Why we should be thinking with the Physical Distancing lense…not social distancing in sponsorship
By: Nick Lawson
Tags: Sports Sponsorship, Sports Business, Sponsorship Activation, Sponsorship

Why we should be thinking with the Physical Distancing lense…not social distancing in sponsorship Nick Lawson Follow May 24 · 4 min read

How do you get fans to interact with sponsors in an age where 6ft distance is the new norm?

Our concourses were once a bustling place of excitement with fans interacting and enjoying the sport & team they love. It is hard to imagine that this will be the case moving forward. With regulations coming down of masks, distancing, and limits to fans in the stadium we will have to massively change the assets we sell to our sponsors.

But…this doesn’t mean we get rid of those assets altogether. We just have to re-create them with the current situation in mind. In order to do that, we have to look through a different lens, one that focuses on keeping our fans socially connected with sponsors while physically distant from them.

This week on The Inches podcast Rich and I dive into how you should be changing your mindset and lense from social distancing to physical distancing and how you can create new assets from this thinking.

You can listen to the whole episode HERE. But as always I’ve broken down the key points below.

Step one: Think through a lense of physical distancing…not social distancing

On a presentation with the league Rich was given a great insight that he shared on the podcast…and I think it is fantastic for really changing how we think about our packages and assets.

The presenter brought up the point that we should not be calling it social distancing, rather we refer to it as physical distancing.

The reason this is so important is it allows us to reshape the problem and look through a new lens for a solution. How can we bring our fans together socially with our sponsors while keeping physical distance?

We still need to connect our fans socially with our sponsors on game day. They pay us to connect with our fans. With this…social distancing is out of the question.

But, if we think of it through the lens of physical distancing there opens another opportunity. The new question is how to keep them connected if we can’t have them within 6ft of each other.

This allows our creativity to come out to solve the problem and evaluate solutions to offer as replacements.

The first step of this is vital. Shift your mind from social distancing to physical distancing.

Step two: Once we have that lense, do a walkthrough of your concourse

I’m an extremely visual person. Sometimes in meetings, I will bring out a big sketch pad and literally draw out the problems.

With this, if I were looking to find physical distancing solutions, I would walk through my stadium concourse as it is empty and try and visualize where my booths are and how I can find a solution for keeping fans 6 feet away while still connecting them with the sponsor.

If you have access to your concourse I would do this ASAP to get a head start. We will have fans back in our stadium soon and even if we don’t know when that is we have to close sponsors who will be wary of buying a concourse activation that doesn’t allow fans to get close.

When you do this walkthrough you will start to see the problem. One is for our insurance, car dealership, and vacation booth-ers who use games to win prizes for interaction…how do I replace that experience if fans have to stay 6ft away?

Once you visualize the problem, you can visualize solutions. One solution that comes to mind is putting up a rope barrier around the booth(6ft away) and having your sponsors print a giant QR code behind them on a backdrop. When fans scan, they can play a digital game or be connected with the human at the booth.

Maybe it is a facetime setup. Maybe a messaging program. Maybe it is a 10% off offer.

This reaches the same goals but it is physically distant…not socially.

As we look for solutions, I would walk through your space and start working out solutions & replacements. It will pay off 10 fold when it comes time to explain to your sponsors why they should continue to booth.

Step three: rebuild your experiences to make them even better than before

Nothing like bringing up an age-old Haiku to get your message across.

Rich brought up a haiku that really fits right now. It is from a 17th-century Japanese poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide.

The haiku goes:

Barn’s burnt down — now I can see the moon.

Beautifully put, sometimes destruction allows us to see things in a new light and make them better.

Ok, so what does this have to do with sponsorship?

In sports, our barn has burned down. But this grants us the opportunity to rethink, re-evaluate, and rebuild to gain a better outcome.

As we look with a new lens, change the things you hated before about your physical assets. We for the first time in a long time have a blank canvas. We got the reset button.

Notice this blessing and rebuild your barn so you still have a view of the moon.

Overall, this is where we get creative in the sponsorship industry

I’m not going to say everything has changed because…well…it has been said a bit too much.

What I will say is now is the time in sponsorship to let our creativity flow. Allow the crazy ideas to come to the top as you look at physical distancing and the solutions they can bring.

We have been hit with an unforeseen and disastrous problem in our industry. How we creatively bring ourselves out of the ashes will define how good we are as an industry.

I’m excited to see the new barns built with a better view of the moon than before.