A little more than a year ago, I initiated a project to restore the films of William Kentridge and to create events with the finished product. I needed to raise more than R1-million to create a 35mm film print that could be projected at a live performance of Philip Miller’s score. Standard Bank, having awarded Kentridge its Young Artist award in 1984, understands the importance of his work and has funded the major portion of the print costs and allocated addition budget for events. (Investors, including Kentridge’s local and New York galleries, provided the additional finance needed.)
The print travelled to Durban, Cape Town, Grahamstown and Johannesburg, where it was used at the opening of the Constitutional Court, which was attended by the country’s top judges, giving it great political status.
The business relationship was simple and mutually beneficial. Standard Bank gave us a budget with which to create the print and put on the events in exchange for branding rights, including its logo in the final rolling credit of the film. These were rights we were very happy to give as they did not affect the artistic integrity of the work in any way.
Despite the odd positive example, most South African companies have been slow to use art to push their brands because of sport sponsorship and the expense of TV commercials. More importantly, as South African companies don’t know how to use art to promote their brand, they place art sponsorship under the social responsibility budget and not the marketing budget. Here it has to compete with cause-related sponsorship requests, such as much needed primary education and health.
Internationally, the trend has been for companies to merge commerce with art to gain leverage off the association. Corporate sponsorship of the arts has more than doubled in the past 15 years in Britain (totalling £120-million a year) and more than tripled in France. The reason is simple: foreign companies see art sponsorship as a good marketing and PR opportunity.
‘Ten years ago, a company would sponsor something, invite some people, have a nice party and walk away,” says Wendy Stephenson, managing director of Sponsorship Consulting, which has Unilever, BP and Morgan Stanley on its client list. ‘Today, they milk the sponsorship for what it’s worth, because it’s a marketing activity just like advertising, or PR, or direct mail.”
Unilever ordered an audit of its sponsorship of an art installation at the Tate Modern in London. According to communications manager Claire Dixon, the study by Sponsorship Consulting showed that the company got £1,5-million in value out of the £1-million it spent in four years on the Unilever series.
This is the beauty of art sponsorship. Art events attract influential people and opinion-makers that other sponsorship does not. Additional state and festival budgets can be secured for events, giving the sponsor more exposure for its investment. Certain projects are able to travel internationally and promote the sponsor’s brand globally and, more importantly, promote the country to the world’s most discerning audiences.
Nine Drawings for Projection has achieved all these objectives. The event was recently hosted at The Barbican and Leicester Square in London and sponsored by Standard Bank as part of its ongoing effort to increase its international presence. Thanks to the Public Art Fund of New York, the event moved from London to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and New York’s Central Park — the ultimate venue for an art event. The Public Art Fund secured the funding from Bloomberg, the world’s biggest sponsor of the arts, to host events in the parks.
Bloomberg has attached its brand to art because it believes it is good for business. It does not sponsor sport and spends very little on traditional advertising. Instead, it surrounds its workforce with art (including commissioning an artist to design the plates in the canteen) and sponsors the world’s major art events and galleries. This strategy has clearly served the interests of the company and its founder, Michael Bloomberg (the present mayor of New York).
We were part of the line-up for Brooklyn’s annual summer Celebrate Brooklyn festival, with one night dedicated to South Africa. The ever-popular Hugh Masekela performed in the early evening followed by the Kentridge event after sunset. There was an audience of 9 000.
South African companies are not the only ones slow in realising the value of art to sell a brand; so is the South African government. The South African Consulate in New York and SA Tourism had the rights to brand our night in Brooklyn. They decided to use images of baboons, leopards and lions to woo the discerning art-loving crowd. This Big Five approach to marketing South Africa reinforces negative stereotypes of Africa as a primitive place.
During the three weeks abroad, Africa featured continually in the press in the run-up to the G8 summit. The foreign press, sympathetic to Bob Geldof’s call for the West to help Africa, painted a picture of a pathetic continent in desperate need. While this might have helped to secure more aid, it would have done very little to attract investment.
Massmoca, an art institution north of New York, had an installation comprising a world map and a pair of scissors. The participants in the installation were the public, who would cut the labels off their clothes and pin them to the map. While labels from every American brand filled most of the globe, with concentrations in Mexico, the United States and China, the whole continent of Africa was empty. Until we can interest foreign markets in our culture we will not be able to translate the artistry of Africa into a clothing brand or other product desired by the West.
The right art sponsorship deal is good for artists, good for the sponsor and great for the country. For the cost of a low-budget television commercial (excluding agency commissions), Standard Bank has a product that has projected its logo to 9 000 people at Prospect Park and to New York’s art elite, including the deputy mayor and her entourage in Central Park. (This exposure was at no cost to Standard Bank as the events were paid for by Bloomberg, which was billed at the start of the projection).
South Africa has great art. That is why you will find our top artists’ work in the world’s major collections. There is no excuse for Johannesburg International airport to use the terrible art it does to welcome guests. There is no reason for a major company to spend a fortune on a TV commercial that invents a black sculptor buying his sculpture back. There is no reason for SA Tourism not to use art as an advertising theme to attract New Yorkers to South Africa.
When corporate companies start shifting a fraction of their advertising budgets away from ad agency ‘creatives” and toward internationally acclaimed creative artists, we might just begin to see a shift to lasting products that entertain, inform and attract foreign interest in Africa.