ING  has mastered the art of winning whilst losing in Formula One sponsorship

The art of activation

ING, the global financial services group, has entered Formula One like no other sponsor before it. Veteran Dutch agent Mick De Haas put the deal together while American Isabelle Conner made sure the activation worked. Despite a lack of success on the track, together they have made quite an impact

In mid-December last year the Renault Formula One team announced the return of its prodigal son, double world champion Fernando Alonso to the team for 2008. Almost before the news was released by Renault, there followed a press statement from the team’s title sponsor ING expressing its delight. Nobody should have been surprised by its speedy response. It simply reflected the proactive way the financial giant has approached its first 12 months in Formula One.

Alonso’s return is important to the Dutch bank. It is aware more than anyone that he is the missing ingredient to its magical formula. If ING can win as well there is nothing it can’t achieve for the US$150 million a year it spends sponsoring the team and activating the deal.

When ING arrived in late 2006, it was Formula One’s largest ever non-tobacco sponsorship deal. After thinking about and rejecting a secondary deal it became the title sponsor of the world champion team, and also bought in trackside branding at 14 races and title sponsorship of two races. Formula One has hardly seen its like since Marlboro burst into the sport in the 1970s.

There were two key individuals involved in making it all happen. Isabelle Conner and Dutch sponsorship agent Mick De Haas. Conner came later but De Haas was involved from the start.

It all started at the Italian Grand Prix in September 2006 when almost unnoticed amidst the media activity surrounding Michael Schumacher’s retirement announcement, five ING marketing executives arrived in the paddock on Saturday morning to view presentations from Ferrari, McLaren Mercedes and Renault. All three teams believed they were pitching for a secondary deal worth between US$10 million and US$20 million. It was a deal they all wanted, although Renault needed it most. The team was losing all three of its major sponsors Telefonica, Mild Seven and I-Mode at the end of the season and had no replacements in sight. For McLaren and Ferrari it would be merely icing on an already rich cake. They wanted the business but it wasn’t make-or-break by any means. In fact both Ferrari’s Jean Todt and McLaren’s Ekrem Sami were more interested in stopping Renault getting the deal than getting it themselves.

Italy was a crucial weekend, masterminded from start to finish by De Haas. And for a business with few secrets the Dutchman kept it totally secret. Not a word leaked out. De Haas had plenty of reasons for keeping it so. Any leaks would start a feeding frenzy of agents and teams and would probably end in ING deferring its decision after it was faced with so many offers from so many people, something that had happened all too frequently in the past.

In fact there was no better man for the job. Despite a low profile in Formula One in recent years, De Haas is a veteran of global sports sponsorship. He began his career in advertising, following in his father’s footsteps. He learned the trade working in various European cities for the Burson-Marsteller agency. However his big break came in 1978 when he joined the West Nally agency in London: “I was invited for a job at West Nally, which at the time was one of the growing agencies that held the rights in soccer and the Olympics, run by Patrick Nally. It was a breeding ground for the original sports marketing people.” As well as De Haas, alumni of West Nally also include the likes of Karen Earl and Michael Payne.

At the time, De Haas was responsible for managing the accounts of sponsors such as Canon and Coca-Cola. He recalls it was an eye-opening experience: “I realised that a lot of these companies were not taking sponsorship very seriously. From a conventional marketing background I was already astonished that these companies were spending months deciding on advertising campaigns, not actually thinking seriously about sponsorship but spending all this money.”

After working on Canon’s behalf, he then went on to join the company itself in 1980, as sponsorship director for the Japanese company’s World Cup soccer programme. “This was my first experience of supplying the sponsorship,” he recalls. “I developed a sponsor policy for the company, looking at a structured programme for soccer and other areas that fitted the particular product group of the company. We developed programmes for different products and countries and it was very interesting to develop an integrated sponsorship campaign but also to activate it and I spent a lot of time working with agencies to make it value for money, which can still be difficult.”

After facilitating the company’s entrance into Formula One with Williams, he left Canon in 1984 to join Guinness as sponsorship director. But Guinness underwent many management changes and virtually withdrew from sponsorship, and in 1986 he left to set up his own agency called MDH Communications and started working with his old client Canon again – until it ended abruptly in 1993 when Williams signed with Rothmans. The way Williams dispatched Canon left a bitter taste and an angry De Haas stepped away from Formula One for 13 years, not even returning to the paddock until Monza 2006.

The roots of De Haas’s relationship with ING can be traced back to over 13 years ago. Then he was contracted by an event called Sail Amsterdam, held every five years, to look after its five main sponsors. It was a job he did in 1995 and again in 2000. “One was Heineken, another was ING,” he recalls. “The chairman of the committee of the event was Hans Verkoren, who later became a board member of ING and developed ING Direct. It was to prove an important contract.

ING had begun seriously considering Formula One during the early months of 2006 when it realised its brand recognition didn’t match its financial performance. Isabelle Conner explains: “The board was looking at the results of the organisation. We are one of the largest financial services organisations in Europe and in the top 15 globally. We have very healthy profits and a number of clients that love us – 60 million around the world in 50 markets. And yet there was a bit of a disconnect between all of that and the awareness in the market of what ING actually did. That was what the board set about to understand: what could be done to rectify that? What could bring the brand more in line with results?”

The ING board quickly decided that sponsorship, specifically sports sponsorship, was the answer and set about a rigorous analysis of as many as 10 different sports over a six-month period. Conner takes up the story: “ING looked at sports like tennis, soccer, golf, track and field, basketball and the Olympics. There was a period of elimination because there were certain sports that were unavailable, like soccer until 2014. There were others that did not reach the demographics that we wanted to go after. Certain sports, like athletics, just didn’t give us the TV coverage.”

De Haas was a vital part of the analysis, as he recalls: “In 2004 I was working on a project for another bank, ABN AMRO, in the Volvo Ocean race. They asked me if I could organise a stopover in Amsterdam, so we spent four months developing that and suddenly ABN changed their minds and said we should do it in Rotterdam. I was very frustrated because we had a ready- made plan. Before the race organisers made the decision I asked them to give me two more weeks because I noticed ING sponsored one of the Australian boats in a small way. So I called Hans Verkoren – it was nice to call someone on the board – and we arranged a meeting with his head of communications Nick Jue. We met in January 2005 and we eventually decided it wasn’t right for ING, but Nick told me they were reorganising and the chairman wanted to look at sponsorship.”

Six months later De Haas’s agency was appointed to research the extent and effectiveness of ING’s sponsorship. What he found surprised him. “They only had experience of marathon sponsorship and to such a degree that people compared marathons to the Olympics. You have to be very careful if you’re brought in as an outsider by the boss to tell them they are wrong.”

De Haas ordered an internal analysis of the company’s marathon programme “to see if it worked”. He adds: “I wanted to find out what ING’s competitors were spending and why and on what. The final question was to ask whether there was a case to have ING do a major sponsorship.”

Under De Haas’s control, a small team from ING was formed to run the sponsorship analysis. De Haas also hired two agencies: ING’s existing brand identity specialists, Interbrand, and, following a four-agency pitch, the Frankfurt-based Schmidt Und Kaiser which has previously run Allianz’s sponsorship.

But ING executives at the time were vehemently anti-motorsport and, with De Haas’s background, were suspicious of where he might lead them. “We had a bit of non-cooperation early on,” De Haas admits. “Some people at ING knew I had a background in motorsport so that was off limits. People said to me ‘we will never do motorsport’ and I never put it on the agenda. But through the process it had to come onto the agenda if they wanted to examine a global sponsorship.”

Despite that the sponsorship team presented its findings to the ING board in June last year. As De Haas describes it: “We did a very thorough investigation about the brand, the value and the deal. I think we proved in the end that a good sponsorship programme would be the answer for them. We

said the best options were international tennis

with the ATP and the other was Formula One. Internally at the time there was a momentum building for Formula One but I still thought it was going to

happen.

“Tennis was a softer option but it’s not very impactful and you need to have at least three years to build the brand. At the time there was a window where we could get the title sponsorship for the Australian Open Grand Slam and two hours before we presented to ING we got a call that somebody had picked it up, so that was that. With tennis we said we would have to have two Grand Slams. I felt the culture in ING was too soft for Formula One although the more I worked there the more I felt they needed something like that.”

De Haas recalls waiting for the verdict outside the boardroom and to his intense surprise, the decision was to investigate Formula One further. He recalls: “I had proposed a deal with a top-three team and estimated with some homework that we would spend E20 million with a team and do some trackside branding at six to eight races and one race title sponsorship. The homework was taking 10 countries where ING is – some developing, some existing – and interview our customers to find out.”

His team also interviewed each of ING’s 200 worldwide directors to gauge their mood. “I think 90 per cent were positive and agreed that ING needed a big project. Some of them disagreed with F1 but they said even if they didn’t like it, they realised they could do something with it. With the customers, we found nobody who said they would walk away from ING if they did Formula One, which was surprising even to me.”

De Haas immediately set his sights on the top three teams, Renault, Ferrari and McLaren. Intriguingly he reveals that there was a fourth option, although realistically it was never on: Prodrive, then scheduled to enter the sport in 2008. “I know David Richards and he couldn’t offer me much at the time, but I gave them the chance because if you are going for a smaller team where ING could dominate the car, it would have been a good one.”

Throughout June, July and August the team researched the possibilities of Formula One sponsorship. It gave De Haas the opportunity to call on some old friends such as McLaren’s marketing supremo, Ekrem Sami, and Flavio Briatore. Needless to say, given his experience with Canon, Williams was not one of the teams he called. He says: “I actually had my first meeting with Flavio at the end of May. I asked for an audience with him and showed him a copy of ING’s annual report and he didn’t know ING. In June and July I went to the top three teams and said to each: ‘This is my client, this is why they possibly want to be in F1, what can you do for e20m’. They all came back with proposals. One was a bit more, one was a bit less, but it was so interesting to go through three marketing teams in a sequence of three weeks.”

De Haas admits that after years away from the frontline of Formula One he was very impressed with the professionalism of all three teams and each one offered something different: “McLaren offered ING a nice deal but they already had Vodafone and it was a black logo on a silver car. Ferrari was more difficult. Because of Phillip Morris they weren’t allowed to put anything on the car. One day before the board meeting in September I got a sticker on the car, but they had done a really great proposal, which in other circumstances I would have said was ideal. They really wanted to make ING their finance and insurance partner for the whole group.

“I was very straight with all of them because I had nothing to offer them, other than an update, and I told them all I was approaching all three of them. Jean Todt said early on, ‘Are you talking to any of the Japanese teams?’ My first meeting at Ferrari was funny. I went with Reiner Miller from Schmidt Und Kaiser and we did the introductions and Jean Todt said ‘What do ING want?’. I said ‘We want an orange car’. And he looked at me and looked again and started to explain why that wasn’t possible and I said ‘Look, Jean, don’t worry’ and then it clicked that I was joking. Giulio Zambaletti came in and we spent an hour-and-a-half with them, very interesting.” De Haas also met with Renault executive Laurence Eckle in Geneva.

Unusually at this point De Haas and the other appointed agencies had been handling the negotiations themselves, without any involvement at all from ING executives. The plan was to use the Italian Grand Prix weekend in September to introduce ING executives to the three teams. De Haas explains: “We were planning to take the chairman, Michel Tilmant, but three weeks to go he cancelled. He said that he liked Formula One but didn’t want to influence the decision by being there. That was very sensible. He sent a board member for ING Direct, one of the bigger divisions, and the CEO from Italy, five people in total.”

Despite distancing himself from the process, ING’s chairman stayed close to the negotiations. De Haas says: “The chairman understood very well. He gave me a very hard time when I gave him an update in August. He took me to pieces, challenging me on everything. Then once I’d convinced him he told me that they needed to get boarding as well as the car and explained that his background was marketing. That was a turning point, because I then knew that he knew what would be good for the brand.”

The Monza weekend proved to be impeccable timing. The world’s press was focused on Schumacher while the Dutch press contingent who would have been most likely to spot a group of ING executives wandering in and out of motorhomes, had eyes only for Spyker’s buyout of Midland. De Haas could go about his business unmolested.

On Saturday morning at Monza, De Haas told each team they had an hour to make their final presentations to the board members, as he recalls: “We started at 10 o’clock in the Renault unit. Flavio came in for the final five minutes. He sits there, takes it all in and then, bang, says exactly the right things. Then we went to McLaren next door, with Ekrem doing his thing and Ron came in and did his Ron stuff. Then to Ferrari where Jean Todt was dealing with all the Schumacher hype. They each had a completely different approach.”

As he left the paddock at Monza he had the most crucial conversation of all: “I just briefly asked Laurence Eckle whether the title sponsorship was available, because I knew Mild Seven was leaving. I said, ‘I don’t think it’s on the cards, but do me an outline of what the title deal would do differently to what you’ve offered already and the price difference’.”

Two weeks later De Haas and the ING agents presented their findings to the main ING board.

De Haas recommended Renault to the board simply because ING’s colours could be on the car. He also presented the title sponsorship package offered. “I remember sitting outside thinking it would take half an hour and it took an hour and a half. At that point you think it’s gone. When the meeting finished they told me it wasn’t a pushover, that there really had been a discussion. They asked if I could get more boarding because they thought that was valuable and then added ‘we’ve decided to do title’.” De Haas’s eyes light up as he recounts the story. As he says: “In an agent’s world that never happens. There is a year and a half of work in it but you can imagine the phone call to Renault. There was a sort of silence on the other end.”

With the deal done it was a time to start thinking about execution and activation. It was no surprise to Mick De Haas given its investment and the detail that went into finalising the deal, that ING assigned one of its top marketing executives to run its Formula One programme. But it was maybe a surprise that they chose a woman to take on the macho male dominated world of Formula One.

American Isabelle Conner got the nod. She was previously head of marketing for ING’s private bank, a very important role, if not the most important divisional marketing job at the bank. Her selection was a good measurement of how important the sponsorship was for ING’s global future.

Conner freely admits that before taking up her new role she knew little, if anything, about Formula One, but, inevitably, she was forced to become a quick learner. She may have had a lot to learn about the sport, but few in the Formula One community are able to match her marketing knowledge and experience.

She’s not a petrolhead, but the way she talks after only a few months in the job, one might have been excused for getting the opposite impression: “It’s incredibly exciting and I personally find it absolutely fascinating and the more I learn about it the more I find it fascinating. Everything I’ve done in the last 20 years has brought me here today.”

Originally from New York, Conner has spent much of her career managing the marketing strategies for several major financial organisations, including Deutsche Bank and Prudential Securities. After becoming Deutsche’s head of international marketing for private banking, she decided to leave New York and move to Europe in 2003 to join ING.

Despite the results on the track thus far, Conner is clearly delighted with the relationship. “It didn’t hurt they were world champions, but the team were just very easy to work with,” she says. “It has just been a pleasure to work with them. They are a group that is open to new ideas, very competent and professional as a group of people.”

Forging a good working relationship with the team early into the deal was a top priority for Conner when she took up her role in charge of the programme in January last year. On the eve of the Malaysian Grand Prix she invited the whole Renault team, including the race drivers and mechanics, to an introductory party. Conner remembers it as an important moment, as she says: “We wanted to do that early on to show we’re in it for the long term. It’s very important if we’re going to see each other every other weekend that we bond as a team and that’s what I feel we’ve done.”

The Renault title deal, however, is only part of the ING investment in the sport. ING has also become one of the biggest trackside sponsors, spending an additional sum thought to be as much as US$20 million in the process. Its banners will appear at no fewer than 14 of the 17 races this season, which has already included the title sponsorship deal at the Australian Grand Prix in March and the Belgian Grand Prix in September. Conner says trackside placements were a natural extension of the Renault deal. “Once we’d decided to go into the sport, we had a couple of choices. The board looked at both, we did our research, analysed it and it makes perfect business sense. This is definitely the group of people we want to reach, so why not let them know that we’re here.”

Buying the exposure was one thing, but ING’s board made a strategic decision to sanction the extra investment to successfully activate the deals. “That’s really where you get the leverage,” says Conner. “That’s where we had the real issue at ING: certain people in certain parts of the world think of ING as an insurance company or a retail bank. That’s the perception, for instance, in Asia, whereas in the US it’s ING Direct – financial planning and retirement services. In the Netherlands, it’s a definite retail bank. We went in with title sponsorship, so we’re very visible. We buy the boards at 14 of the 17 races, which will further add to the visibility. But when somebody watches the ING lion logo on television, what are they thinking? The board allowed us to go out and tell the story beyond what we’ve done with on-car and on-track.”

The central pillar of the activation strategy is a global advertising campaign. Interestingly it is the first global campaign for the ING brand, as Conner reveals: “The firm was decentralised in its approach. Our businesses were promoting their services in local markets, but now we’re aligning and channelling our efforts through a global television and media campaign.”

ING’s central broadcast campaign comprises 30 different global markets with 15 to 40-second spots designed by German advertising agency Kempertrautmann. The intention is to promote the similarities between the Renault F1 team and ING by comparing the driver to the customer, each supported by a group of professionals. “We’re on CNN five times a day in Europe and Asia, we’re sponsoring broadcasts mostly around the race weekend. That’s where we’re focusing our media buying because that’s where it makes the most sense. If an F1 fan is about to watch the race and see the ‘ING’ on-car branding, just before that he sees the commercial that tells him that ING is a global financial institution active in banking, insurance and asset management and that’s the link we’re trying to make. In year one those are the messages: it is truly an awareness campaign.” She adds: “If you look at the markets we’re going after the focus for us is Central and Eastern Europe and Asia. That was another reason we liked the sport, because there are a lot of races happening in Asia now.”

Conner has put together a team of three managers at ING’s London office to coordinate and activate the sponsorship: Jon Tracey dealing with the media, Gabor Dani as head of advertising, marketing and tracking and Mark Maan, taking care of the events and hospitality strand. Conner says her team currently numbers around seven people with some interns. Indirectly, however, far more are involved: “Above and beyond that we’ve asked the six board members to appoint an F1 officer for their line of the business – so the wholesale bank, retail bank, insurance Asia, insurance Americas insurance Europe and private banking each has a dedicated person. We have calls with those officers every other week to talk about everything happening centrally, locally and at the race track.”

For each Grand Prix, ING sets up a project team, assembled from its staff in the area where the race is being held. They are charged with managing the local activation at every event. It is part of a wider strategy to make Formula One an integral company-wide project. “It’s the first time people who have never spoken to each other at ING have come together. For Kuala Lumpur you could have somebody from the real estate business, someone from the wholesale bank and private banking all working towards that common ING goal, which is to get the brand up in Kuala Lumpur. After three years at ING that’s what I’m most proud of.”

ING’s in-depth analysis of how best to promote its brand in the first place has quickly been matched by its diligent approach to tracking how effective the sponsorship is. “We did a zero measurement in 32 markets where we interviewed 500 people in each of those markets – some 15,000 individuals – to understand what the level of awareness was. Are you aware of ING’s business? Are you aware ING is in Formula One? Which team is ING sponsoring? We’re going to do that same survey halfway through the season and again at the end of the year. That’s important, just like the research to get into the sport was very intense. At the end of the race calendar those market-by-market numbers will dictate what year two and three will look like, but right now we’re just too early into it [to predict].”

Conner provides an example of the total commitment to the project when she explains that the whole ING sponsorship team stays at each race venue until the Monday following the race, in order to carry out a full debrief of the weekend’s events. Even in the first three races, the debriefs have averaged five hours each. Conner believes it is all part of the company’s learning experience. “Logistically, it’s a huge thing,” she says. “Once the Grand Prix goes away it doesn’t stop because then we start planning for the following year. I think now it’s best practice.” She is certainly aware that ING has entrusted her with a lot of cash, possibly US$150 million in all, and she is determined to spend it wisely.

It was more research that prompted Conner to focus her efforts on the local activation of the brand in each area. She studied previous examples of financial Formula One sponsors such as Credit Suisse, Allianz and HSBC. “I think we’ve taken what we can from that and are trying to do it in an even bigger and better way.”

For a company like ING, which is active in 15 of the 17 Formula One host countries, local activation makes perfect sense. Conner certainly cannot be accused of not doing her homework on the subject, as she says: “I personally interviewed at least one hundred people in the industry and outside the industry just to understand what makes sports sponsorship successful. The key message that kept coming out was local activation and that’s where I have to say we are succeeding because it’s happening without much prodding.

“What has surprised me is that this has taken on and spread like wildfire throughout the company. People love it internally. What is even more spectacular is what the local businesses are doing. For example in Kuala Lumpur what I heard from everyone outside of ING is, ‘ING, that’s all we are seeing’ because the local business took their existing campaign and for two months switched it to the F1 campaign. So all over downtown Kuala Lumpur you had billboards, signs everywhere, the monorail, the commercial was airing, they branded whole buildings with our car and team. When you parachute into a race city and see that kind of enthusiasm that was completely funded locally, then you see how we’re going to make this sponsorship work.”

Similarly keeping as many of ING’s 117,000 employees informed about the sponsorship is another of Conner’s early priorities. “We have to work out how to use this to build employee pride. How is this going to impact the recruiting we do because the financial services industry is all about talent and we really want to be one of the players with UBS, Credit Suisse, Merill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. It’s

important to make sure we get and keep the

best people.”

Aside from simply raising the profile of the brand for the consumer, Conner is also well aware of the potential benefits to ING of business-to-business relationships through Formula One. “In the Paddock Club it’s the ‘wow’ effect and that is really helping for two different parts of the business. It’s not mass retail, it’s private banking and wholesale clients and we entertain them there. That is working very well. Coming out of Kuala Lumpur and Bahrain we’re very happy with the relationships we’ve formed.”

While Renault’s on-track results may have been disappointing in the opening three races of the year, Conner calls ING’s brand awareness numbers thus far “spectacular”. She adds: “I’m most interested in visibility and these are the hard numbers. What we are finding so far after three races is that we’re the best, most visible brand out there, bar none. In Melbourne we were most visible because interestingly enough on television when you see our cars the logo is highly visible.”

De Haas, meanwhile, has stayed involved with the sponsorship as a strategic consultant, reporting to ING’s new head of communications Frank Koster. “I don’t get involved in the day-to-day stuff, but if Isabelle (Conner), needs advice I am there.” He adds: “Over the last few months I’ve realised that they have to learn and go through it themselves. As long as they don’t do silly things, and they don’t, then this is the learning year and we can sit back in six months and work out what went wrong and right.

“Another part of my work with ING is working on a focused sponsorship policy for other areas of the group. If you look at RBS, they do more than one thing. We mapped out what they were doing: in India ING sponsors hockey, in Holland they sponsor football and they will continue doing that but we are setting some guidelines in terms of how you set the logos and do the contracts. We’ve just started that and we’ll present the first outline to the board in two or three months. F1 doesn’t cover the whole world, like the US. We’re looking at other opportunities.”

For now De Haas is able to sit back and reflect on a job well executed. It has been his return to the forefront of Formula One sponsorship, although he insists it does not mean that will remain the case. “If I take on another project, or another ING, it will not necessarily be in the Formula One business, because that’s what I want to be as a consultant.”

Conner can reflect not on the single podium the team achieved in 2007, but on the brand exposure results. Overall it went straight into the top 10 of sponsor coverage, in eighth place, beating high spending sponsors like Red Bull, which could only manage ninth place. It scored 3.34 per cent of all car coverage at one hour 10 minutes and 36 seconds. This did not include its individual race sponsorship and trackside hoardings. In its own independent analysis Conner commissioned to examine the success of its first year in the sport, Research International surveyed 16,000 people in 32 key markets at the start of the season and again after the final race. They reported a seven per cent increase in perception of the brand, a 25 per cent increase in positive perception and a 29 per cent increase in willingness to do business with ING in the next year. “In 2008 our goal is to fully activate the F1 sponsorship in all ING markets, in order to make use best use of our increased awareness, and drive business into the Group by continuing to promote ING’s products and services,” Conner says. She has big plans for Alonso and his rookie team-mate Nelsinho Piquet and retains her confidence that the team will soon return to the glory days of 2005 and 2006. As she puts it: “We do what we’re good at and they do what they’re good at and I’m confident everyone’s going to come out a winner.”