Chevron, ConAgra Foods, Dodge, Nokia, Panasonic and National City Join the Growing Roster of Top Fortune 1000 Companies to Adopt Sponsor Direct Technology to Manage Sponsorship Business

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2005 - Sponsor Direct®, the leading provider of technology solutions for the sponsorship, sports business and event marketing industries, is ushering major corporations into a streamlined and innovative system to help them manage their sponsorship business. Chevron, ConAgra Foods, Dodge, Nokia, Panasonic and National City are the most recent blue-chip companies to join Bank of America, Eli Lilly, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Nestlé Waters North America and TJ Maxx/Marshalls, who have been using SponsorPort® to manage their sponsorship information.

The recent trend in the sponsorship industry is to move away from paper-based management and look to electronic solutions. Mark Rockefeller, founder and CEO of Sponsor Direct, says, "We believe SponsorPort is rapidly becoming an essential tool for any organization that looks to sponsorship and event marketing as an increasingly important component of its marketing mix. It is inevitable that corporate sponsors and their agencies will continue to switch to the electronic management of proposals and sponsorship investments, and we intend to continue to position ourselves as the leader in this space."

"After thoroughly analyzing all vendors in this space, and even considering building one in-house, it became clear that Sponsor Direct provided the most comprehensive sponsorship solution," says Pablo Carreno, Senior Sourcing Manager at Nokia. "We were looking for an online global solution to meet both our short-term and long-term needs and were very impressed with Sponsor Direct's capability to not only impact the process of managing our sponsorship proposals but to also help us manage our current sponsorship initiatives and ROI development."

SponsorPort is a Web-based application developed specifically for companies involved with or moving into sponsorship. Once deployed, SponsorPort allows companies and their agencies to receive, screen, manage, and source sponsorship opportunities electronically. This creates significant advantages, from greater internal efficiency and reduced costs to superior tracking and management capabilities.

"The current process of receiving and responding to the endless volume of sponsorship solicitations is antiquated and outdated, leading to significant internal inefficiencies and headaches and an inability to capture real potential value from these opportunities," says Dockery Clark, who recently joined Sponsor Direct's Board of Advisors. "SponsorPort makes it possible for corporate sponsors and their agencies to easily screen proposals, quickly identify relevant opportunities, and respond accordingly."

No other company combines Sponsor Direct's experience in state-of-the-art Web-based technology development with their in-depth understanding of the sponsorship process. SponsorPort introduces a single, organized channel for the corporate sponsor to receive proposals and to selectively communicate its guidelines and objectives to prospective sponsees. Once a proposal is submitted using the SponsorPort application, companies are guaranteed to consistently capture the information they need to properly evaluate a new sponsorship opportunity, and proposals will automatically be routed to the appropriate decision maker. Furthermore, with SponsorPort the internal collaboration, communication, and archiving of relevant proposals becomes effortless.

"The fundamental premise behind the introduction of SponsorPort," says Ken Brenner, president of Sponsor Direct, "is to give the sponsor more control over the entire sponsorship process. SponsorPort makes it extremely easy and cost effective for a company and its agency to review and manage large volumes of unsolicited proposals, and offers a powerful low-cost resource for a company to easily and effectively source new opportunities of interest."

Jodie Adolfson, Senior Presence Marketing Manager for Nestlé Waters North America, said, "As the largest water company in North America with several national and international brands including Poland Spring and Deer Park, we are constantly flooded with sponsorship proposals, product placement and product donation requests. SponsorPort has automated the proposal submission and screening process and has allowed us to dramatically improve the communication of sponsorship information throughout our marketing department and with our promotions agency. What surprised us most is that SponsorPort has been embraced almost immediately by everyone, both internally and externally, from day one."

The key to SponsorPort's superior design is its flexibility and scalability, both in terms of adding new users and upgrading functionality. This approach allows SponsorPort to evolve over time without becoming cost prohibitive. Further differentiating Sponsor Direct from its competitors is its approach to developing software that impacts and enhances the entire sponsorship life cycle.

To complement its existing proposal management application, Sponsor Direct will be rolling out a suite of Portfolio Management Tools by mid-year. SponsorPort Portfolio Manager will allow a company to centralize its sponsorship portfolio into a single database which will allow companies to monitor the execution, supervision, measurement and ROI analysis of its sponsorship efforts.

"Because SponsorPort saves us both time and dollars, it is a sponsorship director's best friend," says Melissa Perri, associate presence marketing manager for Nestlé Waters.

Founded in 2000, Sponsor Direct is an Application Service Provider focused on developing Web-based tools for the sponsorship, sports business and event marketing industry. It is rapidly becoming the leading developer of Web-based software applications to help companies electronically manage all sponsorship, media, product-placement, and community-related requests and information.

Sponsor Direct maintains its headquarters in Tarrytown, New York, with a sales office located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City

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