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Teams lower down tend to get a game server and a voice comms server, in exchange their sponsor will get some increased exposure of their organisation by having their teams wear the tag and so on.

That can be used to gain sponsors who might ultimately pay the organisation for advertising.

Higher division teams are in the same boat although many of the best organisations will offer LAN support to get their teams to competitions where their good results give their brand a good image from which they can advertise e.g. Dignitas – Intel and Bigfoot Network cards :)

They just work exactly the same way that any other advertisement does.

What you can provide for your sponsor – Coverage and publicity.
What they give to you in return – Money, Services or negate some of your running costs.

For example, a web hosting company will generally sponsor a lot of teams, because giving away some free, shared hosting has very little drain on their resources, yet the publicity could amount to a couple of sales, or more hits on their website which can raise awareness of the company, and possibly lead to further sales.

You will see companies like Steelseries sponsoring a lot of gaming teams, because they get the added bonus of advertising to their target audience… gamers.

If you want a sponsor, it doesn’t matter how good your team is, it simply matters how much coverage you can give to your sponsor. If you are a top team, you’re probably going to be features in more news articles, have more visits to your website, reach lan or cup finals (resulting in even more coverage). For that reason, a top team will probably obtain a sponsorship deal of more monetary value than a lower skilled team, but if you can present a potential sponsor with some stats, and they match their requirements in advertising, then you might find you can get a better deal than simply, a mumble server or a free mouse mat.

When I was playing for Monster Munch, I was in discussions with a company who realised the potential advertisement and were willing to set up an annual budget for expenses, as well as get in talks with one of their partners to see if it was feasible to provide flights to international events (USA). The case I presented was on the lines of:

– Rebranding the team to match sponsor company.
– Estimated viewing statistics of ETF2L and other league websites, and add weight for being a premiership team (meaning their company name would be seen any time anyone went to check out the division tables).
– Features heavily (and lightly) in countless news articles across a number of community websites.
– LAN exposure, t-shirts, blog, interviews.
– Showing other companies that currently sponsor gaming teams. (They loved the fact that companies such as Intel and Nvidia were sponsoring teams that we would be playing against).
– Their brand name published on these other team’s websites (Dignitas 6: 0 YOUR BRAND etc…).

When you start to dig deeper, it can be very easy to convince a company that can spend £100 on putting a full page advert in the newspaper, to sponsor your team for a few hundred or thousand pounds over the course of a year, especially if their product matches the audience most likely to see your advertisements.

Sadly, our team folded and the negotiations were cancelled, but if you put some effort in, anyone can obtain a good sponsorship deal that benefits both parties!

Wow thanks man.

You have good knowledge on the subject, thanks for sharing. I have pm you with some other questions if your up for it, or simply post back in this thread.

Thankyou again

Post answers in this topic, it is interesting!