The Sponsorship Company, said to be India’s first sponsorship marketing platform, has kickstarted its operations. Through a web-based platform, thesponsorshipcompany.in, it aims at helping individuals, organisations and institutions who are seeking sponsorships for their events to connect to brands across the country.
Subramanian Iyer, managing director of the company, who has been in the event space for close to eight and a half years (his last company was Fountainhead and he headed sales for West and North), said, "In my last tenure, apart from getting new business and clients, one of my main KRAs was building intellectual properties ideas for brands, which are largely sponsorship-led in the country. Unfortunately, the whole sponsorship process is very ad hoc. We see a lot of brands moving to experiential marketing because of opportunities in ATL and events and BTL. We believe a lot of focus will be on events that the brand owns, and does every year. There are international platforms like this that exist already. With our platform, it'll take a little while to build, but we're confident that once we have a couple of success stories, it'll take off." Webly is the digital agency that helped in developing the platform.
How it works is once someone posts a proposal, based on the category of the proposal, the platform reaches out to brands those have enrolled in those categories. If the sponsor shows interest in the proposal, then the platform acts as a medium between the seeker and the sponsor to close the best deal. The platform also offers product development services that help sponsorship seekers to make custom made proposals as per their needs.
Iyer said, "To get people to post a proposal, they would only come if the brands were already there on the platform and they had the guarantee that the proposal would at least be viewed. Six months ago, we started the process of developing the platform and approaching brands. Currently, we have about 198 brands. The target is to reach 500 by the end of the year."
On where the company will make money, since it's free to submit a proposal for the seeker and for the brands as well, Iyer said, "Right now, we're not looking at money; it's about the idea. The revenue stream for us, currently, is in the product development services."
Iyer has a partner and three consultants working with him (he estimates their collective experience to be 25 years); the team size is of 12, and he says they're aggressively hiring in sales and sponsor management.