Our news MEC Access Launches PARTNERZ Research

Tuesday 24 June 2008

Singapore, 24th June Proprietary Tool Brings Greater Rigour to Sponsorship Evaluation. MEC Access, a division of Mediaedge:cia (MEC), a leading media communications specialist, has launched an exciting, new partnership evaluation tool; PARTNERZ. This proprietary tool pulls together a wide range of data from sports, entertainment and cause properties across nine countries to identify the most appropriate partnership and sponsorship matches for brands.

PARTNERZ empowers MEC Access to better measure consumers' relationships and attitudes towards over 500 different sponsorship properties. ?‚ This provides valuable insights into where brands should be investing their sponsorship budgets and also how activation strategies should be structured.

PARTNERZ, which covers the UK, USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, India, Nordics and Russia, also allows multiple analyses to be carried out simultaneously, linking different sponsorship properties with brands and assessing the best fit (using WPP's proprietary diagnostic and predictive brand measurement tool, BRANDZ). In the UK, USA and China the data has been fused with TGI to provide even deeper analysis of consumer lifestyle attitudes, motivation and behaviour.

Mike Jackson, Managing Director of MEC Access APAC, said: "More than 10% of all global marketing budgets are spent on sponsorship, but less than 1% is spent on pre-testing branded content ideas. ?‚ MEC Access is one of MEC's fastest growing divisions and the market leading PARTNERZ study will be used heavily for international clients, but will also be invaluable to our Indian and China offices in helping clients to get the absolute best from their investments in this area. ?‚ It's a very exciting, innovative and important tool for us and we believe it will help us greatly when working with clients to both identify and activate all forms of brand partnerships."

The PARTNERZ study was conducted by Millward Brown for MEC Access and a consortium of other WPP agencies including, Mindshare Performance, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy Action.