Panelists warn dangers of ‘sportainment’
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03/09/2010
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Jacques Séguéla, Vice President and Chief Creative Officer of Havas, warned if sport does not resist becoming run for entertainment purposes it will die and that the relationship has to be “a marriage of love and not convenience” and the ‘Let the show begin: sport, art and entertainment’ panel session at the 2010 Global Sports Forum Barcelona.
Séguéla said: “I think brands are increasingly going to become co-producers in the sporting world. We are not going to have just passive sponsors...we will see a new concept – ‘sportainment’. The merger between sport and entertainment needs to be a marriage of love and not convenience. Sport needs to be a dream machine and not a money-making machine.”
Marketing Director of Grupo Mahou-San Miguel Javier Herrero-Velarde said it was a sponsor’s role to “make sport more accessible, bigger and magical” but that “in the end the consumer decides and is the judge.”
Francis Gabet, Director of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, warned that there was “not one commercial model” for sport in the world. “What constitutes values in Europe are Western influenced and complex. Perhaps this is not the same in China. Nor in the USA or Canada,” he said.
Spanish author Vincenc Villatoro, whose latest novel ‘Tenim un nom’ tells the story of the journey one man and his son make to Paris to watch the Champions League final between Barcelona and Arsenal, outlined the central role that sport has in society as “one of the biggest epics of the contemporary world and one of the biggest factories of identity.”
