Next Level Sports Marketing

Anheuser-Busch’s spending on sports properties will be slightly higher this year as the brewer takes advantage of opportunities in the sports industry hurt by the recession.
“It’s slightly up,” Dan McHugh, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of media, sponsorship and activation, said in an interview. “We’re not talking about dramatic numbers. In this environment … for us to say we’re actually increasing our spend against sports in ’09 is a pretty incredible story.”
Anheuser-Busch, a unit of Anheuser-Busch InBev , historically has been the biggest U.S. corporate sponsor in the sports world, and its combined estimated ad and sponsorship spending last year approached $1 billion.
Anheuser-Busch’s overall marketing budget, excluding what the company spent last summer around the Beijing Olympics, will be slightly off, almost even with what it spent in 2008, said Keith Levy, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of marketing.
“It is a bit of an opportunity to make your dollars go a bit further as you find other big sports sponsorships or other marketers coming out of certain properties or reducing,” he said, adding that beer and sports go hand in hand.
Anheuser-Busch InBev increased its spending on U.S. advertising by 17 percent last year to an estimated $612.5 million due in large part to the Beijing Olympics, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Of that total, almost $350 million was spent on sports-related TV ads, including $53.3 million on the Olympics.
Also last year, the Anheuser-Busch business boosted spending on global sponsorships, mostly sports related, by about 5 percent from the $360 million to $365 million it spent in 2007, according to research firm IEG.
Numerous companies, including General Motors Corp and FedEx Corp , have cut sports-related marketing as the recession has squeezed their budgets.
The beer sector has been more resilient than other industries and its support is critical to the global sports industry because growth is slowing in most other sectors.
On Wednesday, Anheuser-Busch announced it had agreed to extend Bud Light’s sponsorship of Major League Lacrosse for two years. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Everybody’s pretty much trying to weather the storm with the marketplace conditions,” McHugh said.
“There’s a reason we got to approaching a 50 (percent) share brewer and we’re not going to abandon some of the things that have gotten us there,” he added, referring to Anheuser’s U.S. market share. “We’re going to look for new opportunities.”
Over the last two months, Anheuser-Busch has extended its sponsorship deal with AVP, the pro beach volleyball league, and decided to end its sponsorship of the National Hot Rod Association after this season.
In the last 18 months, it also has renewed deals with the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League, and signed a new deal with UFC, a U.S.-based mixed martial arts fighting organization, Levy said.
One way the brewer has reduced costs on sports sponsorships is to back away from exclusive deals, which IEG said can add as much as an additional two-thirds to the cost. The ratio of exclusive sports deals signed by Anheuser-Busch has dropped to 56 percent today, down from 86 percent in 2004, McHugh said.