. One notable deal is with the German investment company Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which will pay him US$8 million over three years for wearing a four-inch (10 cm) advertisement on his post-race hat.
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