Public Art and Value Added Sponsorship
November 3rd, 2007 at 12:12pm Rebecca Borden
Recently, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) celebrated 25 years of sponsorship of the arts and they decided to celebrate the public art way. Since they wanted greater logo real estate as corporate sponsors, they decided to commission original works and installations on their own. This session presented a case study of UTC’s sponsored public art in Madison Square Park, NYC and Broadgate Arena, London, UK. The most interesting component of this case was how they used surveys, conducted by Audience Research & Analysis, to measure the impact of this endeavor.
How to you measure the value of public art, which by nature, has a more elusive, serendipitous, and iterative visitor experience than say a theatre or museum?
How can you design an assessment survey that documents valued added to both the consumer as well as the sponsor? (The presenters generously shared their powerpoint with me for this blog).This session suggested some important lessons about assessing the value of sponsorships. First off, when surveys include questions not only about the value of the artistic experience to participants but the value of the corporation that sponsored the event, the research serves a dual role as both collecting perceptions from a targeted consumer population and as documenting return on investment for the sponsor. When cast in this manner, sponsorship surveys become a great R&D component for the corporation’s marketing department, which may be a vital leverage point that public art managers can use to help sell sponsorship of new commissions and installations.
