Kim Skildum-Reid is a leading corporate sponsorship consultant, trainer, speaker and author with 25 years experience across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. She was born and raised in the US and worked for many leading companies on their sponsorships of major events including the Superbowl and US Open Golf. She moved to Australia and started her own consultancy in 1994, now named Power Sponsorship. Next week she will deliver a keynote address at the Sport is Fantastic conference in Sydney. In this guest post she looks at expectations around Paralympic sponsorship and what really counts when companies are spending sponsorship dollars.

It’s just over a month until the start of the London Olympics, and I recently fielded my first media enquiry about the relative lack of sponsor support for Paralympians. The usual implication by media is that sponsors are to blame for the discrepancy, and that they should be sponsoring Paralympians to the same level as able-bodied Olympic athletes.

My issue is with the word “should”. There are two main angles on the word, in this context, and they’re both wrong.

The first is the implication that performance equals commercial value for a sponsor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. When a sponsor invests in sponsorship, they invest in opportunity. It’s what they do with the sponsorship – leverage – that provides the results. Sponsors need to be able to use a sponsorship – in this case, an athlete – across a range of other marketing media to be worth the investment of marketing money.

Performance is only one part of the “sponsorability” of an athlete, along with the profile of the sport, her/his personal profile and charisma, their relevance to at least one of the sponsor’s key target markets, behaviour, and sometimes the athlete’s back-story. An athlete – disabled or able-bodied – can bag a ton of medals, but if their sport isn’t in the top tier (modern pentathlon, anyone?), they may very well struggle to get significant sponsorship.

The second angle is about guilt – with the insinuation that responsible companies should support those unfortunate disabled athletes. I can tell you one thing for sure, Paralympians are finely tuned athletic machines and there is nothing “unfortunate” or lesser about them. They would tell you the same thing, and anyone who pays attention to the Paralympic Games would never class the athletic accomplishments as anything but impressive, disabled or not.

When we talk about the marketability of Paralympic athletes, a big part of the struggle is the lack of media coverage – both televising the event itself and covering Paralympic news. In other words, some of the very media that lay guilt trips on corporate sponsors would be more accurate if they took some responsibility themselves. Unfortunately, some seem to have decided that sensationalised corporate bashing is more newsworthy than actually covering the Paralympic Games.

Of course, if you and I and the rest of the world sought out what coverage there is, it would surely drive more and better media attention. Seriously, though, how many of us have read these sponsor-bashing articles, thinking “those athletes really deserve sponsorship”, but we never tune in, ourselves? Or couldn’t name one Paralympian?

As for the Paralympians, anything they can do to raise their personal profile will increase their marketability. The number of second-tier athletes (ie, not the superstars) building a fan base and public persona via Facebook and Twitter and YouTube is growing all the time, and there is no reason Paralympians can’t do the same thing.

I’m not giving sponsors a “get out of jail free” pass. It is absolutely true that some sponsors are too blinkered – seemingly incapable of thinking laterally about how they could leverage a second-tier athlete to genuinely build their brand. That said, there still must be a critical mass of interest and relevance around an athlete for them to be leverageable. Some are. Some aren’t (at least not yet).

The upshot of all of this is that making comparisons between the commercial value of top performing Paralympians and the small percentage of Olympians who attract major sponsorship is unfair. There are many factors that go into that commercial value, taking one-dimensional shots at corporate sponsors isn’t going to accomplish anything.