Sponsor Hunt

Its 22 more days till the World Cup and 2 months till the new year. The hunt for sponsors is on for next seasons's budgeting. I am looking and writing to anyone I think might be interested in sponsoring the team or getting their brand into the sport.

Trouble is the sport is not that well known - that I accept. But also people are closed minded. They either want to support football or they put their money into Pool or a Marathon. I wonder how they pulled Standard Chartered into sponsoring the Singapore Marathon and Aviva into bolwing. We know that Mr Osim does triathalons - thus he sponsored the Iron man here recently. Caltex is smart to get their brand into motorsports with the Karting event they organised.

Perhaps the way to get a big sponsor is to get a rich CEO into the game. But big CEOS play golf and that game is not short of corp sponsors.

So what am I looking for? I'm looking for hip brands who want to attract the youth and people who are into extreme sports. Nike Singapore started a campaign of street ads featuring skaters and BMX bikers- nice campaign but it lacked a extreme team sport - paintball. Maybe Nike Singapore doesn't know paintball and the Red Sevens exists. I tired to write to them but their emails have bounced back.

I spoke to Red Bull a while ago and they seemed a bit arrogant- they will only put the Red Bull label on their internationally sponsored players and teams. They wouldn't even give me a cap because I'm not an official Red Bull spokes person. So now I'm trying to talk to the Thai Red Bull and see if they're more open minded.

Yesterday I wrote to a few companies- I hope I get through to the right person one of these days and get us a jersey sponsor and enough money to cover our paint consumption next year.