tennis tournaments but no banking group has supported tennis with
the enthusiasm of BNP Paribas. The bank’s head of communications,
Antoine Sire, talks to Douglas Blakey about its hugely successful
commitment to the sport, from grass roots level all the way to the
Davis Cup.
France’s largest banking group, BNP Paribas (BNPP), is to serve up
its first-ever worldwide advertising campaign, based around its
longstanding sponsorship of tennis, as it looks to emphasise its
global credentials. The ultimate aim of the push is to catch up
with other global banking brands such as HSBC that are better known
worldwide than BNPP.
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A series of ads, created with the bank’s French media agency,
Publicis Conseil, feature fans invading a tennis court during a
tournament, picking up racquets and starting to play. The campaign,
which will run into next year, echoes similar marketing initiatives
by international rivals such as ING and Santander, which both
launched their first ever global ad campaigns in March last
year.
“A few years ago, we did not have a global branding policy but now
we are putting the business of the bank in parallel with our
sponsorship,” said BNPP’s head of communications, Antoine Sire.
“When we started sponsoring tennis 35 years ago we were a local
bank – mainly a French bank. Now we are very active in retail
banking in Italy, in Turkey and the US; in fact we have at least 15
countries where we are very active in retail banking.”
The ads will run throughout 2008 on global news networks including
CNN and BBC World, sports cable and satellite channels such as
Eurosport, and national networks timed to coincide with major
tennis tournaments.
“It depends on the measurement criteria, but by any measure we are
now one of the top five to 15 global banks with more than 60
percent of our employees based outside France. We are a very
profitable bank and one of the three or four global banks that were
best placed to avoid the worst of the subprime crisis, with
relatively low writedowns.”
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By GlobalDataBNPP’s tennis support now reads like a roll-call of honour of the
sport’s major events. In 2002, its sponsorship was raised to a new
level when it became the title sponsor of the Davis Cup, the
prestigious international tennis competition. Its support for major
tournaments on the men’s ATP tour includes events such as the
French Open, Rome Open and Monte Carlo Masters, and is on a
different scale to rivals such as Barclays and Santander, for whom
tennis is just one of a number of sports allocated marketing
spend.
“Thanks to our tennis involvement we are already well known, and
even if people do not really know us well, they have our name
somewhere at the back of their mind. Tennis is good for us and
gives excellent visibility to our brand. Now it is time to increase
our visibility with a commercial that says ‘you have probably heard
of us but we are not only a tennis backdrop, we are a fast-growing
bank which is gaining a lot of market share and probably present in
your market’.”
The ad campaign will cost around €10 million ($15.4 million) in
addition to the €25 million the bank spends annually on its various
tennis initiatives. “To be the number one sponsor of tennis, €25
million is extremely good value for money. In Formula 1 (F1)
racing, for example, this amount of money would give us maybe one
fifth of a piece of a F1 car. Tennis, by contrast, is affordable,
[allows us] to be the sport’s biggest sponsor and gives us a good
balance between affordability and visibility.”
Sire adds: “My favourite sport is motor racing but if you get into
F1 sponsorship, you need to spend, say, €40 million and then
another €40 million on top for advertising or people will not
realise you are involved. BNPP is a very lean company and it is
very difficult to convince our top executives to spend major money
so you need a really good case.”
A fight for recognition
While soccer is the most popular sport in France, Sire does not see
a business case to divert marketing spend to the sport. “If you get
into soccer, you have a fight for recognition with a lot of other
sponsors. F1 is glamorous but you do not always see the sponsor’s
brand on the car. In the Davis Cup and French Open, the BNPP
backdrop will have two billion views.”
Sire takes pride in two recent independent surveys in which
the bank’s marketing strategy in general and the BNPP brand in
particular performed strongly. “Of course we measure the success of
our sponsorship internally but an independent study in France given
coverage by the French newspapers reported that the BNPP brand had
the strongest recognition by the public in terms of any sports
sponsorship at 33 percent. No sponsor, be it beverage companies,
mobile phone operators or other banks had as high a recognition
level.
“While cycling is very popular in France, we beat all of cycling’s
sponsors in terms of recognition. Our tennis sponsorship will give
us a presence all around the world so when Thailand play Japan in
the Davis Cup, for example, we are there.”
He was also keen to flag up the results of Brand Finance’s 2007
report The Brand Finance Banking 500, a ranking
of bank brand values by the consultancy in which BNPP ranked number
six, up from number eight in the last such survey (see table
left). “We are very well placed in this survey, well ahead of
ING and very close to Santander, which both spend a lot on
marketing. Given the relatively low amount we have spent to date on
advertising, I am sure our support for tennis has played a major
role in our current brand valuation.”
BNPP also sponsors wheelchair tennis, is the largest sponsor of the
sport at youth and club level and supports 500 minor tournaments
around the world. Its support for the game culminated in BNPP’s
selection in 2006 as the first recipient of the Joseph Cullman
Award from the International Tennis Hall of Fame – recognition of
the significant contribution it has made to the game of tennis and
the help it has given to develop the sport around the world.
“The sport considers us to be very loyal and we are more a part of
the landscape than any sponsor in any sport except perhaps brands
such as Nike and Adidas. We are probably one of the very few
non-sport sponsors with such a huge level of acceptance in the
sport. There are many places around the world where we provide
backdrops to local clubs because amateur players are proud to play
in front of the same BNPP backdrop as the players in the Davis
Cup.”
The bank’s love for the sport and its focus on teenagers and young
adults also involved an innovative tie-up in 2006 with Sony’s
PlayStation division with the creation of the Roland Garros Virtual
Tour, the first virtual tennis tournament, named after the famous
tennis stadium where the French Open is held. According to Sire,
the bank’s dedicated tennis microsite at http://www.tennis.bnpparibas.com/
attracted 185,000 viewers during
2007 and 350,000 page views.
