Horse Show Sponsors in 2020

[woodrwo]

Would love to hear from sponsors, who are not in the horse-related products business, if they are continueing with sponsoring upcoming horse shows. Typically a sponsor wants to support the sport/or local community event, but also get advertising exposure and networking mileage out of the sponsorship. We are in the NY/CT area and are concerned about moving forward on many fronts. Not only the exposure for us might be very limited, which we are paying for, but also the fact that there are so many people losing jobs and in food lines…it just does not feel right to sponsor a luxury sport at this time.

I am assuming organizers are having a heck of time getting commitments. We have several sponsorships out there for non-profits that deal in cancer survivors or community centers. They have all cancelled their summer fund raisers thru July. But the horse shows are still planning on running.

Not to mention our business, like all businesses, are trying to keep all of our employees on the payroll and our doors open. Hard to think about sponsoring a horse show.

Thoughts?

[clanter]

it just does not feel right to sponsor a luxury sport at this time.

not a horse show sponsor but when I had my businesses open I found we did best in the worst and best of times, it was the ho-hum middle ground of foundering economy where we had problems.

The the “worst of times” we found the people who had money would spend it looking for bargains or would repair old equipment hoping to get more life from it. Also to protect assets (we were in access control systems) Companies were welling to spend money to save money …

During the “best of times” people just felt good spending and the equipment we provided gave them the exclusiveness of “see what I have” here look and I control everything from My Phone…See.

Also during those times companies had budgeted upgrades, as they were always seeking cost savings while not reducing security.

My son is advertising, primarily fashion industry. He has a backlog of work as retailers/manufacturers attempt to put afresh face on their offerings. His clients primarily are projecting their products to the well off.

But yes there is a major storm of change coming… I was in aviation once so follow it somewhat… estimates are now coming in that it appears there will be about 20,000 major airline pilots who are going to loose their jobs… and those for the most part are not chump-change jobs.

So, really depends upon your product if sponsoring horse shows is a good use of the dollars

[clanter]

I do see an opportunity for special Private Shows that run on similar format as the “old shows”, but invitation only so the wealthy’s kid can still compete… these shows should go back in time, offer real silver awards that would be admired rather than chunked into the pile of things

To some elite there have been too many lessor ones to navigate at that the standard shows (does make one cringe when a commoner who has driven their own horse to the show, prepared the horse and wins the class with their self taught home junior)

But I noticed that the Hamptons is very short of property these days as those with money attempt to escape Manhattan, they are even stepping down trying to buy property on east Long Island driving those price up.

[jumpottb]

My company sponsors shows/comps in multiple disciplines/breeds, we also sponsor our clients events. We are in the veterinary field (they are our direct clients). We have taken a hit. We are not spending or promising to spend at this point. I can play around with some low cost ideas, but we need to make sure we aren’t putting ourselves in a position to not get the funds back if the said competitions doesn’t go forward.

We are supporting our direct clients, we just need to be careful of marketing dollars toward the end user. However, in no way did we decide this based on luxury in sport. We know our end users are the back yard horse and the Olympian horse (literally). This is a fluid situation for many companies and for us, frankly we know our direct clients (veterinarians) can use the support if we can offer it to them vs marketing dollars at events.

I know you asked for none-horse related but perhaps this view point helps