The Irish Sponsorship Awards played to a packed room at the Doubletree by Hilton last night. In a twist that will not go unnoticed alcohol companies took home half of the awards with Heineken the biggest winners on the night, across a range of sports and arts categories.
Their team won for innovation withy the Heineken Sound Atlas, best use of TV with ‘The Kick’ around their European Rugby sponsorship and best arts sponsorship for the Heineken Tiger Fringe. The latter won the overall prize for sponsorship of the year.
“It was a great team effort and we are thrilled to have scored so well across so many different campaigns,” said Heineken Sponsorship Brand Manager Jo Donnellan.
Bacardi took home three awards for Best Use of Digital and experiential marketing in sponsorship activation at the Electric Picnic and for best entertainment event sponsorship.
The third multiple winner of the night went to the AIB GAA team and their agencies at Rothco and WHPR. The Toughest campaign around the GAA Club Championships is a long term partnership that keeps getting better and has been featured on plenty of occasions on Sport for Business this year. The activation around All Ireland final day when they offered €2,000 for your club to rip up your ticket to the match captured the heart of why clubs are such an important part of the sport.
Others within the Sport for Business family to climb to the stage were BT and Fleishman Hillard who won the best use of PR for the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition of which we are proud to be a part of again in 2015; Bank of Ireland for the Sponsor for a Day promotion in Outdoor with Carat Ireland; WHPR, Cycling Ireland and An Post who took the Grassroots sponsorship award for the An Post Cycle Series; RTÉ with Muller Corner for the best Media sponsorship around the Voice of Ireland and Eircom and Special Olympics Ireland who used all their 29 years of partnership to win a hotly contested award for best Cause marketing ahead of Lifestyle Sports and the Mark Pollock Trust as well as Today FM’s Shave or Dye.
Carlsberg picked up the best use of Radio from our own Rob Hartnett for their soccer promotion to ‘Meet the Fans’ and the Reputations Agency landed the award for best sponsorship team.
This was the third year of the Sponsorship Awards and they really have gone from strength to strength. Wherever there are winners there will be losers but the night was supported strongly by companies like AIG, Boylesports, Spar, the Irish Greyhound Board, Etihad Airways and Liberty Insurance all of whom will be back in contention next year.
A final hat tip of the night must go to MC Dermot Whelan who rode in to the room and up onto the stage aboard a Dublin City Bike, sponsored of course by Coke Zero and JC Decaux. It was the kind of idea that most would have immediately thrown out as being too likely to end in embarrassment and pain. Fair play to him that he carried it off not only at the start but also in delivering the ‘Tweet of the night’ prizes to ourselves, journalist Joe Donnelly and Padraig Staunton. To find out why you’ll have to check out our twitter feed which from next week will be displaying on the home page of the site.
The Head of Sports Sponsorship for YouTube will deliver the keynote address at our one day conference on Digital Sport on November 27th. A limited number of tickets are still available. Click for details.
