Startup Choice 2017 > Submission

Sponsoo https://www.sponsoo.de

by Sponsoo GmbH

We are Europe's largest marketplace for sports sponsorship. We connect athletes, sports clubs and teams with potential sponsors.

Problem: The sponsorship industry is missing out on digitalization. Sponsors complain that the sponsorship process is complicated and inefficient. The transaction costs for new sponsorship deals are way too high and the management and measurement of already closed sponsorships is complicated and expensive.

How we are solving the problem: By introducing a digital marketplace, we make the process easy and transparent. But we are more than just a "marketplace" - our new features make sponsorships really smart, targeted and measurable. As a VC investor phrased it in his feedback: "This is cool, you're providing similar functionality like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to marketeers - just for the sponsorship market."

Just to give three examples how we are making sponsorships smarter:

1. A big data matching algorithm is comparing hundreds of data points on each sponsoree with the needs of a sponsor. It's like on a dating website: One side says what they can offer, the other side what they want. We bring together both sides.

2. We have trained an artificial intelligence to automatically detect the sponsor's logo in images and videos. As a result, sponsors automatically find out when their sponsorees have posted content with their logo in social media, or how often their logo was visible in a TV broadcast.

3. We combine all this with media information that allows us to exactly determine how many people have been reached by the sponsorship - no matter if the reach was online, in print media, or at live events in the stadium.