Scalability
The trouble with both strategies is the issue of scalability. Super Bowl advertisements must be relevant to football fans, so they’re often intentionally retired after their premier. Hyper-local advertisements must be tailored to the unique needs of each town and team and include different business information. There’s also the risk of channel partners misrepresenting the brand by using outdated logos and imagery, or executing an ad poorly for lack of marketing knowledge. This is why it’s essential to develop a strong channel marketing program.
Providing channel partners with pre-approved, customizable assets, clear brand guidelines, and incentives or shared funds for utilizing certain tactics can make scaling a youth sports sponsorship campaign feasible, even easy. By the same token, a Super Bowl advertisement can be repurposed and broadcasted on TV stations across all of your brand’s locations, but it misses the customization component. Channel partners intimately know their region, town, or neighborhood and can apply that local knowledge to make your brand’s advertisements more relevant to members of their community. So, it’s important to bring their perspective into the mix when scaling your marketing strategy.
Ultimately, Super Bowl ads singularly serve the national brand and neglect the channel partners who drive daily sales in their local communities. But when the national brand and channel partners run a campaign as a united front, the messaging is stronger, the audience more focused, and the ROI potential greater. So this Super Bowl Sunday, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy licking the Doritos dust off your fingers in peace knowing that a $500 local sports sponsorship could be just as effective for your brand as a $5 million 30-second ad. Regardless of how expansive or limited your budget is, local advertising should be treated with the same level of effort and intention as a Super Bowl ad seen by millions of viewers. When it comes to marketing, the big leagues aren’t always better.