Alan Yentob’s excellent documentary on the work of Oliver Sacks, reminded me to share one of the insights that I picked up at a WARC conference I attended a few weeks ago on Sponsorship Marketing. The event chaired by a good friend of citizensound, Mark Palmer, brought together some excellent speakers including Sally Cowdry, Marketing Director of O2 and Max Bonpain, Head of Brand Management at Samsung UK.

One of the speakers at the event was Peter Walshe from Millward Brown who talked about the PARTNERZ programme that they had been developing with fellow WPP agencies, including Mindshare, Mediacom and Mediaedge:CIA. The work aimed to match brands with the myriad of sponsorship opportunities available to them.

One of the key bits of their research examined a range of key ‘cultural’ activities and the level of fit with consumers. They asked consumers all over the world ‘what activity do you LOVE?” Peter asked the audience what we thought would come out top. Most people banked on sport, but a small number of us shouted out music, and guess what we were right…

Music 36%
Film 28%
TV and Entertainment 17%
Sport 15%
Gaming 13%
Good Causes 11%
Arts 9%

Source: Millwood Brown/WPP

So if your were under any illusion that Film, TV, Sport, the Arts or even Gaming were more important to human beings than Music, forget it, you don’t have to imagine any longer!