Why Fast Company lowered its event sponsorship rates

Kayleigh Barber of Digiday writes about why Fast Company lowered the sponsorship rates for its Innovation Festival event.

Barber writes, “The strategy for selling the virtual Innovation Festival that took place from Oct. 5 through 9 was to ‘have a larger list of sponsors who are paying a little bit less, and that is exactly what we did,’ said John Donnelly, chief revenue officer at Fast Company and Inc.’s parent company, Mansueto Ventures.

“The 13 total sponsors that came on board for the festival, including Booz Allen Hamilton, PepsiCo, Facebook and Meals on Wheels America — up from six in 2019 — paid about half as much as the rates previous sponsors were charged for the 2019 in-person event. Still, the average sponsorship deal for this year was in the six-figure range, according to Donnelly, though he declined to provide hard revenue figures for any aspect of the festival.

“Planning to close several smaller deals versus a couple large ones may seem like more work for the sales team, but Donnelly said that it made sense with the lack of overhead that typically goes into the festivals’ usually elaborate sponsor activations. (Prudential sponsored an escape room in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall in 2018.)

“It also made sense with the size of sponsor’s marketing budgets, which have been stretched thin during the coronavirus crisis.”

Read more here.