Nokia To End Isle Of Wight Sponsorship

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia is to end its headline sponsorship of the Isle of Wight music festival.

The event has been billed as The Official Nokia Isle of Wight Festival for three years but the company has now decided that it can associate itself with music in more strategic ways.

Nokia head of marketing Simon Lloyd revealed the news at the MusicWeek/Ricall Music & Brands conference yesterday (19 July). He said: “Isle of Wight has been good for us for the last three years and we got involved at a time when we were just formalising our music strategy. We have realised that a brand of our size does not need to put our name on those kind of events. We get the same cut-through by just being involved and we don’t need to necessarily badge the event.”He added that Nokia hoped to still take part in the festival in some form. This year the festival was held over the weekend of June 10 with headliners Coldplay and The Foo Fighters.

Nokia also has its Rock Up & Play initiative that provides unknown bands with a stage at music festivals. However, it also sponsors television show The X Factor. The telecoms industry has scrambled to associate itself with music as mobile phones become an increasingly important method of audio and video content distribution for young people.

O2 now sponsors the O2 Wireless Festival in London’s Hyde Park and Vodafone has just taken up sponsorship of the Somerset House series of concerts, while T-Mobile is well into its 18 month partnership deal with Robbie Williams.

Lloyd also hit out at the occasional “precious” nature of music artists and said that the industry was sometimes “painful” to deal with when trying to create brand partnerships. He pointed out that there were only a limited number of brands but a seemingly infinite number of interested players in the music industry.

He said: “If it’s about the music experience it does not really matter who the label or who the artist is as long as they are in the right place in the market. If the artist gets too precious we can move on to someone else.”

Source: http://www.mad.co.uk