A Sports Marketer With A Mean Curve

September 12, 1994 at 4:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

After Sprint Corp. paid $20 million in sponsorship fees for the 1994 World Cup, Mike Goff needed help. As director of corporate sponsorships, Goff wanted Sprint to get its money's worth. So for a flat fee, he hired a sports-marketing firm, Clarion Performance Properties in Greenwich, Conn., to come up with ideas.

The result: long-distance calling cards picturing soccer stars, a geography program for Latin American schools tied to game results, and discounts on long-distance calls for soccer-related businesses. Plus, Sprint agreed to pay a percentage of soccer-related long-distance bills to local soccer groups. And every World Cup fax or phone call went through Sprint. A preliminary analysis of how much business the programs produced, Goff says, is "frankly, stunning. We owe a lot of our success to Clarion."