Kia dips into kitty for high-flying bombers

Kia and the Essendon Football Club yesterday jointly announced sponsorship to run for the next five years.

"It gives me great pleasure today to announce that Kia Motors Australia are going to be the club's new co-major partner for the next five years ," said Essendon Chairman, David Evans. "We believe the exciting landmark five-year deal between Essendon Football Club and Kia Motors Australia to be the largest co-major partnership in AFL history — and one of the largest individual sponsorships in Australian sport."

Essendon is one of the oldest clubs in the AFL competition, dating back to the 1870s, when it joined the erstwhile Victorian Football Association. In 2011, the club, known as the Bombers, finished 8th on the ladder, but toppled 2011 premiership team Geelong during round 15.

Assistant Senior Coach Mark 'Bomber' Thompson (pictured with some of his charges and the Kia Optima) is hoping for a top six berth in 2012 — thanks in part to the depth of talent and, equally, the average height of the team's players, around 188cm tall.  That sort of advantage will stand the team in good stead, in the ruck or taking marks.

Negotiations between the club and the vehicle importer began as long ago as July, around the time of the Australian International Motor Show, and, under the terms of the agreement, the Kia logo will appear on the front or the rear of each player's guernsey for alternating rounds of the home and away season. Neither Kia nor Essendon would reveal the worth of the deal.

"We believe it ranks up there with the largest sporting [sponsorship] deals in the country," Kia COO Tony Barlow was content to tell motoring.com.au, "We're not going to actually specify a number, but we believe it's a substantial deal — and up there with the best."

Asked what had led Kia to settle on Essendon, Barlow offered the AFL's national competition status and Essendon's high profile within the competition as major considerations.

"The AFL has a large national reach and we've done a lot of homework on that obviously — it is the sport that reaches so far into the nation. We believe the consistency of that right across the year, in addition to other promotions we run will stand us in very good stead."

The Essendon deal has been arranged through Kia Motors Australia, not its parent company, which sponsors the Australian Open grand slam for a global audience. Does that mean Kia Australia would extend its promotional exposure during the winter months by locking into a deal with an NRL team?

"This is our first one and we needed to get into that type of sponsorship, for the reasons that we talked about before — broadening our reach into the market," Barlow replied. "I don't close off that we'd stop at one, but we just have to assess the opportunities. This sponsorship is a very unique opportunity for us, with one of the iconic sporting clubs in Australia — and really it made sense every way we turned.

"We're very discerning about how we proceed with these things and we'll look — in future — but at the moment the focus is on Essendon and getting the runs on the board."

Skoda's recently announced Greater Western Sydney sponsorship deal offers the VW-owned brand both Sydney-related and national synergies, prompting the question: would Kia have done better sponsoring a team based in one of the non-traditional states in the ALF comp?

"We couldn't find any better sponsorship than the Essendon Football Club; after we'd done some due diligence and assessed other propositions over time, this is just tremendous for us."

With Kia's headquarters located in Sydney, are there any Essendon followers in the Kia Australia management team?

"No," replied Barlow with a laugh, "[but] we run regional offices all around Australia, we have a dealer network all around Australia; our head office is in Sydney, but we have a regional office down here as well. It wasn't a decision driven by people's favourite team, it was a pragmatic business decision and we believe that the sponsorship foundations are what we need to look at when we make those calls."

What brought Kia and Essendon together? Barlow, at this point, handed over the question to Steve Watt, Kia Australia's Marketing Manager.

"In Christchurch at our national dealer conference last year — before Tony joined the company — we announced that we were going to find a local sponsor of opportunity to supplement our AO [Australian Open], because AO's tremendous, but it lasts 16 days in the middle of summer and then basically, as soon as that ends, you have a long vacation outside the sponsorship market until the following January."

According to Watt, after the announcement was made that the importer was looking for a sporting club as a sponsored partner, Gary Holmes from the dealership in Mildura happened to meet Xavier Campbell, Essendon Football Club's Head of Commercial Partnerships at a breakfast. Holmes suggested to Campbell he contact Kia about a sponsorship tie-in.

"We needed something, so we then set some really strict criteria for what we wanted as a sponsorship [deal]..." Watt continued, saying that the club chosen "needed to be a foundation club, needed to have a higher level of participation from its members, it needed to have a high membership base, needed to be corporately aligned with our ideals..."

"Having set those parameters down, there are not many clubs that fit that [profile].

Watt and his fellow Kia execs were clearly impressed by the Essendon leadership group from their very first meeting, with the Kia marketing manager describing his Essendon counterparts as "corporately savvy" and the whole organisation as "well run".

It seemed that Kia did meet with other sporting organisations, but none impressed the car company officials as much as Essendon. Watt says that the company wasn't "getting that corporate sense" from other clubs and codes.

"[Essendon] were talking about selling cars and dealers; you don't often see a sporting club using those words. They normally talk about premierships and flags..."