I’ll tell you what happened in my career before. Maybe you’ve been there, too.

There’s a sponsorship, sometimes a fairly high-profile sponsorship, and I have gotten asked to write it about it in an ad or email…but, there wasn’t really a strategy. 

That is not the way to get the best ROI, the most juice for the squeeze.

Sponsorships truly succeed when they tie into the value proposition of the brand. So this lesson in a recent podcast guest application really grabbed my attention – “Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the ‘logo slap’ sponsorship”

To hear the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Rebecca Biestman, Chief Marketing Officer, Guild [https://guild.com/].

Guild raised $175 million in a Series F funding round in 2022, at a $4.4 billion valuation. Wellington Management led the financing, and Oprah Winfrey participated in the round, along with other backers. 

Biestman manages a team of 70 in the marketing department.

Lessons from the things she made

• Maximize brand awareness by going beyond the “logo slap” sponsorship
• Embrace new tech that helps drive your brand strategy
• To build a brand that lasts, consider rebranding a team sport 
• Be prepared to step up when the unexpected happens
• The best candidate for a role isn’t always the one who has done it before
• Making a difference and building something great aren’t mutually exclusive

Discussed in this episode

Join us for MEC050: Let AI Agents Market For You [https://join.meclabsai.com/ai-agents] on Tuesday, May 13th at 2 pm EDT

Creative Marketing: Does it all make sense? (Podcast Episode #19) [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/creative]

Marketing at 200 MPH: Sports sponsorship lessons from F1 & finance (podcast episode #125) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/sports]

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

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Daniel Burstein Podcaster

Daniel Burstein is the Senior Director of Content and Marketing at MarketingSherpa and the host of the ‘How I Made It In Marketing’ podcast, where he talks to marketing leaders about the lessons learned through their careers.

He also reports on successful marketing campaigns and industry data in MarketingSherpa articles, and helps facilitate the AI Guild from MarketingSherpa's parent organization, MECLABS Institute.

Daniel has 23 years of experience in copywriting, content writing, interviewing, speaking, business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.