Looking toward a major conference next month, the International Sponsor Council has established a CFO Advisory Committee to develop a collective perspective on sponsorship programming.
“We believe that there’s a need for organizations to pay attention to the CFO in planning their sponsorships,” said Terry Cecil, ISC president and CEO. “There’s a need to have a CFO perspective on sponsorships.”
The basic concept is to bring representatives from major sponsorship companies together to identify and articulate broad issues before they become problems, according to Cecil.
“We want to have an exchange of ideas,” he said.
A dozen companies have committed to participate on the advisory committee, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Visa, MasterCard and Panasonic, Cecil said. Duane Still, Coca-Cola CFO of North America and Cathy Mills, CFO of Africa for McDonald’s are the first two members named to the committee.
The organization’s upcoming conference on Feb. 27 and 28 is the ISC SponsorCamp to be held at King & Spalding world headquarters in Atlanta. Rick Burton, chief marketing officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and Mark Jeffrey, clinical associate professor of technology at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, are featured speakers for the two-day event.
Burton also will participate with Still on a CFO panel. But beyond that, the event is intentionally free-form with no set agenda, an “un-conference,” according to Cecil. The idea is to enable a dialogue on the pressing sponsorship issues of the day. Cecil anticipates that the adverse sponsor impact of the current TV writers’ strike will be among the topics that will be addressed.
The ISC is currently making moves to expand the organization into Europe, South Africa and the Far East. Cecil said the ISC is working with several German companies and seeking member companies in China.
The ISC is hoping for broad international participation at its global summit at the Louvre in Paris in October.
