Not too long ago, our friends at the sports marketing agency, SMI, came to us for help in producing a promotional brochure for their client Citroën Sport. SMI were marketing a sponsorship proposition for Citroën, one of the leading teams in the World Rally Championship.
Since the sponsorship deal would only be done for a not inconsiderable sum of money, our work had to be prestigious and noticeable – noticeable enough for Europe’s leading brands to start showing an interest. Our solution was dramatic piece of print, an A3 portrait brochure highlighted in Citroën red, and featuring some of the really dramatic photography that was available.
Fast forward a year or so and we find ourselves producing ‘Captured’, a photo-book highlighting award-winning photography of the teams and players in the Barclays Premier League – a coffee-table ‘book of the season’ that you’ll see in many of Barclays’ corporate reception areas.
It was ‘Captured’ that enabled us to find a format for another SMI project, this time promoting Mahindra Racing, who this year are the first team from India to compete in the Moto GP championship. Mahindra wanted to demonstrate to potential sponsors both the substance of Moto GP and the solid credentials of the team that they were bringing to the grid for the first time.
The Mahindra Racing credentials book comes with its own slip case and is part of the door-opening programme being implemented by SMI, in which Mahindra plan to introduce themselves to potential sponsors and partners, in India and across the world. We equipped their team too with a complementary Powerpoint presentation – styled to match the contents of the book – to help explain the nature and extent of the full sponsorship proposition.
The lessons from all of this seem to be that if you want to impress high-level audiences, then you can’t afford to take half measures, and a book may just offer the presence that your proposition deserves.
My credit card company sent me a mailer recently. It was so flimsy that I doubted the sales proposition even before I read it, and it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the offer totally valueless. Better to send me nothing than this kind of thing.
Barclays’ commitment to the 
