An Inside View of Tobacco Sports Sponsorship: An Historical Perspective. (Research Paper)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Faced with ever-increasing advertising restrictions, sponsorship of sports has been an important promotional avenue for tobacco companies in North America and around the world. This paper examines the corporate sponsorship objectives and strategies of tobacco companies, based primarily on historical documents from the British-American Tobacco Co., which has operations in over 80 countries. The documents are part of the Guildford Depository located in Guildford, England. It contains over six million pages of corporate documents for the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT) from a 40-year span (early 1950s to mid 1990s). Tobacco company sponsorship practices include developing sponsorship evaluation guidelines, extensive pro-promotion and post-promotion of sponsored events, making full use of the event site for sponsorship identification, ensuring that sponsored events are televised, and using an extensive array of public relations practices to ensure news coverage of a sponsored event. Other sponsor s could benefit from emulating the sponsorship practices of tobacco companies. Keywords: Tobacco sponsorship, sports sponsorship, Guildford documents Introduction In North America and around the world, sponsorship of sporting events has become an extremely important form of marketing communication for tobacco companies. A recent study found that during the period 1995-1999, tobacco companies in the USA conducted 47 sports-related sponsorships involving 1,930 events and $226.8 million in sponsorship funding (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2001). Although they are facing ever-increasing marketing restrictions around the world (including loss of sponsorship opportunities in Canada and in the European Union; National Post, 2002), tobacco companies use sponsorship as a distinct competitive advantage, in order to accomplish a host of communication goals that can complement their overall marketing objectives (Amis, Slack, & Berrett, 1999). Much can be learned about the effective use of sponsorship by studying the tactics and techniques used by tobacco companies. Examining tobacco company marketing plans and sponsorship plans is one way to gain this insight. The 1998 Minnesota settlement requires maintenance of web-sites and depositories containing over 33 million pages of the tobacco industry's corporate documents (Rybak & Phelps, 1998). These documents provide extensive information regarding many facets of the tobacco industry, including advertising and sponsorship strategies. One of the major document depositories, the Guildford Depository located in Guildford, England, contains over six million pages of corporate documents for the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT), a multinational corporation with subsidiaries in over 80 countries around the world, including Imperial Tobacco in Canada and Brown & Williamson Tobacco in the United States. Using documents from the Guildford Depository, this paper provides an inside view of tobacco sports sponsorship. Based on studying the documents, a general framework of the major issues and action of tobacco companies was developed and is presented in Figure 1. The rest of the paper will follow closely this framework. In particular, this paper focuses on the innovative and highly-effective sports sponsorship practices of tobacco companies that have developed out of the restricted marketing environments they face in many countries. Tobacco companies have been forced to develop creative methods for maximizing their sponsorship involvement. This provides some valuable lessons that non-tobacco marketers may wish to emulate, in order to gain maximum advantage from sports sponsorship activities. Benefits of Sponsorship: Goodwill and Beyond Not surprisingly, tobacco company sponsorships are perceived more positively among current smokers than among nonsmokers (Kropp et al., 1999). However, both smokers and non-smokers alike are exposed to tobacco sports sponsorships, so tobacco companies attempt to derive the maximum benefit from these sponsorships. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.040 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".