Event Sponsorship - Perceptions of Agriculture and On-farm Realities

We’ve just finished a rewarding and exhausting four-year project, our sponsorship of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games^™ 2014 in Normandy. The Games are unlike any other global sporting event and our sponsorship is unlike any other sports sponsorship. Event sponsorship is commonly used as a way to advertise retail products to a mass audience yet Alltech does not produce retail products.  

So, what then are the objectives and benefits of a sporting event sponsorship for a B2B agricultural biotechnology company like Alltech? Catherine Keogh, Alltech's CMO, and Aidan Connolly, Alltech's VP of Corporate Accounts, set out to answer that question in a paper entitled Using Event Sponsorship to Cross the Chasm between Consumer Perceptions of Agriculture and On-farm Realities published in the International Food and Agribusiness Management (IFAMA) Review.   

Keogh and Connolly take you through the how and why of the sponsorship, laying out the objectives, methods and metrics. More importantly, they provide an excellent and succinct overview of a very serious challenge facing farmers and the agriculture industry as a whole. Agriculture finds itself confronted with a wave of negativity even as innovative technologies are allowing farmers to feed more people using fewer resources. It is very important that agriculture meet this discussion head on and work to dispel myths, encourage open conversations and build trust.

To find out how we used our sponsorship of the Alltech Games as a step toward building that trust, read the article at IFAMA.org.