Activating a sports sponsorship deal is the key to getting the most out of an attentive, ready-made customer base.

Getting bang for your marketing buck has always been a tricky business, but sports sponsorship is proving to be an increasingly popular vehicle for companies seeking to promote their brands.

This year the global sports sponsorship market is expected to increase in value by 12 per cent to about $38 billion (€28 billion).

The reason is simple. Marketers have realised that it is better to engage rather than interrupt consumers when promoting brands. Sports sponsorship provides the perfect, ready-made content.

In Ireland, the total sponsorship market is worth about €103 million, according to Onside, a sponsorship consultancy. Sports accounts for about 60 per cent of that figure and is set to grow significantly.

"More brands are moving into this space, and it's getting a busier in terms of sponsorship," says John Trainor, Onside's managing director.

The GAA will shortly kick off a process to find six sponsors for its All Ireland football and hurling championships.

The association has called time on the previous title sponsor model that saw Guinness and Bank of Ireland lend their brands to the hurling and football championships respectively for more than a decade, although both will be offered the opportunity to participate in the new deal. "The feeling within the association was that Guinness and Bank of Ireland had effectively taken ownership of the championships," said one senior sponsorship source.

"They wanted to change that. They also wanted to bring a bit of competition to the space. It's no harm to have a number of companies promoting your sport, rather than one," he said.

Under the new arrangement, the GAA is seeking three sponsors for both the hurling and the football championships.

In a manner similar to how the Uefa Champions League is run, the sponsorships will be integrated with a new television broadcast deal with sponsor ads being used to support the coverage of matches.

The GAA has also struck a deal with provincial grounds that will bring uniformity to pitch side billboards for the benefit of the main sponsors. "We've recognised the need to maximise the promotion of our games," says Dermot Power, the GAA's head of marketing. "We also want to control our brands better and not hand them over completely to our sponsors."

The IRFU and FAI are also set for a major sponsorship bonanza by offering up the naming rights for Lansdowne Road. The associations are believed to be seeking a mouth-watering €50 million for a 15-year deal. "It's big money and there won't be too many takers, but you can see from Emirates sponsorship of Arsenal's new football stadium in England that this kind of sponsorship can be quite effective," says one advertising executive.

Activating a sponsorship is the key to success. Research has shown that brands that combine broadcast sponsorship with linked ads and below-the-line activity, achieve double the impact for their investment over those that invest only in broadcast sponsorship.

"Brands that only buy a sponsorship without activating it are wasting their investment," according to Jamie Lord, marketing and business development director with leading media buying business MindShare Asia-Pacific, in a letter he penned for the latest edition of Media, a UK trade publication.

The GAA's new sponsors can each expect to pay about €2.5 million a year for the right to be associated with the championships. About half of this will be spent on activating the sponsorship.

Spar is one example of a company using an event to promote its brand to a global audience, while also connecting with the local market. Spar International is a regular sponsor of athletics. Its association with last year's European Championships gave it access to 950 million viewers.

Spar Ireland, meanwhile, has linked up with Derval O'Rourke and David Gillick to promote its brand to young people. To date, Spar has spent €1.5 million on its involvement in Irish athletics.

The convenience store chain linked up with O'Rourke about two and a half years ago. Since then, she has won a World Indoor gold medal and a silver at the European outdoor championships.

"We've done very well from our association with Derval," says Suzanne Weldon, marketing director of Spar Ireland. "She fits with the age profile of our target customers and it also helps to promote some of the healthier food options we have available in our stores."

Spar has taken its campaign to schools, sponsoring sports days and providing kit to youngsters. In the run up to the recent World Athletics Championships in Osaka, Spar also offered 10 trips to the Far East through a competition, the Sprint to Japan.

"We got a lot of good feedback from our retailers about that and it really seems to have paid off," says Weldon.

Not every country in the Spar family has activated its athletics association so successfully, so Weldon and her colleagues have been asked to present the Irish experience to a company-wide marketing conference in Nice at the end of October.

Nigel Geach, a director with London-based Sports Marketing Surveys, says sponsors increasingly want to own events. "HSBC is a good example of that," he says. "It has created a number of golf events around the world that are synonymous with its brand."

Cycling is a sport where sponsors names have become synonymous with the teams they are backing. It was a strategy that worked well until recent years when the sport has rocked by drugs scandals.

Gerolsteiner, a German mineral water company, recently pulled the plug on its 10-year sponsorship of the German ProTour cycling team. Gerolsteiner is said to have invested €9 million in the sport annually. Gerolsteiner said the recent scandals had served to "temporarily devalue cycling as a communication platform".

German mobile phone company T-Mobile, meanwhile, has extended its support of the ProTour team until 2010.

In spite of cycling's problems, Geach believes that sports sponsorship will continue to thrive, particularly in conjunction with television advertising.

"The fragmentation of TV audiences means that the medium doesn't have the same position as it did 10 or 20 years ago.

"Sponsorship is now more and more part of the marketing mix and both have to go hand in hand for a campaign to be a success," says Geach.