Pranav Soneji, The Secret Strategist and Unofficial Partner Live at Global Sports Week

Diversity is one of those words that is often given a capital letter and is in danger of losing its meaning, like Content, Story and Data.

You’ll find very few people openly arguing against the aspiration of a diverse sports business. But here we are, still looking out across an industry that’s predominantly white, middle class and male.

This week's podcast with Pranav Soneji, co-founder of Livewire Sport, was prompted by their mentoring programme Diversity in Digital, which the company is doing in collaboration with some of their clients, including Channel 4, The Jockey Club and Wimbledon among others.

My response was twofold. 1) That’s a good idea and 2) Fuck me, it’s 2020 and we’re still having the same conversations we had at college in the 80s.

Pranav Soneji: I got a job at the BBC in 1999. I applied for a scheme run by the NUJ, called the George Viner Memorial Fund, which was students from ethnic minorities, for bursaries to help them break in to journalism. I got a nominal amount but it as the gesture, realising that there was a group of people out there who believed that I could make a difference and make a change what still is a white male dominated industry. I’d go to press boxes and I was always the one who stood out. I’m happy to say I never received any prejudice, or not that I noticed. But realising that in the 20 years since not much has changed. Now as a decision maker, running my own agency with four other people, I have the ability to facilitate change. It’s not specifically about skin colour, its about visible and invisible barriers: It’s location, sexuality, health, all these different things that stop people achieving their dreams. I want to be able to facilitate that change and give people the opportunity to have a foot in to the industry. We serve such a diverse audience, totally global. We also realised that as an agency we need to change. We’ve done well in increasing female representation, but outside myself and a couple of others we’re not quite there when it comes to non-white people.

Thinking v Doing, part two

The latest Secret Strategist piece, that dropped on the site this week and has caused a bit of a stir, which is sort of the point.

The gist of the argument is - as with diversity above - not new. The piece points out that sponsorship marketers don’t get their hands on client marketing strategy, because they’re still not seen as thinkers but doers. This was always the fight. Go back twenty years and sponsorship was seen as an execution tool, which at the time meant putting the signage in the right place so the camera would catch it and making sure the hospitality tickets went to the right people. Doing, not thinking.

Fast forward to today and you see the same dynamic working, it’s just the context has changed to digital. Sponsor is still seen as an execution tool, working hard at the bottom of the funnel, desperately chasing the last click, and meanwhile the big ideas and big budgets go as ever toward media and (advertising) creative.

Although sponsorship requires a healthy dose of planning and creative, there is a much bigger emphasis on delivery, operations and general project management know-how. This is a fact of the industry and sponsorship simply would not survive without these skills. However, the dominant focus on these downstream elements (skills that can be acquired over time) has led to the emergence of a generation of brand side decision-makers whose skills primarily reside in delivery. For the most part, they are not as comfortable addressing bigger questions that sponsorship is trying to answer that can make or break an investment – what the sponsorship is really doing for the business, audience planning, how the brand should show up in that space and questions around effectiveness.

Unofficial Partner Live at Global Sports Week

Me and Sean are off to Paris. We'll be spending 6th-7th February nosing about Le Carrousel du Louvre at the inaugural Global Sports Week where I'll be hosting our first live podcast recording on stage. The session title is 'Battle for Time: How Can Sport Remain Competitive' and the guest line up is uber. The full programme is available as a pdf here.
Tickets are still available via the link above. If you're going along make sure you come and say hello.