Whereas Coca-Cola and Cingular had created reasons for their existence, Ford had struggled to find a solid and justifiable role. What we learned was that if a brand is part of a story line, our brains will accept the role of the brand and remember its presence. However, if a brand and its role don’t support the story line, the opposite will happen: Our brains will simply erase it. That’s the way we survive and keep from ending up like zombies, considering the average of 2,000 brand messages we are exposed to every day.

What resonates for me is something which underscored a gathering of sponsors at the world’s biggest annual sponsorship conference in Chicago not too long ago – and that is that sponsors need to embed themselves into entertainment the consumer craves. Not as an add-on or afterthought, but as a genuine “value adder” to the entertainment. So when Motorola sponsored Robbie Williams’ recent trip to South Africa, and got a 30-second big screen ad before he came on stage, they got it wrong. They were tackily adding themselves to the experience, rather than become integral to it. That’s the generous assessment. The cynical one is that they did themselves harm by intruding on the consumer’s experience. There’s a delicious word for it – they “brandalized” the event.

Clever sponsors get the difference. They won’t just write out cheques and sit back to admire their name in lights. They actually engage with what they’re sponsoring, and look for ways of enhancing the consumer experience. They realise that, at times, it is better to be discrete and low-key; at other times they can go big and bold. It is a small, but important distinction and being able to tell the opportunities apart make the difference between a mature sponsor and an opportunistic one.

Examples of great sponsorships like that abound – 702′s Walk the Talk; Pick ‘n Pay/Argus Cycle Tour; V-Festival (when it, ahem, actually happens); Old Mutual Encounters; and of course, my personal favourite for obvious reasons, the Standard Bank Young Artist Awards. Those are all sponsors who add value through their involvement – they don’t just hijack the event for their own branding purposes. They act with integrity. We need more of that.