Partner your way to Growth

Partnership and collaboration were the key themes in the Marketing Week address by Katrina Sedgwick, director and CEO of the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival.

Katrina discussed how business partnerships, corporate sponsorship are playing an increasingly important role in arts delivery, and how presenting a festival requires a critical mass of resources and collaboration, including financial support, between cultural partners, sponsors, the media and a host of stakeholders.

Many of the principles touched on regarding how ideas and mutually beneficial solutions can grow through partnerships can be applied to any sector.

Partnerships with a focus on selecting organisations likely to engage most readily with your own, and share ideas that will help both organisations consider new ways of thinking and arriving at solutions. Katrina said that for the BAFF, this includes seeking partnerships with arts organisation seeking to build audiences collaboratively rather than in competition. She said that loyalty often develops through positive experiences in one arts environment encourages audiences to try associated arts experiences.

Successful partnerships involve joining the right brand with the right medium.

Consumers have increasing control over their media experiences, with the proliferation of media sources and an increasing insistence of being able to access media when and wherever they want. So, when reaching audience members who are likely to act on your message, the value of media entities should not be reduced to their distribution size. This includes thinking about coverage beyond traditional media platforms, such as social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, and also offline forms of reaching niche audiences who may not have embraced social technology.

Consumers will ignore advertising, marketing and publicity efforts that do not speak directly to them. Engaging audience members and seeking their ideas will become an increasingly important to organisations’ success.