A Little Background...

For those of you that are new readers to our blog (…and that should include just about everybody… given that we just launched this a couple weeks ago…), we want to welcome you.

For logical reasons, most submissions that we're going to post will deal directly with Sponsorship issues; however, by way of background, for those of you that don’t know much about me or our company – sponsorship is only ONE of the things that we "tackle" here at Seaver Marketing Group.

Our "roots" are in the sports industry (…sports sponsorship and sports promotions to be precise), and we drew on these roots some fifteen years ago in launching our annual conference & trade show, The National Sports Forum.

The business of sports – for those of you that may not be sports fans out there … is huge – in fact, sports is now the nation’s fifth largest industry!

And our event, the NSF, gathers the top team marketing, sponsorship, sales, advertising and fan entertainment executives together each winter, (…usually the week leading into the NFL's Super Bowl).

Each year we draw together about 600-700 executives from across the industry -- the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, NHL, Major League Soccer, the Minor Leagues, Auto Racing, Colleges, Horse Racing … you'll even find a handful of Sports Commissions there with us each year in attendance.

To this nucleus, we're joined by corporate sponsors, sponsorship agencies, event management firms … and a Trade Show hall that’s been (thank you!) sold out for years now.

And as you might imagine when you get a conference hall full of sports business executives together -- sponsorship is one of the PRIMARY topics we address each year.

I tell you all this so that you won't be surprised when you pick up a bit of a "sports theme" to many of my entries here. Sports currently accounts for about 65% of ALL sponsorship dollars spent each year – so it's the 3,000 pound gorilla out there in the sponsorship world.

As for our conference, the Sports Forum isn't open to the general public; however, should any of you be curious to learn more about the NSF—please feel free to take a tour through our website: www.sports-forum.com.

Again, thanks for joining us – we're delighted you found us! Here's looking forward to "talking sponsorship" with you (…even if there's a little bit of a sports flavor mixed in!)