According to Wikipedia, a sponsorship is “something is to support an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services.” Of course, a sponsorship…a sponsorship typically benefits both the recipient (by providing material benefits) as well as the sponsor (as a marketing tool that enhances the sponsor’s public image and provides access to a wider audience).” Sponsorship is a form of advertising, which can be broadly described as “paid, one-way communication through a medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled.”

Flipping through the December Advertising Annual 2004 I couldn’t help but be reminded that there is a large gray area between a strict sponsorship and an advertisement.

Here is what I mean: sponsorship is really a notification that something was paid for by a corporation, but there is always a certain degree of affinity between the corporate brand and the product / event it is sponsoring.  Sponsorship is more about brand than sales.

Premier advertisements are art. In many ways, top-line advertisements are simply sponsored art. Take for example the following ad for Hot Wheels:

The only thing that is sold in the ad is brand, nothing else, and that is why there is so much room for art.

With a continued democratization of art and production online, one of the great potentials that will open up will involve increased opportunities for corporations to promote their brands through long-tail artistic productions.

The challenge will involve aggregating and segmenting these productions so that a marketer would not have to approach these opportunities in a one-off fashion (which would just be logistically impossible).