By Robert Wheatley

Sponsorship yields opportunity for national attention

Events and brand experiences are vital to creating tangible meaningful connections with consumers. Especially when the audience consists of those most dedicated and interested in the category where you do business, above and beyond the opportunity for media coverage.

The ability to touch and interact with consumers can be priceless in creating an authentic relationship with people who are potentially your best and most devoted customers. Importantly though, events offer enormous leverage for even greater benefit in communications. We wanted to share a recent example with you. Here’s the story:

Client Sargento Foods is launching an important new item in its Artisan Blends line – Authentic Mexican Cheese blend of Artisan and Sargento cheeses – a product that further drives a wedge of uniqueness in the supermarket dairy cheese business. Under economic conditions that push consumers increasingly toward private label options on anything they perceive to be a commodity, this product launch bears strategic significance as we work to elevate and differentiate the Sargento brand.

Enter the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, one of the nation’s largest and most well attended culinary events. We developed a significant and integrated sponsorship package for Sargento, as a platform to support the launch of the new product.

This is an example of sponsorship strategy at work. While it is true that the festival affords a wonderful sampling opportunity for a new product like this in an environment populated with culinary glitterati and food influencers, the real excitement is connected to how this was used as a backdrop for outbound communications on a national level.

The key ingredients:

See photo coverage of the projects below…

Celebrity Chef Michelle Bernstein became the centerpiece of the effort, creating recipes for the new product and adding significant cachet to the launch from both festival and media perspectives.

South Beach serves as a newsworthy platform for coverage around the nation, secured by kicking off the event with a live national satellite media tour in 27 cities. Chef Michelle conducts real-time cooking demonstrations featuring the new Sargento Artisan Blend in each segment with the festival as the draw for bookings.

NBC Today Show’s coverage included a live segment with Al Roker from the event. Chef Michelle was booked for a top-of-the-hour interview with Al at 8:00 a.m. on Friday morning, when viewership is peaking. The product package has prominent placement on the set. The interview creates a stampede to the Sargento booth that morning to sample the Chef’s creations and meet her.

Meanwhile the client participates in a Reuters wire service story about how festivals are faring in the difficult economy. The story includes multiple quotes about the Sargento participation and goals. The story goes national and garners additional pick-up.

Content creation in the digital age is simply an opportunity waiting to happen. So the agency team blogs the event with daily video posts “live from South Beach” to help spur traffic a artisancheesecenter.com — a subject relevant web platform hot-linked to Sargento.com.

The culmination of all these activities helps support traffic to the Sargento booth where hundreds of hungry consumers meet the chef and sample a unique dish created especially for the Mexican Blends product.

The Sargento sponsorship is extended to include a presence at Burger Bash, one of the most popular consumer venues at the South Beach festival. A chef competition to create new gourmet burgers presents an ideal platform to promote the brand’s natural sliced cheese business – Sargento products were featured in winning Chef Spike Mendelsohn’s recipe.