I sent over a proposal for an overall event sponsorship to a medium-sized company a few days ago. One of the many bullet points in the “Here’s what you get” section mentions that all press releases about the show will include the name of the sponsoring company, their website address and their sponsor level designation. As I was going through the proposal with my contact, she said “Our PR department will need to approve every press release that has our name on it before it is released.”

This is the second time I’ve heard this in about a month. The first time, I clarified with my contact at another company that it meant approving only the section that mentions their company and only if it was anything other than, “Gold Sponsor: ABC Company, www.ABCCompany.com.” That I can understand.

But this time it was different. The potential sponsor wanted to approve every single release before we sent it out - no matter what the content - if it had their name anywhere in it.

This is nuts - and probably a deal breaker for me. It’s a $15,000 sponsorship which is extremely hard to turn down, but I can’t turn over my corporate communications to a sponsor. Hopefully we can reach some sort of understanding. I can’t imagine CES has to send over every single press release they send out to Sony to approve before it goes out…..do they? I mean at some point Sony probably trusts that CES isn’t going to send out a release saying they are buying Apple without getting approval from both companies. I understand wanting to control the company’s message and image, but at some point their has to be a measure of trust between sponsor and show management. And what about the huge shows with 30 sponsors - can you imagine trying to get approval for every release from even half the companies?

I’d love to hear from any show organizer out there who had a similar request and how they handled it.