WTA Appoints Phar Insight

PHAR Insight has been appointed by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), the global governing body for women’s tennis, to undertake an analysis of the value Lead Global Partner (LGP) sponsorship opportunity can deliver to brands.

The LGP partnership provides the opportunity to be recognised as the leading brand associated with women’s tennis in the world, and has been developed by the WTA to reflect the strategic goals that brands are increasingly aiming to achieve through their sponsorships.

To that end, as well as calculating the value delivered from on-court branding at 54 events in 33 countries, PHAR Insight’s work will focus on the range of other benefits, including access to its 2,500 professional players, provided to a brand through the partnership – including the strength of the opportunity’s strategic benefits.  A new algorithm developed by PHAR Insight as part of its collaboration with Mediacom to create an industry-leading set of evaluation tools will be applied to provide an assessment of overall value, reflecting the relative contributions of both the tangible and the intangible benefits.

Steve Tseng, Chief Sales Officer at the WTA, said of the appointment: “We have worked very hard to create a partnership which goes much further and deeper than year-round global media exposure alone, and provides brands with unique access and content to enable them to engage meaningfully and distinctively with consumers.  An analysis just of media value would never capture the extent and depth of the value that a brand can receive from this partnership.  And so we were extremely impressed that the tools which PHAR Insight has developed assess not just all the tangible benefits which is impressive in its own right, but also the strength of the opportunity’s strategic attributes. PHAR Insight’s analysis now enables us to have a much more strategic discussion with brands, by enabling us to demonstrate more comprehensively the value that the LGP opportunity can deliver.”

Alastair Macdonald, Director of PHAR Insight, commented: “It’s easy to get blinded by the sheer scale of the media exposure that the WTA schedule delivers for a brand, but this only tells one part of the story.  A large number of powerful strategic attributes makes the LGP opportunity one of the most interesting currently available in world sport.  Given brands’ increasingly strategic approach to sponsorship, and focus on understanding the value of their investments, it is essential that any analysis reflects the strategic value meaningfully.  Our new analysis tools and proprietary valuation algorithm take these strategic considerations into account, and are showing that the WTA’s LGP opportunity has the potential to deliver some of the strongest returns in the sponsorship industry.”