Portrush tipped to prosper without title sponsor

This week’s Irish Open at Royal Portrush will not suffer too much from the lack of a title sponsor, leading sports marketing expert Padraig Slattery believes.

This year’s event, beginning on Thursday at the world famous Dunluce links, will be the second Irish Open in succession to be played without a title sponsor following the withdrawal of 3 Mobile in 2010.

Yet the first visit to the north since 1953 and a return to Portrush for the Irish Open for the first time since 1947 is already a success for the European Tour, having sold out tickets for Saturday and Sunday’s third and fourth rounds, the first time that has happened for one day at a regular tour event on its schedule, let alone two.

The intervention of Tourism Ireland helped keep the tournament on the schedule in 2011, although the prize fund dropped by 50% from €3m to €1.5m. However, in the continued absence of a presenting sponsor, the European Tour has instead assembled an impressive array of category sponsors to help underwrite the €2m prize fund.

It is that strong portfolio of companies that Slattery, Dublin-based Slattery Communications managing director, believes could be the future model for expensive sponsorships events.

“It doesn’t surprise me there’s no title sponsor because it’s a huge sponsorship in terms of the levels of money that they want,” Slattery said.

“And now there are views there that a single, main sponsor is a thing of the past and that what is needed is a more American model where they have four or five different sponsors in a tournament — you might have a presenting sponsor and then very strong category sponsors.

“The Irish Open has done very well in that regard this year, with the likes of Heineken and Emirates coming on board. So on one hand, it is a surprise because it’s a very high-profile event, on the other hand, golf is very expensive. The Irish Open prize fund is not up where it was, relative to the halcyon days but it’s still very expensive, as well as the costs of putting a tournament on.”

Emirates, for one, is happy to be involved with the Irish Open, signing a three-year deal with the European Tour in May. The Dubai-based carrier’s country manager for Ireland, Margaret Shannon, told the Irish Examiner her airline saw the event as the ideal platform to engage with its target clientele.

“We just feel that golf has got a huge following in Ireland and internationally and with the three big Northern Ireland golfers and the prominence of Pádraig Harrington, Irish golf is very important worldwide,” Shannon said.

“So the association with golf through the Irish Open is very good for Emirates.”

The airline already has a prominent sponsorship profile thanks to its association with Arsenal, holding the London club’s stadium naming rights having signed a 15-year deal in 2004 and becoming the Gunners’ shirt sponsor two seasons later.

Their Irish Open sponsorship, however, is its first such deal in Ireland.

“We sponsor 14 other golf events, seven of them on the European Tour, so it’s something that we do. The Irish Open came up as a sponsorship and we felt that for the three-year period that we have in this deal, it can connect us to the people and connect the people to our network [of destinations] beyond Dubai.

“It gets out name out there for us and it ties in with our current branding by connecting with the people. So we believe we’re going to get a lot of exposure by being associated with it.”