The sponsorship in the age of branded content

Abstract

The sponsorship hasn’t always achieved to consolidate itself as a relevant and efficient tool: apart from the lack of a general and consensual definition and, sometimes, an incorrect use by the companies, the appearance of new advertising tools as the branded content have led some media and authors to question the sponsorship’s validity. The goal of this article is to know the extent, the dimensions and the future of the sponsorship, as well as differentiate it from the branded content, with which there are often confusions. The methodology uses in-depth interviews with experts to know the state of sponsorship in the companies, given the rising popularity of the branded content. The results obtained allow to detect: the difficulty of establishing just one sponsorship typology; the fine line between sponsorship and content generation; the validity of sponsorship in the organizations, but with some application differences depending on the company size; and, finally, the good future prospects for the sponsorship, although inevitably linked to the content generation.