MediaCom has formally launched its five-year-old MediaCom Sport division in Canada. The specialized business unit focuses on sports sponsorships, as well as event management and media rights negotiations.
Chris Collie, who previously worked with Havas Sports & Entertainment, is heading the division after joining MediaCom late last year.
While MediaCom had previously supplied clients with sports marketing services, Collie said MediaCom Sport was a more formalized offering, capable of working in tandem with the agency’s traditional media planning and buying capabilities.
“I’m literally working with colleagues that are on the media buying and planning team, while looking holistically at what a client is doing…[so] we’re able to bring in that sports sponsorship piece to complement what’s going on,” he said.
Collie said traditional media management and sports sponsorship had reached an inflection point, making it the right time to formalize the GroupM network’s sports offering in Canada.
“We don’t look at sports sponsorship as replacing all the other marketing communications, it really is a complement to all those other areas,” he said. “It’s one piece of the overall marketing puzzle. Clients are looking to companies like us and saying ‘How do we figure this thing out?’
MediaCom Sport is fully integrated within MediaCom’s client services teams, and boasts a presence in MediaCom Canada offices in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Collie said he expected to be “actively hiring” staff for MediaCom Sport beginning in Q4.
“There are lots of sides to MediaCom Sport, from identifying opportunities and looking at the strategy and presenting those ideas, right through to streamlining those ideas, connecting with sports properties, negotiating the deals, building the plan and seeing it through to measurement and continuous improvement,” said Collie. “There’s a whole continuum of activity, and we’re now looking for experts in the various points.”
MediaCom Sport’s early initiatives include a program for Dairy Queen that includes both the Toronto Blue Jays and Baseball Canada, complemented by a traditional media plan.
The partnership with the Jays includes everything from in-venue signage to on-air mentions by the Blue Jays’ broadcast team during Sportsnet’s Jays telecasts. MediaCom Sport also negotiated a first-pitch opportunity celebrating the QSR’s charitable initiative Miracle Treat Day, in which $1 from every Blizzard frozen treat sold is donated to local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
In addition, Dairy Queen’s sports marketing efforts are being extended at grassroots level through the “DQ Rally Cap Initiation Program” in association with Baseball Canada.
“That’s part of the value we can offer – we’re not just a sports marketing agency or media planning and buying agency,” said Collie. “We’re trying to look at things holistically so the client can leverage as much ROI as they can from their marketing dollars.”
