Ketchup

I just got back from the nomination announcement party for the Music Week Awards, which this year is being sponsored by T Mobile. As part of the sponsorship, they had several (4+) promo staff wandering the venue showing off the latest Sony Ericsson music handset. Which is all good. I even entered a competition to win one.

But when it came to announcing the nominations, sponsorship really got in the way of proceedings, and verged on the uncomfortable. The guy on the mic (no idea who he was) launched into a 5min spiel about T Mobile and the Sony Ericsson handset, and it was plainly obvious that he was reading from a cue card and was the first time he’d read it. Couple this with the fact that he was preaching not neccesarily to the converted, but to a bunch of people who really couldn’t give a s**t about the sponsorship, and I found even myself questioning the thinking behind the deal.

For me, T Mobile could have exploited the sponsorship much better by exploiting the Street Gigs activity and featuring a surprise set by one of the bands represented in the nominations - for example, one of the nominations for Best UK Marketing Campaign could have performed a surpise acoustic set, and gained some nice column inches in the music press as well as personified a good “marketing campaign” exploitation.

Free wine was a nice touch though. Good grapes.