John Balkam: Building Better Sponsorship Partnerships (Full Transcript)
Ronen Ainbinder
Joining us today for the Halftime Snacks is an author, social entrepreneur, and sports marketing professional.
Coming to the show all the way from Baltimore is the artist behind a book called 3-Win Sponsorship. In his book, he talks about how organizations can begin integrating purpose and social impact into their sponsorship platforms.
The book's core idea is based on a three-win mindset, which means to conduct business with the well-being of people and the planet in mind.
Additionally, he's the founder of Third Win Group. A sponsorship consulting firm, where they help talent in sports to maximize their earning potential and maximize their impact off the field.
Our guest's area of expertise lies in the intersection between marketing, sponsorships, and social responsibility.
It is an honor and a pleasure to host him in the Halftime Snacks;
Ladies and gentlemen, John Balkam!
John Balkam
Thanks for having me around it. It feels good to be here.
Ronen Ainbinder
It feels so much better to host you, John. Finally, I want to start with the question that a follower named Taylor on Twitter sent us, and that is if you have any nicknames at all? And if so, which one's your favorite?
John Balkam
Well, I've had about a million nicknames ever mind my life. And way too many to name right now. But I would say a lot of people call me JB or Johnny B. And those are good. But I honestly think my favorite one is J Balks. And it just so happens to be my Instagram handle as well. So can you can throw me a follow-up. If you if you want
Ronen Ainbinder
J Balks. That's a really good one. Now, I want to start asking you a question that will take a lot of you to think introspectively. Let's build a scenario. Let's suppose that you'd be running for president, maybe against Joe Biden, or maybe next time against Kanye West. Who knows. But let's say you let's suppose you are running for president, what would be the three main reasons why people should vote for you? If you want to share maybe your purpose, your vision, your mission?
John Balkam
Well, Ronen, as here in the US, it's been an election year. So, fortunately, I've been thinking about my stump speech for quite some time. I would say three things come to mind as to why I would be a great president. One would be my values. So I always like to put out into the world that I'm a man for others, and I'd like to be of service to others. That's a core value. The second would be my mission or my purpose. And I like to think about my mission as using my time, talent, and treasure to make a positive impact on other people and then inspiring other people to do the same. And then the third, the third reason would be my height. I'm about six foot four. And everybody knows that tall people make great leaders. So vote John Balkan.
Ronen Ainbinder
Man, what a legend. I'm also 6'4. People should vote for tall people! I want to talk a little bit now about your career as a writer and, of course, your book. I want to ask you, what were the three experiences that drove you into writing the book, three-win sponsorship?
John Balkam
One of the first experiences that put me on this trajectory was this class I took back when I was in the fourth year of my senior year at Georgetown University. And it was a class on social entrepreneurship. Now, I knew what entrepreneurship was, and I had entrepreneurs in my family. But the term social entrepreneurship was pretty new for me. And it was just a total eye-opener. It was one of those lightbulb moments where you realize, "Oh, this is a thing?" We're building a business that makes a positive impact on the planet and other people. That's the core reason to create the business. So it really clicked with me. And, and it kind of when I left Georgetown, it kind of put me on this trajectory of okay, "I want to be a social entrepreneur, or I want to work in businesses that have that purpose, that larger purpose to that." So that will be the first one. The second one would be my first attempt to become a social entrepreneur, which is about three to four years after graduating. I helped to start a company was one of the early founders of a company. And while that company ended up failing, or at the very least, my stretch at the company, we didn't reach the success we wanted. I had an incredible amount of lessons that I took away from that experience. And I got to move from Washington, DC to London for about three months and go through an accelerator program with tech stars, which does an amazing job getting startups from A to B or A to Z in a very short amount of time. So that was where I really just started to give this entrepreneurship thing a try. And even though it didn't turn out well, and our team ended up breaking up, I took a ton of lessons away from that experience. The third experience that was really beneficial that I learned a lot from that put me on this book; the entrepreneurship path that I'm on. After I left that startup, I joined a company called Everfly, this really cool education technology company based back in Washington, DC. And I spent about three and a half years there, as they were going through a company's growth phase. So there were maybe 200 employees when I got there. And before I left, there were over 500, and it was in a short amount of time. And I really got to.
I got exposed to what it's like to work for a mission-driven, purpose-driven company as it's growing. And not only that, I got to work inside of a sports and entertainment division ever fi where we were effectively running social impact education programs, through the sports and entertainment industry, through partnerships in the sports entertainment industry. And that is where I really got a lot of inspiration for the book. And I was seeing how sports marketing sponsorship, the whole sports landscape was starting to evolve. And that's that was one of the catalysts for me taking on the book project. And the rest is history. I guess we'll get into some of that.
Ronen Ainbinder
What was the most challenging part of writing and publishing a book? And how did you solve that?
John Balkam
Well, I'll tell you one of the worst things or most challenging things. I won't say it was bad, but it was pretty terrible was revisions. And revisions, just meaning you have your manuscript, and then your editor goes through and makes you like, edit a ton of your book. And that makes it's very time-consuming. It's very difficult. So, how did I get through that? I just got it out? I guess I don't remember exactly any tips. But it was pretty, pretty difficult. But the bigger challenge was a bit of imposter syndrome. Where you feel like your writing isn't good enough, or your research isn't strong enough for me, I don't have enough interviews, or, for whatever reason, I don't belong in this position to be an author. And I suppose the way that you get through that is you have a support system around you. And you have people encouraging you, and you kind of have a team who helps you to get through those feelings and to actually put your name on the piece of work that you put out there and just be proud of it and realize that you belong.
Ronen Ainbinder
I love that, John. I actually believe that the imposter syndrome you mentioned is an indicator of you telling yourself that you're actually pushing yourself harder than you can do. If you feel like you don't belong if you feel like you shouldn't be there. If you feel like you're not expert enough or you don't know enough about the topic. That's where that's when you know that you are pushing yourself to your max, and you're doing things that you're uncomfortable with doing, and that you're actually working towards a greater goal. I also remember how when I started my podcast, I started having conversations with people that I never imagined that I would be able to speak to, and out of a sudden that they're speaking to me! Who am I? The day I realized when you respect the fact that you're pushing yourself and that you're doing things that you never thought you were ready for, that's when you know that you're on the right track. So I feel like that's a great thing. John, I want to ask you, I want to switch over a little bit to ask you about the book. And I want to know, who should add the book to there must read the list. Who is the target audience? Who's the product persona? For who is this book targeted?
John Balkam
Well, let me take one second and just give you a quick rundown on, like, What is a 3-win sponsorship? Sponsorship is at its fundamentals, a three-legged stool, and the three legs of the stool are accompany a team or an athlete or someone that we call talent. And then the third leg is an audience or a fan base. And in every sponsorship, there are at least those three parties. And the reason that sponsorships happen is so that companies can tap into an associate with a team or an athlete or an influential person to talk to the fan base, which already has a relationship with a team. The book is a little bit different in my whole take on this three-win mindset when it comes to sponsorship is I felt like the way we've been doing sponsorship in sports entertainment for a very long time was not quite remembering that that third leg of the stool. The most important part of the equation, the fan base, and the fan base, wasn't necessarily seeing the value. They were being advertised to. And they were seeing sponsorship, but were they really resonating with it? Was it making them remember the brand was making them feel better about the team or the company trying to get in front of them? So three-win sponsorship is effectively inserting a cause or a larger purpose in the middle of this relationship and rallying all three parties in a sponsorship deal around something valuable to society and to the planet, really. So if traditional sponsorship is just like traditional advertising, three-win sponsorship is basically caused by marketing in sports entertainment. To answer your original question, who should pick up a book and add it to their reading list? Pro athletes and musicians. Anybody who receives sponsorship dollars or wants to do deals with sponsors, people who are brand marketers, so if you're deciding where to place your marketing spend, you're trying to do some type of sponsorship deal, you should pick it up. And I think some of the ideas will benefit you. Finally, any sponsorship salespeople out there, because I know there are many out there on the team side, the lead side, and you sell sponsorship for a living. When I read when I wrote the book as I'm a soft spot, I was thinking about you, ship salesperson by trade as well. So pick it up. And of course, reach out to me too, if you want to chat because I like to be not just a name on a book I'd like to, I like to put a face to a name.
Ronen Ainbinder
I'd like to add another party to the equation. I feel like the sports management degree is a very fresh, new, and up and coming thing that we start to see in a few universities worldwide. I feel like students who will be the up and coming managers of athletes, organizations, event organizers, and even technology creators should know about the value you wrote about in your book because they will be the ones driving the sports industry's entertainment later on. So I would suggest if you are also studying sports management that you should check it out.
John Balkam
That's a good point, Ronen. I forgot all my students and professors out there. But I actually did have an MBA class this past semester. Use the three-win sponsorship is one of their core teachings. So great reminder, and thank you for mentioning that.
Ronen Ainbinder
Absolutely. John, I am also a writer, maybe not as serious as you are. But I write every week, and I always struggle to think about becoming a better writer. I want to know if you have any specific advice or ideas or share some of the things that work for you to suggest other writers try. Tell us a little bit about that.
John Balkam
Well, don't take it from me because I'm early on in my writing journey as well. But earlier this year, I picked up Stephen King's book on writing. And he said there are two things that every writer should do, they should write a lot, and they should read a lot. And that's pretty simple and straightforward advice. But in reality, I think those are the two best ways to improve. You need to read, not just junk food writing. You need to read great writing that you admire and that you want to model yourself after. For me, I read a ton about not just the sports business but also sports in general. So I read The Athletic a lot, read the Washington Post sports section, or read the New York Times, sometimes I read the New Yorker. And it's almost like improving your writing by osmosis if you will, and I really am a big believer in that. And you won't necessarily be able to measure how much your writing improves. But you just know that great writers like Stephen King believe in it, and suggest you do it and then write a lot. That's, that's just the reality of any skill or discipline is the repetitions is what will make you better. And then also repetitions, but with discipline behind it. And basically getting feedback to know what you're working on and what you're trying to get better at. It's basically calibrated practice, and really focusing on Okay, I'm trying to write more clear or with more brevity. So let me try and take this 500-word essay and cut it down to 200. And let me get the same message across or a better message across. So for what it's worth, those are my two cents, but take it from Stephen King rather than me.
Ronen Ainbinder
Yeah, I related to two phrases. One is if you want to cook better sushi, then get better fish. And that just means that the better the input, the better the output. Suppose you're consuming information, reading about sports, or reading about any other topic, the higher the quality. In that case, you'll be able to not only write better about them but also have a more concrete opinion and have a more complete perspective. And also, you won't really become an expert, but you'll feel more comfortable around the topic. So that's one, and the other one is, which I love is that you mentioned that intentional iteration about being intentional on the thing that you're iterating around. If you're improving your style or improving the sentence length or the vocabulary, be intentional about the things you want to improve. And then that's how you go step by step. John, I love your two cents. I want to ask you. Now, coming back to your book, what are three common beliefs that athletes and sports organizations usually assumed to be true about marketing and sponsorships? That in your investigation or your writing, you've realized that they're wrong with which you disagree with them? And why would you disagree with them? Can you just give us a little bit of your perspective?
John Balkam
Sure. We need to realize that as marketers generally and sports marketers and sports entertainment professionals, the old fashioned way doesn't necessarily work. And we're I'm not even sure that it ever really did work that well at changing fans and customers minds and attitudes, behaviors. And by the old fashioned way, I mean billboards and ballparks, right logo placements, quick-hitting advertisements. Look, I To be fair, I'm kind of an outsider. I'm not like an industry veteran. But all of the research that I've seen suggests that people are more annoyed by traditional ads than they are entertained, or, or excited. Right? And that's what we really want to get when we're markers. We want positive feelings and emotions to come up. So I think one thing is the old fashioned way doesn't necessarily work anymore.
The second misconception is that it's all about the money. It's all about the Benjamins. When in fact, it's only partly about the Benjamins. I mean that sponsorship is not just You giving up name image and likeness rights for cash and then doing social media posts and tagging your sponsor on social media. To me, effective sponsorship is a partnership around shared value. And you're bringing something to the table for the sponsor. Sometimes, it's pure access to your fan base, to your customers, and that, that connection you already have. But other there could be other benefits that if you ask your sponsors, they'll tell you actually, what we really wanted to do is entertain our clients at your game, because we're a business to business company. And that is really important for us to be able to have face to face interactions. So it's not just about money, of course, in almost every sponsorship, money exchanges hands, from a sponsor to a sponsee, whether that be a team or an athlete. What you want to do is understand each individual sponsor, what value you can bring to the table for them, and what value they can bring to the table for you. And I think you'll see more and more athletes, more and more teams and leagues, they're starting to realize that. Oh, some of our sponsors can actually help us solve a problem inside our businesses. They can bring technology to the table, or maybe they can bring a different fan base or a different marketplace that we haven't tapped yet. So that's number two. And then the final one really is. I think 2020 exemplifies this perfectly. There's a misconception that you shouldn't be political, and you shouldn't get involved in social impact and causes that will hurt your chances of getting a sponsorship. But I think that's actually completely false. And in fact, this year, we just saw Sports Illustrated, they named their sportsperson of the year is the activist athlete. And it was five American athletes that they named, including LeBron James. They were recognized not only for their excellence on the field and also for their contributions off-court. And those contributions, including getting very political, LeBron started up a basically a political action organization called more than a vote, which was encouraging people to vote, to register to vote. And Patrick Mahomes, you started to see him doing advertisements for Adidas, where he talked about the Black Lives Matter movement. So the old advice that athletes were getting, or teams are getting about, uh, don't get political. Don't involve yourself at all in any social causes. Except it's acceptable, like veterans are cancer, which is important causes, but are kind of everybody can get behind, fighting cancer and supporting veterans, there's very little risk in supporting those causes. This is, to me, a really important one. And one of the core reasons why a three-win mindset and methodology and sponsorship is important because we see consumers' fans. They want their athletes and their teams to take stances on political and social causes near and dear to them. And in fact, if they do that, the business results will be better when it comes to sponsorship. So those are three things that I think about. It's not all about the money. The old fashioned way needs a bit of an update, and being political and being active in social movements is actually good for business in this day and age.
Ronen Ainbinder
That's super interesting, John. Do you think that the time when Colin Kaepernick, the ex-quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, and we all know the story, tried free agency, no one was hiring him? He was the brand with this perception had this perception of negative connotations because of the associated kneeling in the anthem as something wrong when the intention was not that? Do you think that when Nike signed calling for an add on? Did they want to showcase him as a leader? Do you believe that that was kind of like an inflection point in both brands, sponsorships, and how we see athletes going along the lines with your third point of what athletes mean to society? Do you think that that was a very important moment?
John Balkam
It was it was. And the interesting thing is that that last point I just made about athletes and organizations and sports getting political. That was actually not true for Colin Kaepernick. In fact, he lost his job because of his activism on the sidelines. That was only four short years ago when the NFL felt like taking a stand against police brutality, and racism in the United States was bad for business. But look at how much things have changed in 2020. Right, Nike did make a bit of a bold stand, if you will, and kind of went against the NFL, which by the way, is a very, very big and lucrative partner of the NFL. However, that was like, I want to say, the end of 2016, maybe the end of 2017, when the initial Nike commercial came out with Kaepernick. Three years later, what happened in 2020 was the pandemic, the covid 19 pandemics, the George Floyd protests, and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement swept across the United States and worldwide. Suddenly, the NFL and basically, all of the other sports leagues here in us realize that, oh, we were wrong in the past. And by the way, it's actually good for business now to be on the side of Colin Kaepernick. And because attitudes have shifted across society, and younger people, the younger people in our generation, and the generation below us, they already were on Kaepernick's side. Still, it kind of took a massive social movement, really, to make the shift. So I want to. I mean, Nike deserves some credit for being early, and being a bit of a leader, and supporting Colin Kaepernick. But now, it almost feels like Kaepernick was a little bit ahead of his time. Although to be fair, he needed to make that stand to kind of set the table for all the other activist athletes who are really putting themselves out there this year, if that makes sense.
Ronen Ainbinder
Yeah, totally, John. I feel like it's fascinating because we are exactly in the inflection point in sponsorships in the way things are gonna look. In the future, we are at a very critical point in time, where we're gonna see how the new rules are gonna be applied in terms of marketing and sponsorships. Your book will be a guide of concepts that will need to be applied in the future. And that's fascinating. John, I'm so happy that you can share that with us. And since we're running out of time, I want to ask you a more personal and last question, to get to know you a little bit better. I want to know what the best thing that someone has ever done for you? And why do you remember that?
John Balkam
Sure. So I'll actually give my parents a hat tip here. Because when I was in college, when I was a freshman, first year in college, I had difficulty with mental health issues and had to take a semester off. And during that time, my parents were so patient, loving, caring, and just nurturing. And it was the only reason I was able to get through it and then graduate on time. And I would have never been able to not only graduate but then pursue this career and the book and all these different things that I'm passionate about, if not for my parents being so amazing when I was having a tough time. And I'm glad now that we're seeing mental health being much less taboo, and we're able to talk about it more openly, because certainly in 2009, when I was going through it in 2010, we still weren't were quite there yet. So yeah, my parents have certainly always been there. But I want to give them a special shout-out to be so supportive and loving and help me pursue this career I'm on right now. And it's really been inspiring me to think about how I use my career in sports entertainment to pay it forward and positively impact other people?
Ronen Ainbinder
Wow. Shout out to Mr. And Mrs. Balkam. You have a great kid. It was an honor to host him on the Halftime Snacks. That's a great place to wrap today's conversation. John, I want to thank you so much for your time, kindness, insights. Thank you so much for talking about your book and about sponsorships, and about everything else. I hope that you guys get John's book and follow John on Twitter. The links are gonna be in the description. But hey man, thank you so much for coming. I appreciate it!
Transcribed by Otter.