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Where can baseball fans view memorabilia like a 1982 Cal Ripken Jr. rookie card or a 1950s catcher’s mask, swing at fastballs in a professional batting cage and let the kids burn off some pre-game energy on giant inflatable slides and toys?

For each of the past five seasons, Iowa Cubs fans, along with fans of about 50 other minor league clubs across the country, have enjoyed the Principal Family Fun Fest sponsored by Principal Financial Group Inc. The traveling event, which encompasses about 4,000 square feet of baseball-themed attractions, is billed as the “largest and longest-running celebration of baseball.”

The Family Fun Fest is among several large-scale events that Principal and other Central Iowa-based companies have attached their names to over the past few years, as companies recognize the value of using sponsored events to entertain customers, reward clients and gain national exposure. Whether they’re presented as brightly colored inflatable kids’ toys on a midway or flashy racecars tricked out with corporate logos, sponsorships provide a valuable relationship tool.

“Sponsorships allow you to engage with your target industry in a unique way, because you’re typically tapping into a passion or interest that they have,” said Steve Whitty, Principal’s vice president for corporate marketing. “It really resonates with people when you put your brand in the context of something they really enjoy doing.”

On average, large companies target between 15 and 20 percent of their total marketing budget on sponsorships, and Principal’s spending is within that range, he said. Principal’s portfolio of sponsorships now includes ventures in auto racing, a professional golfing event, a women-in-business teleconference series and the Inc. 500 conference.

Corporate sponsorships are a significant growth industry, according to figures from the International Events Group (IEG), which tracks spending trends. North American companies will increase their sponsorship spending by an estimated 12.6 percent this year, the sixth consecutive year that the annual growth rate has increased from the previous year and the biggest jump since 2000, according to the IEG’s annual industry forecast. Total sponsorship spending by U.S. and Canadian companies is expected to reach $16.78 billion this year, up from $14.91 billion in 2007.

Racing for sponsorships

Sporting events are expected to grab the largest share ever of that corporate spending this year – 69 percent, up from 66 percent last year – and will generate the only double-digit growth among all categories of sponsorship types. By comparison, spending on entertainment tours and attractions is expected to increase by less than 3 percent, to $1.61 billion. Arts-oriented sponsorships are expected to increase by 3.4 percent to $822 million, and festivals, fairs and annual events spending is expected to reach $754 million, a 7.7 percent increase.

Meredith Corp. has been among the most active sponsors among Central Iowa’s publicly traded companies, though many of its annual events are less visible to Iowans because they take place on the East Coast. For the past 35 years, the company has sponsored the Family Circle Cup tennis tournament in Charleston, S.C., attracting top stars such as Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova. In New York City, one of Meredith women’s magazines, More, hosted a marathon and half marathon in April in which more than 7,000 women participated. This fall, the company will host the Fitness Mind, Body, Spirit Games, which includes 4-mile men’s and women’s runs and a 1.7-mile family fitness walk in New York.

Auto racing sponsorships have become as popular as the sport itself. Principal, for instance, sponsors NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races and drivers. Casey’s General Stores Inc. is the official convenience store of the U.S. Modified Touring Series (USMTS), and will serve this year as title sponsor for the USMTS national championship series and four national tour events. Wells Fargo & Co. has sponsored NASCAR race teams for the past eight years, and for the past six years has had an increasing sponsorship relationship with Petty Enterprises and its driver team of Kyle Petty and Bobby Labonte.

During the 2008 race season, which began with the Daytona 500, Wells Fargo will have primary sponsorship of the team’s No. 45 car in 10 races, which includes a full-car paint scheme with its corporate colors and logos, and associate sponsorship with a logo on the car in the remainder of the races.

The large scale of the events – the average attendance at NASCAR races is 190,000 – and the length of the multiday events allow for spending significant time with clients to build relationships, said Tom Gibbons, director of corporate sponsorships for Wells Fargo Financial. “It gives you time to have fun and to build that relationship,” he said.

This season, Wells Fargo will host hospitality events at 21 races, bringing an average of 150 business-to-business clients and Wells Fargo representatives together.

The IEG estimates that Wells Fargo invests between $20 million and $25 million annually in corporate sponsorships. Gibbons declined to provide any figures on what the company spends on NASCAR sponsorships, saying only that it’s “a significant number.”

Though Wells Fargo pays attention to the return on investment provided by the brand exposure, the financial services company is more interested in “hard-dollar tracking of business that comes our way” as a result of the sponsorships, Gibbons said. For instance, the company tracks the amount of additional auto financing business it receives from dealerships after hosting dealership representatives at an event or providing a NASCAR vehicle for a weekend display at a dealership, he said.

A big deal

Principal hadn’t considered minor league baseball as a sponsorship opportunity, but latched on to the idea for Family Fun Fest after a nationwide search for its next corporate sponsorship, said Chris Riedel King, a senior relationship manager with Principal who manages the event.

“We started talking about Family Fun Fest in 2003, shortly after our ‘Treasures to Go’ national tour with the Smithsonian American Art Museum was ending,” she said. “We were looking for something else with a kind of a national footprint but local activation to provide marketing opportunities for our field offices.”

A Florida-based company, Entertainment & Sports International (ESI), pitched its concept for Family Fun Fest to Principal after seeing an advertisement in the IEG newsletter seeking a “grassroots marketing opportunity” for a national event with which it could partner.

With the surging popularity of minor league baseball, “we looked around and found that there was no national fan celebration, that nobody had ever taken all these teams all over the country and strung them together with one touring entity that would replicate from market to market,” said Joe Owens, ESI’s co-founder.

Additionally, many of Principal’s clients and field offices are located in the middle-market cities in which the minor league teams play, “and minor league baseball is very much tied to the small and medium-sized business, which is our sweet spot,” Riedel King said, “so there were a lot of synergies.” The relationship was also a factor that led Principal to purchase the naming rights to Sec Taylor Stadium, which was rechristened Principal Park, she said.

ESI’s long-term contract with Principal allows the company to offer the event at no cost to the ballclubs, Owens said. “The reason it’s been welcomed so well by minor league baseball is that the teams realize they could never bring anything the size and scope of this to their ballparks themselves,” he said. “And in addition to this, Principal provides funds to promote and market it. It’s been proven to increase attendance, so they’re putting more people though the turnstiles. Some of the teams build their annual fan festival around the date that we can come.”

Along with the midway attractions and games, which are offered for three hours prior to game time at each ballpark on the tour, the Family Fun Fest enables Principal to invite special guests to attend a hospitality picnic during the event inside the ballpark, “so that helps us to build even deeper relationships with people,” Riedel King said. “We’ve been able to get even more people to come to that over the years. They could be existing or prospective clients, existing brokers or producers for us or prospects. Sometimes we’ve used it for recruiting agents.”

The event continues to grow in stature. This year, for instance, the major leagues have for the first time invited the event to attend spring training games in Florida.

“Principal has been a great supporter of things we’ve wanted to do over the course of the years,” Owens said. “In everything that we’ve wanted to do, we’ve come to Principal and we’ve said, ‘We have an idea about how we can grow the value of this,’ and they’ve been a true partner in supporting that.”

Steve Whitty’s name was misspelled in the print edition of this story.