Sponsorship Marketing
Cover Story
Sponsorship Marketing
Chris Amimo
Sponsorship Marketing: No Big Boys In My Party!
Preamble
For purposes of this article, we will define Sponsorship Marketing as a strategy where a brand pays or provides resources to associate with an event, team, or organization to build trust and increase name recognition. In this issue, Chris Isaiah Ongondo Amimo, co-founder and chair, Ligi Ndogo S. C. Academy, shares what three decades in grassroots sport taught him about sponsorship, ownership and the billion-shilling opportunity hiding in Kenyan youth football.
The Beginnings
In 1996, four university students sitting somewhere around the University of Nairobi’ s Lower Kabete Campus decided we were going to organize a high-school basketball tournament. There was no feasibility study. No marketing agency. No PowerPoint deck. No“ go-to-market strategy.” We just loved basketball.
We were consuming SLAM Magazine religiously. SLAM itself had only been launched in 1994, mixing basketball with hip-hop culture in a way that spoke directly to the generation we belonged to. AND1 had also emerged out of American streetball culture in 1993.
Somewhere in all that consumption of American basketball culture, we decided: why can’ t we do something like this here in Kenya? So the 3-on-3 Junior Challenge was born. And Nairobi in 1996 was the perfect place for it.
Basketball culture was hot. Shaquille O’ Neal was already a superstar and, in that very year, a 17-year-old called Kobe Bryant was drafted into the NBA and ended up alongside Shaq at the Los Angeles Lakers.
But we didn’ t need Los Angeles to provide the culture. Nairobi had plenty of its own. Gen Z, allow me a small history lesson. You people think Nganya culture started with
16 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE you. Please. We had Manyanga. And some of those Mathrees were absolute monsters.
If memory serves me right, some of the hottest routes were Buruburu 58, Eastleigh 9 and South B 11. There were matatus going around Nairobi with names like LA Lakers and Orlando Magic, booming sound systems, flashy artwork and makangas who were celebrities in their own right.
They were chick magnets. They were mobile nightclubs. They were culture on wheels. And, without knowing it, they became our first media partners.
We printed posters for our basketball tournament and asked the matatu crews if we could place them on the windows near the doors. They charged us nothing. In fact, they were only too happy to be part of the gig.
Today, somebody would probably prepare a 40-page strategy document and call that influencer marketing, community activation and out-of-home youth audience penetration. We called it putting posters in mathrees. The principle, however, was exactly the same: go where your audience is.
For the poster itself, we needed an action shot. Again, there was no creative agency. No lighting crew. No stylist. No art director.
My cousin Nabs was a star basketball player at St Mary’ s, so I asked him to come down to the University of Nairobi basketball court and do some dunks. We found a local photographer. Nabs jumped. The photographer clicked. Boom. Photoshoot done.
We didn’ t have money, but we understood the culture. And perhaps that is one of the first marketing lessons I learnt without knowing I was learning marketing. Money can buy reach. Understanding can create relevance.
Then another door opened. Nabs’ best friend was Charles Cardovilis. Charles introduced us to his father, the late Miki Cardovilis, who gave the 3-on-3 Junior Challenge a lot of airtime on the Capital FM sports show.
There was no elaborate media partnership agreement. No rate card negotiation. No branded content package. This was relationships at work. Somebody saw four university students doing something interesting for Nairobi youth and decided to give the idea oxygen.
Suddenly we had the matatus carrying our posters around Nairobi, Capital FM talking about us, schools talking about us, basketball players talking about us and music driving the whole thing.
Again, today we would have impressive names for all this. Earned media. Influencer marketing. Content marketing. Experiential marketing. Community marketing. Cultural marketing.
We had none of those words. We simply knew where our audience was, what they cared about and who they listened to. And we kept going.
From memory, we selected schools such as St Mary’ s, St Austin’ s, Alliance, Aquinas, Mang’ u and International School of Kenya. Lenana also somehow made the cut.
Now, in the interests of historical transparency, three of the four organizers were Lenana alumni, so I cannot swear before a court of law that Lenana’ s selection was based entirely on basketball merit. Our old school had been a regular at the nationals in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by 1996 our judgement may have been slightly influenced by old-boy patriotism.
Then we called DJ Pinye. Yes, Gen Z. That Pinye. He really has been around that long. Pinye was already part of Nairobi’ s 1990s music culture. We needed him because we understood something else: this could not just be a basketball competition.