TEDx expands partnership platform, new partners use festival of ideas for content
Dezarnaulds: “TEDxSydney sponsorship model is evolving well beyond cash investments”
TEDxSydney, one of the world’s most successful iterations of the famed festival of ideas, has seen major transformation in the way sponsors are engaging with the event, with many now creating experiences that extend well beyond the one-day conference.
Having previously taken on sponsors to help underwrite TEDxSydney, which began its life at Sydney’s Carriageworks seven years ago before moving to the Opera House, organisers are now aiming for a partnership model that allows supporters to tap into the TEDxSydney audience.
Head of partnerships, Kate Dezarnaulds, said there has been a real shift in the way that sponsoring TEDxSydney was seen both internally and by the organisations seeking to align their brands with the festival.
At the same time she sees the development of the partnership model as an example of the future of how sponsorship will evolve.
“TedxSydney has been the beneficiary of an extraordinarily hot master brand in the TED master brand and our event in Sydney was just incredibly well-placed early on in the development of theTEDxSydney program to become one of the leading events in the world,” Dezarnaulds said.
“Each year the level of partnership interest has increased. It’s well beyond cash investments. We have aligned with brands who have a commitment to big Australian ideas.”
Dezarnaulds said the growing trend is for partners to develop content programs that extended beyond the direct involvement with the event, but to also tap into attendees as a resource in their own right.
“I think one of the key trends we have seen this year is that everything is content first. So when we are talking to partners we are thinking about how we can facilitate the experiences at the event but really through the lens of the content that we are going to be able to create for them to be seen far and wide after the event and this is quite different.
“Two or three years ago it was really about creating really exciting and stimulating brand activations to be able to see the attendees of TEDx Sydney as thought leaders and taste makers and they would do the word-of-mouth referral. Now partners are getting very savvy about their owned content and how that content can do the communicating for them.”
She said that TEDxSydney was not for every company and that businesses that became involved needed to have a very particular attitude.
“Partners are very brave and confident in their own position,” she said.
While brands such as St George and The Univserity of Sydney have been slowly learning how to leverage their links with TEDx, one of the latest brands to align with the festival is property giant JLL.
Anna Town says JLL tapping into TEDxSydney for the first time
Anna Town, national director, strategic sales – corporate solutions, for JLL, said this year is the first time JLL has joined TEDx and the company plans to use the festival to talk to new audiences, connecting with a more entrepreneurial and “bleeding edge” creative community.
“Clearly TEDxSydney gives us that new audience reach,” Town said.
“We think it will help us get our brand outside our traditional market segments but also we are really excited to be able to leverage the audience that attends TEDx by asking their opinion on the future.
“For us it’s quite specifically about the future of work, the future of the built environment and the future of city landscapes.”
JLL will apply what it learns to its own planning models for the future, utilising the creative thinking and spirit that is unique to the curated audience that TEDxSydney attracts.
“We will then be able to have a viewpoint for our clients around where we think the industry is going and how the industry should respond to some of these future thoughts about the way we are going to work and the way we are going to live in urban environments.”
This year’s TEDxSydney will be held at the Sydney Opera House on May 25.
Simon Canning
Don’t kid yourselves TED X. Sponsors are going to want to have a say in what’s presented. They’ll say the won’t. but they will. They won’t be able to help themselves. And there goes the whole concept of an open platform of fresh ideas.
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TEDx is pretty useless as far as the calibre of audience for sponsors.
The audience is filtered, hand-picked by the organisers on the basis that they comply with the predictable inner-city Lefty groupthink.
There’s no possibility of diversity of thought, politics, demographics, psychographics.
If the audience was like normal audiences – self selecting – it would be appealing to sponsors. It would provide that randomness and diversity that ultimately defines an event – not the event defining its audience. But a bunch of under-employed (it’s on a weekday after all), angry activist wannabes just doesn’t deliver for sponsors.
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