A sponsorship program built from scratch, renewed for 12 years
Mother Nature Network launched with sponsors and no definition of what they would get. I built the program that kept them coming back.
The problem
Mother Nature Network, an environmental news and lifestyle website founded by Atlanta ad man Joel Babbitt and Chuck Leavell, launched in 2009 as the green CNN. A brand-new site has no traffic, so display ads weren't an option. The plan was category sponsorships: each sponsor would be the only advertiser in a channel like green energy or consumer packaged goods, while the content stayed editorially independent. The first sponsors signed on sight unseen. Nobody had defined what a sponsorship actually delivered, how it would be measured, or what would make a sponsor sign again the next year.
What I did
Working with MNN's president, Emily Murphy, and Joel, I defined the program: ten pieces of sponsored content a year (videos, interactive tools, infographics, and long-form pieces), exclusive advertising in the sponsor's category, promotion across our social channels, and a year-end report on traffic, social reach, media pickup, and reuse. I wrote, produced, and directed sponsor video shoots, wrote infographics and requirements for interactive tools, ran the quarterly reviews, and grew the sponsor team from one account executive (me) to three. When a sponsor's first shoot went wrong, I rewrote the script and we reshot it in a week, and that sponsor stayed for years. As the programs grew, we built whole sites for sponsors: SafeBee for UL (my concept), SubCulture for Subway, and CommonGood for the Newman's Own Foundation.
What changed
The program grew into a multi-million-dollar business with 20+ sponsors and a 90% annual renewal rate, over 12 years from before launch to the 2020 sale of MNN and Treehugger to Dotdash, where I was on the deal team. Sponsored pieces went from about a thousand views to 150,000, and a lot of the work ended up in sponsors' own sustainability reports.
“He created our multi-million-dollar sponsorship program, managing and cultivating relationships with teams at AT&T, Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Delta, Dunkin', Ford, Newman's Own, Walmart, and more.”