It’s a big world out there

Back in March, I made a trip to Chicago for the IEG Sponsorship Conference, self-described as a “three-day marathon of information sharing and networking … where sponsorships’ most powerful people and most profitable ideas converge.”

For better or worse, coming to a conference like this is a different value proposition for me than it is for, say, a member of Coca-Cola’s nine-person delegation. I’m self-employed, and I could have gone on a kick-ass vacation with the money I spent to hear people say things like, “Activation is to sponsorship what batteries are to electronic toys.”

During the third or fourth of the twenty-plus presentations and workshops I attended, I learned the following from Jeri Yoshizu, promotions manager for the Scion division of Toyota U.S.A.:

“If you’ve ever worked with Grandmaster Flash, you know that if he thinks your event is wack, he’ll tell you to your face.”

For those of us who are not hip-hop concert promoters, knowing what it’s like to work with Grandmaster Flash is not especially useful, and a lot of the presentations were similar recaps of “I did this, then I did this.” Many others were short on details and long on buzzwords. Honestly, I was doubted that I’d get my money’s worth out of the trip.

But I was wrong.

I wasn’t surprised to see only a handful of familiar faces from the cycling scene, but by the second or third day of the conference, I noticed that very few of the people who had picked an itinerary similar to mine had anything to do with sports.

After seeing Kerry from the Portland Rose Festival at almost all of the talks that I went to, I wondered how she could have flipped through the conference catalog and chosen almost exactly the same schedule as I did.

Cycling and rose gardening may be quite different, but we had both selected the sessions that were relevant to reaching the audience that our sponsors want to use us to reach. And if sponsors look at Kerry and me as different ways to reach the same audience, then we’re probably looking at the same sponsors.

It’s easy for me frame my work in terms of competition against other sports, but the IEG conference reinforced a core concept that’s easy to lose track of in a community as insular as domestic cycling: that our sport competes not against every sponsorship that is similar to cycling, but against every sponsorship that reaches the same audience as cycling does.

People always say, “It’s a small world,” but an event like the IEG conference shows you how wrong that is. It’s just the circles we run in that are small.