Luxury Swiss watch brand Hublot, one of the main sponsors for this summer’s UEFA EURO 2008 football tournament in Switzerland and Austria, has donated its entire billboard space at each stadium to Unite Against Racism, a pan-European campaign against racism in football.
The decision, prompted by a desire to promote values the watch company itself sees as important, has huge strategic and financial implications. Competition between sponsors for advertising space at the European football championship is intense, and the value of the billboards can constitute more than 70 per cent of their total outlay. Hublot has not released precise figures but the estimated cost is believed to be between CHF3m-5m. The gesture is all the more remarkable in that it comes from the smallest of all the EURO 2008 sponsors. Alongside giants such as UBS and Swisscom, Hublot’s CHF250m sales turnover is completely dwarfed; but the actions of the Geneva-based watch company could herald a new era for the world of sponsorship, and football sponsorship in particular.
Hublot is already an extremely active supporter of charitable causes. Along with their own charity, Hand in Hand, which cares for orphans in India, Hublot is a partner of the Ayrton Senna Institute as well as the Smiling Children Foundation. A special new limited series Hublot watch has been produced for each organization, with a percentage of the sales revenue from each watch donated to them. The owner of Hublot, Jean-Claude Biver, is totally committed to the concept of helping needy children and as far as he is concerned it is very much a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Monsieur Biver may not be saying it publicly, but Hublot’s “caring-sharing” philosophy paves the way for a whole new outlook from the luxury goods sector, where luxury can set the example. He is hoping this pioneering move will initiate a fresh approach and a different way of sponsoring. "I dream of going to a football match one day where all the billboards in the stadium are devoted to charitable causes,” Monsieur Biver recently confided to a journalist. He added that football is not just a sport, it is an enormous vehicle for communication and it is important to use this power of communication to convey educational values such as the fight against racism.
UEFA has expressed its delight at Hublot’s act of solidarity and has confirmed that no sponsor has ever before donated its advertising space to a charitable cause. Philippe Margraff, UEFA’s marketing director, is more than happy with their two-pronged partnership with Hublot: sport on the one hand and the fight against racial discrimination on the other. There will be no mention whatsoever of Hublot on the advertising panels, or the fact that they have donated them; all space is dedicated to promote the message of the Unite Against Racism campaign, run by Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) and supported by UEFA. The important thing for Hublot is to encourage the values of respect, solidarity and friendship, as essential in sport as they are in daily life, and in this way Hublot can communicate its involvement in the fight against racism to a vast number of people. The only pitchside visibility Hublot will retain during EURO 2008 is on the fourth official’s board showing the amount of injury time at the end of each half.
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