Sky Media has launched Smart Sponsorships, its latest ‘addressable broadcast’ innovation for marketers.
Powered by the same addressable technology as Sky’s AdSmart offering, Smart Sponsorships allow brands to tailor their idents to different audiences using Sky’s third-party data or advertisers’ own first-party customer data. Smart Sponsorship also opens-up the possibility of more local and geographic creative executions and opportunities – meaning programme or channel alignment can be bought for specific locations such as country, county, city, local authority area or even postcode area.
Appearing next to trusted, professionally-produced content, broadcast sponsorship has always been a highly-prized branding tool for advertisers. Until now, however, broadcast sponsors have not had the option to use a choice of creative to connect with different audiences. Smart sponsorships automatically select the most relevant creative message depending on which household is watching.
In practice, this means a car brand could change the car model featured depending on the affluence or life-stage of the household, or change the scenery and voice over depending on location. Using their own data advertisers could also deliver different creative to current and lapsed customers.
Dev Sangani, Advertising Capability and Strategy Director at Sky Media, said, “AdSmart pioneered the use of TV addressability and that same technology will help do the same for Sponsorships. With rich data, exciting creative possibilities and trusted & engaging content – this latest innovation in our exciting roadmap will help brands create even more effective partnerships with our shows and channels.”
Sky Media believes that Smart Sponsorships will likely benefit from the same uplifts in relevance that Adsmart has seen. On average, across thousands of AdSmart campaigns, advertisers have seen a 48% reduction in tune-away, 35% increase in engagement and 10% increase in spontaneous recall when using addressable technology.
Launched in 2014, AdSmart has allowed brands big and small to target their advertising to more relevant audiences, extend reach or make their move to TV possible for the first time. AdSmart is available across Sky and Virgin homes on over 100 channels. In 2021, over 450 brands came to TV for the first time because of AdSmart with a return rate of 73%.
Smart Sponsorships will be available in market in H2 2022.
