The Olympic journey - Sally Hancock discusses Lloyds TSB & Bank of Scotland sponsorship of London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

“We’ve got 75% of all schools in Scotland participating which is remarkable considering that this is only the third year,” states Hancock proudly, as she sees over five years of work begin to come to fruition.

Hancock came on board to oversee the bank’s sponsorship from agency Red Mandarin in 2007, where she was CEO, after the roster agency oversaw Lloyd TSB’s rationale in becoming a partner and help taking its board through the LOCOG tender. Then, while helping search for the right person to lead the marketing of the partnership, Hancock decided to take the challenge on herself, feeling that she had been so heavily involved in organising the deal, that she may as well see it through to its conclusion.

“I thought, maybe this was the time for me to go and do something that I hadn’t done before. Working in strategy consulting in any world, be it brand or sponsorship or marketing, you tend to work across a number of clients and this was an opportunity to go to work completely vertically end-to-end through a programme,” she explains.

One of the first decisions made by the brand was to develop three objectives, which have remained in place over the five year journey, and which, insists Hancock, were all treated with equal importance. These were in the form of questions to answer; What would the sponsorship do for the brand? What would it for employee motivation and pride and what would it do to drive incremental business?

She says that all three have reported good results, and having acquired HBOS during that time and seeing the company grow to around 100,000 employees, the sponsorship has also been used internally to bring together a large staff working across what was seen as two disparate brands.

“I’m really proud of the work opportunities that have been presented for the business bank with the Games and how we managed to help so many companies with the tender process for Games related contracts. We had to create them from nothing – so those three objectives are the same now as they were then,” she added of the work the bank has done through the sponsorship, adding that she became ‘mildly obsessed’ with ensuring that local communities were at the heart of resulting activity from the beginning.

Leading that work has been the sponsorship of 1000 young athletes over the last four years, which Lloyds TSB has partially financed, and of which around 180 have been picked for Team GB, Hancock reveals.

“We’re really proud of that and that will be part of our legacy going forward that they will be picked for future competitions including future Olympics and Glasgow 2014.”

Of the total 8,000 Torch bearers, Lloyds TSB has 1,350 placements, the same number as other Torch relay sponsors Coca-Cola and Samsung. The expectation that all of these bearers would be local heroes however had caused controversy with US music star Will.i.am involved in the relay at one stage, alongside a Russian editor invited by Coca-Cola.

“I have been very clear all the way through this process that whatever the bank did had to be very credible and authentic and appropriate for a bank to do,” replied Hancock when asked about her views on this. “I was very clear from the go that we wouldn’t be distributing torch bearer places to people within the organisation by virtue of their status. That was fully understood and completely accepted. Equally I wanted all of our torch bearers to be relevant and credible and in-line with LOCOG’s ambition for there to be people who have made a difference within their community.”

She continues: “The vast majority of our torch bearers have come through a nomination process. They have been people who have done good within their community. In addition we have 200 people who are running from within the bank, but they are that is due to the difference that they have made within their communities. It’s nothing to do with their day job. This is what they do in their own time as volunteers, or working with the Samaritans or St John’s Ambulance, whatever it is that they have done, and that is through the Making a Difference scheme which has been in existence within the bank for a few years. What we did this year was to reward those people in addition to a small fund that they get for their chosen charity, with a Torch bearer place. The only other torch bearers that we have as a small number of sports people who we have had as ambassadors for a few years.”

Following the acquisition of HBOS, Lloyds TSB was able to agree with LOCOG that its sponsorship activity run in Scotland through Bank of Scotland and inEngland and Wales under Lloyds TSB.

Asked whether the turmoil within the financial climate and the acquisition of HBOS ever affected the sponsorship strategy itself, Hancock says that she expected that it would: “I genuinely thought at some point I’d get a call that said we’d need to scale it back, we need to do less, we need to consider how we might get out of the contract but that never happened.”

As to why the budget was never altered, she explains that it was due to initial

agreements to phase the activation budget over the five years, which she says meant they the deal was ‘a fraction’ to the total price paid for the rights. Cost was also saved through a cull of unconnected sponsorships, alongside other revenue being diverted into the games, such as the hospitality budget for the business banking arm of the bank being diverted through the games too.

“In hindsight, what I look back on as being a very good decision way back in the early part of 2007 was that we agreed then to acquire additional assets to our core set of rights as a partner. We decided to become a partner with the Olympic Torch relay and the Paralympic Torch relay, with the Paralympics and we bundled that into the same agreement. I never once had to go back to the board and ask for more money as a result to do more.”

The Games organiser LOCOG has come in for criticism for its tight management of the brand sponsorship for the Olympics, with ambush marketing prevention very much front and centre of its policy. Having been the first sponsor on board the 2012 Olympics, Lloyds TSB was able to test the waters to see what worked.

“We did take the pain for the rest of the partners following us with working out how some of these assets might be used. One of the things we did early on was to push for the opportunity to use the Olympic Logo in their true colours within the 2012 logo, and we used that for quite a while. We thought that was quite an important asset to use as part of our brand rights. We faced a couple of challenges about how to use that marquee digitally and we worked with LOCOG to help them and us find a solution to that. Again, we wouldn’t have known then what we know now about how much we’d have to use these assets digitally and the extent to which they are used across social media and Facebook, the whole world exploded after we signed the contract.”

As to how restrictive the guidelines are for non advertisers, most notably small business people, Hancock believes that a pragmatic view should be taken of each case.

“When we were out on the relay last week we arrived at a place where someone was having a hog roast and they called it the Olympig. Do we care about that? Do I care about that? I genuinely don’t care. Really, that is about having fun and celebrating. It is all within a certain degree of reason and good humour. Were 300 people to show up wearing Barclays football shirts and sit in a cluster within the stadium then year, I’d pretty much want that seen to but are we going to be concerned about one bloke walking in with a football shirt that says Barclays on it – of course not. That doesn’t make sense. We should be confident enough in our own activity to worry about those things and I am confident enough.”

Finally, as athletes are in preparation for the Games, Hancock says that the bulk of marketing activity has now run, with not much else to roll out other than some above-the-line activity highlighting the bank’s involvement in the games and more customer ticket giveaways.

It’s been a long process for Lloyds TSB, HBOS and Hancock, but now the starter’s gun is primed for the launch of the London 2012 Games.

Hear what Hancock has to say about the significance of the Olympic Torch procession as a marketing tool for sponsors of the Olympic Games.

Below are some adverts and videos of Olympic and Paralympic Activity undertaken by Lloyds TSB and Bank of Scotland as partners of the Games.