So, five years in and this is our first blog post!
James and I started Sebadore Sports Marketing on February 15th 2019, having left our previous agency together in January of that year. Friends for many years, we met while working together at Red Bull Racing in 2013 when the likes of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber were winning races...and Daniel Ricciardo was driving a Toro Rosso (and able to walk down the street without being recognised!).
When we were thinking of the name for our new venture we knew we didn't want it to be another three letter acronym...the kind that even clients forget, get wrong and, generally, don't care much for. We wanted the business to stand for the reason we were creating it in the first place so we landed on Sebadore. Inspired by the story behind Nike, the Goddess of Victory, we blended our own motivations - sports and technology.
We saw ourselves as a blend of two Patron Saints: Saint Sebastian, the Patron Saint of Sport & Athletes, and Isidore, the Patron Saint of Technology & Innovation. We knew our business needed a reason to exist - something to give people a reason to talk to us - and so our focus on delivering value at the intersection of sport and technology was born. SEBA - DORE.
Since our launch we have worked for some of the largest corporations in the world, as well as some of the most nimble and agile venture-backed scale-up tech businesses. We have always rooted ourselves in sports marketing (with a focus on motorsport and F1) and technology. Sometimes those industries intersect and we build bridges between technology companies and motorsport through innovative partnerships and sometimes they stay in their lanes.
Through Covid (when the global sports industry stopped), we picked up a number of US-based venture-backed tech start-ups in need of marketing strategy and support - some of whom we worked with for over two and a half years. This pillar of our business is still going strong today and we are proud to be able to offer our clients a flexible approach to outsourced marketing support. But the majority of our revenue is from sports marketing, in particular F1. We help brands maximise the value of their investments in motorsport by negotiating the best possible partnerships for them as well as delivering marketing and activation services across the entire spectrum of channels.
"So, what's your model? " we get asked a fair bit. We are a micro-agency. Our business model is to remain small at the centre and scale quickly through our wide and deep network of experienced and skilled contractors and freelancers around the world. This means that we don't have to pay for the overheads that afflict traditional agencies...and, therefore, neither do our clients. The knock-on effect is that we can propose a more experienced team member to our clients than other agencies for the same price, or often cheaper. We believe that this model works for our clients, it works for our network, and it works for us - we offer a full-service scope alongside specialisms that you can typically only achieve with contractors. Truly win - win - win.
So, why has it taken so long to get the first blog post up?! Well, I think we're pretty good at what we do for our clients - they seem to be happy with our work! But, unfortunately in a start-up, there is always more to do, more emails to send, more follow-ups to chase and so the marketing practices we preach to our clients have (in some ways) gone by the wayside for our own business. But, we are now five years in and that's going to change! We don't necessarily have more time than we used to do, but we're going to prioritise it in the coming months and years, so this will be the new home of our own content - thoughts, musings, opinions, and more about the industries in which we work.
We hope you enjoy the content that is to come and we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Rich and James
