Customer thinks different from investors – Hitesh Gossain, OnSpon.com

Companies are making great strides through technology, to create value for Brands, by connecting them with the opportunities through a universe of engagements in the market place. Hitesh Gossain, CEO OnSpon.com, speaks to Team Estrade, on challenges faced by the Brands and Sponsorship seekers, future of this industry and on building his company OnSpon.com.

Tell us about OnSpon? About your products and services?

The value of event sponsorships is beyond compare – but it has to be managed well. It’s the arms and legs of a brand’s overall marketing campaign, where the real consumers touch-and-feel your promise. This is a US$ 56 Billion market opportunity, where every global brand wants to engage in an effective sponsorship structure. Onspon.com helps brands (and their agencies) do just that.

Technology is that of a simple market place model that aggregates and curates the best events available for sponsorships and neatly dissects them per brand need to present to the right brands. The backend algorithms are all round brand decision making parameters thereby making decision making simple and clean.

What is OnSpon’s geographical range? How geographical placement of your clients and their products affects your strategy of servicing them?

We are technology driven company hence we have events from 40+ cities as of now. We have four offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Dubai to engage with brands and agencies.

Who is your target group?

We are a location, size and audience agnostic platform where the genesis is that every event manager should be able to engage with brands and their agencies for sponsorship decision making. Hence our target group would be :

Demand Side : Brands and their agencies

Supply Side : Event managers looking to raise sponsorships for their events.

What is the size of the market you are currently competing in, both in India and the world?

IEG pegs India market at USD 4.5 Bn. We plan to address the biggest chunk of this which is sports, entertainment, education, conferences and exhibitions – which is at about 80% of the same.

There are multiple small time consulting companies who do it on project basis, however, there isn’t anyone who is doing it on a marketplace model. There are a few global peers like sponsormyevent.com , sponsorist.com, sponsorhub.com etc. On a product enhancement level, there is IEG which is the biggest consulting company for sponsorships globally.

However, India is a very different market where the average value per event is lower and the sheer numbers are massive. The brands also are keen on engagement matrices which can be established only at a certain scale hence we think we are poised to create a significant traction in this space.

What is your marketing strategy? For each sector, product segment, etc.

We are a marketplace, hence, we have two distinct audiences.

Firstly, Sponsorship seekers, these are the Event organizers: They typically look up Onspon on digital forums online, hence, a lot of engagement creation is created online. These are comprised of,

1. Typically organisations or smaller outfits who do events right from big ticket sports leagues to  community events like Durga Pooja.
2. Industry bodies / Exhibition organisations who organise industry conferences and exhibitions
3. Colleges – for college festivals

Second are Brands or Sponsors: Through industry forums, on-ground team and our custom triggers which brand managers and agencies subscribe to,

1. Brand managers / media managers who take decisions on money deployment for brand
2. Brand’ agencies (media) : Who buy media on behalf of the brand

Strategy for marketing to each audience is different.

Tell us about OnSpon’s game changing case studies.

We don’t track the specific transactions as our model is based on seamless flow of information between the events and the brands. Based on the voluntary confirmations received by brands, we have facilitated around 37Cr worth of transactions through 200+ deals.

Major sponsor deals includes a brand using our platform to evaluate which team to sponsor at IPL, leading sponsorship slabs of an event from the biggest publishing house of India, sponsorships for bodies like CREDAI for their annual events etc

Brands normally want to be associated with known names (products, brands, artists, etc.). Does meritocracy of a not so well known name invite sponsorships? How Onspon brings in value in such a situation?

Known names are just the visible conversations – but the real challenge lies with brands who would like to engage with the ‘not so easy to reach’ audience – which may be niche audience within urban centres – or audience from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns – hence the demand is significant and Onspon is paving the way to engage the buyer and seller in that segment very effectively.

Is the eco system in India ripe for companies like OnSpon? How tough has this road been for you since you started? What difficulties you have faced?

As we are trying to disrupt a very archaic media sales setup, there was a lot of resistance by the agencies who are brand custodians on media procurement decisions. Event sponsorships happen to be non-traditional media. Here my experience of working with one of the biggest EMC organizations came handy and we created a structure where by agencies benefit tremendously from our algorithms and use it to recommend their clients the best partnership opportunities – which as almost impossible earlier.

Within the first 6 months of launch, we were profitable. We had events lining up to get ‘listed’ when we didn’t even have a working website – these included the biggest ones in the country. The brands and their agencies have shown tremendous faith in us – in fact the first ones to come forward and use us were the biggest brands and agencies of the country. The matchmaking was partly automated but this immediate early traction gave us a lot of confidence in the impact we can make to the industry and growth we can achieve by driving revenues for events and effective audience engagement for the brands.

What do you feel is the future of Big Data, Complex machines and AI? Are these something that would benefit OnSpon’s business?

Absolutely! Our curation and engagement metrics are all riven by data behaviours and complex tools that identify the propensity or the brand to engage with the right audience so a lot of our recommendations are based on our data driven pointers. In the next phase of growth, a lot of technology driven tools aimed at bringing the brands and event audience closer are getting framed – we shall apprise you soon about that.

Which product segment/sector is the highest revenue earner for your company?

We help events get sponsorships from brands. By listing their events on Onspon the events get in the evaluation set of brands or their agencies. The basic listing is free followed by premium listing which comes with host of features like automated event dissipation, enhanced visibility, custom ppt creation, event story creation on video, social media amplification etc. We charge a listing fee (fixed) and fund raising fee which corresponds to the sponsorships amounts raised.

What is the biggest challenge faced currently by your industry of operation?

The scope of professionalizing the event management regime is immense and some of the challenges are,

• It’s a 5000+ cr industry but research showed that there was no formalized education to teach event management and Companies found their executives not up to the mark to handle events.
• It isn’t easy to have a generic training because event management includes organizational skills, technical knowledge, P.R., marketing, advertising, catering, logistics, decor, glamour identity, human relations, study of law and licenses, risk managements, budgeting, study of allied like television and other medias and several other areas.
• Sponsorship is again a very specific area where skills are not available in the industry at all
  

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Who are your investors? What advice would you give to Start-ups and MSME companies in this regard?

Investors

Our investors are angels who are business owners – under the Swan angel group. We have also been invested by some individual angels.

Advice

This applies to startups in media and experiential marketing space. Think scale before monetization. There is a temptation to work like an agency and create immediate monetization but hang on to the model – the size and sheer scale shall more than make up for it.

Doing everything yourself, won’t work, delegate! Customer thinks different from investors. Took me quite some time to understand…(smiles)

What is your vision for your company, in terms of,

1. Near term future, over the rest of 2016
2. Long term, over the next 4 years or so.

We are launching exclusive B2B sponsorship marketplace for effective engagement opportunities for launching a 24X7 call centre for events Technology backbone creation, for events to better coordinate on their technology needs – engagement with all event stakeholders in the backend.

This will be a rapid scale-up backed by tremendous traction on paying clients – we would definitely look for a second round once the gap starts coming between the cash outflow and projected revenues – we don’t see that happening for next 12 months at-least as our revenue pipeline growth is also very promising.

Customer thinks different from investors – Hitesh Gossain, OnSpon.com