In the sponsorship firmament, no star shines more brightly than Kim Skildum-Reid. From her base in Sydney, Australia, over the 15 years that I have known her Kim has transformed the conversation about corporate sponsorship. So much of what we now understand as best practices can be traced back to her consulting work and her public advocacy through her powersponsorship.com platform. So much of what we now recognize as hooey was first called out by Kim.
“Distance makes for vision.” It’s a lyric in a song from a friend of mine and it has always rung true with me. So much of the noise around sponsorship seems to come from a few cities, one of them being Chicago. I’ve always felt that the distance between Chicago and Sydney gave Kim a unique advantage: the ability to marry her genuine passion for sponsorship with a perspective untainted by what some in sponsorship would like to see adopted as conventional wisdom.
That’s what has always drawn me to Kim. I first became involved in sponsorship not as a sponsor but as an investor. I heard that The Sponsorship Report might be available, I was a B2B publisher and it looked like a reasonable investment. I bought it knowing little about the sponsorship business, and quickly set about educating myself. I stumbled upon Kim and Power Sponsorship and immediately recognized hers as an incisive and disruptive voice. So much of what she said made sense to me. And that continues to this day.
You can see her influence everywhere in sponsorship.
Just a couple of days ago, a presenter from a major brand at Sponsorship Toronto was asked about his leverage ratio – what multiple of his rights fee did he budget for activation? We don’t work that way, he answered. Instead, the company leverages the plans and budgets of multiple departments to amplify the sponsorship rights it acquires. The leverage spend within his department is a fraction, not a multiple, of rights fees.
Kim has been preaching that message for years.
That’s just one of the many reasons why I’m so happy that we’ll be hosting Kim in Toronto for two ground-breaking workshops in January 2016. They’re brand new, delivered a few times in Australia and New Zealand, and never before on North American soil.
On January 19, she’ll be delivering The Sponsorship Master Class, a workshop aimed exclusively at sponsoring brands. At the end of the day, you’ll be fully equipped to boost and measure your ROI, align your portfolio of sponsored properties to support business objectives, and marshal all available internal resources in support of your objectives. You’ll return to the office so much smarter than when you left.
January 20 will have Kim delivering Getting to Yes. It sounds like a sales course, but it’s not. It’s a workshop where Kim leverages a career spent advising the world’s top brands and puts you in the head of a corporate sponsor. You may enter the room thinking you’re a person who packages and sells sponsorable properties, but you’ll emerge as an essential marketing partner to the top brands in the land.
Both are workshops, not talking head conferences. You’ll roll up your sleeves. Kim will put you to work. She’ll challenge your assumptions. She’ll make you question much of what you’ve been doing. That’s what she does – with boundless enthusiasm, razor-sharp intelligence and a quick and incisive wit.
Be there. Either the Sponsorship Master Class or Getting to Yes. Unless Australia is on your travel plans, you’re unlikely to get another chance like this. And you’ll look back on it as one of the smartest things you did in 2016.
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