Aon

Grady

Will the geniuses in the marketing department issue two versions of the new home kits then, one this year with AIG and then the same one with AON the following season or will they use the new sponsor as an excuse to launch another new kit for 10/11?

Rood

Likely to be the same kit with different sponsor in 10/11

Forev

I think it looks okay and if they're coughing up the cash, it's all good.



(Not mine.)

theimperialinn

I know but it is due to be replaced for the start of the 09/10 season.

Lester Freamon

Part of me thinks that looks fucking brilliant, part of me thinks it doesn't even look like a United shirt. We'll see, I'm fairly positive.

theimperialinn

It looks like some crappy continental shirt.

Rahul

Did they pencil in a Ronaldo goatie as well !

downxandxout

Looks like an inverted knight rider.

Doevle

Looks mint IMO.

Paz

FreakyJim

can't tell if this is real or photoshopped zomg

gbgary

it won't look like that as the V stripe is a one year thing and will be over by the time the aon shirt is made...i believe.

the aon logo is simple and will look good.

ralphie88

Speak for yourself.

ralphie88

To be fair, I told you back in December that we would have AIG on our shirts for next season.

ralphie88

This from the AON site. Nice to know that you replica-shirt wearers are appreciated, eh?

Approximately 6.6 million shirts are sold each year (official/non-official). Provides Aon with 6.6 million "walking billboards"

Bearded but no genius

Bearded but no genius

Do you have children, Mr. High-Horse?

Sunny Jim

14,1

The Flying Potato

The Blue kit from 2006 had Vodafone in its first season and AIG for its second. so no, this doesnt mean next years hsirts will be for just one year.

theimperialinn

Yeah it's not like United have set a precedent for it or anything!

niMic

I don't have a problem with the logo. It'd easily work in just plain white on most of our shirts.

Sylar

I did work experience at Aon.

theimperialinn

We use AON as one of our insurance brokers

kf

So what's There's Only One United in Irish then? Maybe they could put that on the walking billboards...

topper

Looks good on a United shirt AND its a cracking amount at 20 mill a year ( if true) - a kick in the teeth for the doom and gloom lot here who a few months ago were saying we´d be lucky - cos of the recession - to get similar to what we´re getting from AIG. ......we get 5 mill more pa

Good ol Mr Gill

x42bn6

I'd prefer YouPorn.

Nice logo.

Keano1999

Interesting article about our new shirt sponsors and how the deal happened.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/20090...ed-sponsorship


A look at how a little-known Chicago company ended up sponsoring one of world's most popular soccer teams

by James Warren
Manchester United's Unexpected New Player
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When two executives of Chicago’s Aon Corp. went through their mail one day last fall, they each found a large package with a leather-encased box, containing, of all things, a soccer shirt with the company’s own logo emblazoned across the chest. The shirts appeared to be bonafide red home jerseys of Manchester United, arguably the most famous sports team in the world—or at least in the world outside the soccer-suspicious United States.

They had the red and yellow team logo and the Nike swoosh, and were obviously high quality, but they were just mockups. Aon, which is Gaelic for “Oneness,” had no relationship with the team. It doesn’t even have anything to do with its own hometown teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls, or Bears.

That overture led, eight months later, to a sponsorship and marketing deal in which AON paid a reported $130 million in exchange for having its logo on the jersey. The story of how this deal came about, and the benefits each party derives from it, offers an instructive look at the world of international commerce, where in the quest for global success, companies sometimes find themselves venturing into unexpected but auspicious pairings.

Manchester United is a giant on the world sports scene, transcending its un-sexy, industrial hometown in the same way Vince Lombardi’s Packers’ transcended little Green Bay. It’s fitting that the favorite book of its own legendary coach, Scotsman Alex Ferguson, is When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss’s biography of Lombardi.

Based on worldwide polling of respondents' favorite and second-favorite teams, Manchester United has an estimated fan base of 333 million. Its record of championships is equivalent to the Yankees, with an impressive consistency and a Who’s Who roster of past and present players that includes superstars like David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The reach that Manchester United-related events, broadcasts, and products have around the world is staggering. Manchester United games are broadcast in more than 1.1 billion homes in more than 220 countries, attracting an estimated weekly audience of 88 million during the team’s 41-week season. In addition, it has its own dedicated television channel, MUTV (a joint venture with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV), which is broadcast in 197 million homes via cable or internet in more than 100 countries. Its website generates more than 60 million page impressions monthly, with 70 percent coming from outside the United Kingdom. Millions are signed up to receive the team’s email newsletters, and just last year, the team sold 2.2 million licensed jerseys – which doesn’t count the estimated 4.4 million bootleg sales. Affiliation with this team through sponsorship is an unparalleled opportunity for exposure.

Starting in 2006, Man U was sponsored by AIG. It was a four-year, $93 million deal that seemed to give a boost to the financial services company. Prior to the deal, New York-based AIG did not make it into the so-called Interbrand survey, an influential annual list of the top 100 global brands. A year after the deal, AIG was the highest new entry onto the list, at number 47. The reason cited was: “The insurer is pushing harder to make a name. Its sponsorship of Manchester United puts AIG in front of millions of fans throughout Asia and Europe.” At about the same time, AIG rose from 84 to 30 in the Barrons list of World’s Most Respected Companies.

As the economy imploded in 2008, AIG decided not to renew the arrangement when the contract expired in 2010. Even before AIG decided to end its sponsorship, Man U had been strategizing about attracting a more lucrative shirt sponsor, and finding a partner with a similar interest in growing in China, India, and other emerging markets. It considered AIG a fine partner, but it also suspected that the firm may have underpaid for the value it was getting. Man U’s London office began researching potential new partners.

Manchester United was systematic in its approach, going through stacks of data on companies worldwide and, according to team officials, targeting a “substantial number,” sending each of them the mock jersey, along with individually tailored pitch brochures, explaining how the team could provide solutions to each company’s competitive needs.

Aon was an ideal target for such a pitch. The company has no real brand presence, even in its home base of Chicago, despite the fact that its name is affixed to the third-tallest building in town (fourth in the United States)—a white granite-clad, 83-story skyscraper once famously known as the Standard Oil Building. Ask even well-to-do professional Chicagoans what Aon does, and most aren’t sure. (What the firm in fact does is offer risk management, insurance and reinsurance, and human capital consulting services.)

The company isn’t well known worldwide, either. To be sure, it’s huge, successful, respected, and very international (it does the King of Spain’s insurance work, for example). But most of its subsidiaries go by other names, not Aon.

Moreover the company didn’t have much branding coordination. In some places, it sponsored horseraces, in others dragon boat racing, in still others art exhibits. For Phil Clement, Aon’s marketing boss (and one of the company’s two recipients of the mock jersies), the proposal offered the opportunity to tie all these branding efforts together. He could oversee one mega-endeavor, instead of dozens of smaller ones. And rather than starting an international campaign from scratch, Aon could piggyback on the far-flung Man U enterprise. “Instead of running 20 marketing programs,” he later commented, “we could potentially run one, lean, agile, program that would have more impact than any 20 combined. And the fact that I could hit Europe, China and India at the same time was phenomenal.”

It wasn’t all that hard an internal sell since, of a key 32-person board of its biggest operating unit, only six of them hold U.S. passports. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aon executives who work overseas were more vocal about the deal’s benefits than many at Chicago headquarters). That group knows soccer. And of the eight people on its executive team, three are Manchester United diehards.

As the talks continued, Aon didn’t know who its competition was, but company execs knew they stood to benefit from the downturn in the economy. There wasn’t as much crazy marketing money being spent, so they weren’t much concerned about being outbid by a dot-com or some other firm flush with cash or soaring stock prices. And a lot of well-established firms, with large marketing budgets already committed elsewhere, were unlikely to shift hefty sums into a Man U deal. Finally, they knew that some potential competitors were probably skittish about following scandal-tainted AIG.

Manchester United was well aware of its global reach and appeal, but team executives were intent on not seeming arrogant or overconfident. Richard Arnold, the team’s commercial director, said the partnership with Aon was as much a function of the “cultural fit” they discerned as it was the dollars on the table. (He intimated that there were other strong bidders, with AON not necessarily the highest).

The deal was finalized on May 27 in Rome, shortly before the big European club game of the year—the so-called Champions League final—at the Olympic Stadium. (Barcelona ended up beating Manchester United, 2-0.). The shirt-sponsorship portion of the deal is to begin in the 2010-2011 season, to be followed in 2011 by a product promotion agreement, according to which Aon insurance products will bear the Man U brand.

Talking about the deal later, at a bar back in Chicago, Clement could not have been more pleased. By one marketing formula, he figures that to replicate via traditional advertising methods the amount of exposure he’ll get would cost in the vicinity of $330 million.

And so, this Wednesday, while Chicago sports fans were convulsed by the start of the “Crosstown Classic” between the Cubs and White Sox at Wrigley Field, Clement was in London, immersed in international marketing plans, Arnold was in China, preparing for an upcoming Asian tour, and Chicago’s Mayor Daley was in Switzerland, attempting to woo the International Olympic Committee. And while Daley hopes to bring the world to Chicago, Man U is looking to help bring Chicago-based Aon to the world.

TuTuHimm

I thought it was Akon at first