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No pain, no gain for sports marketers?

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Sports traditionally has given fans an opportunity to forget about credit crunches, roller-coaster stock markets and whether they’ll have sufficient savings to retire.

So where do sports league and franchise owners go for relief?

Sports industry executives generally believe that their business is recession-resistant. That sentiment was evident in March when hundreds of sports marketing executives gathered in Dana Point for the annual IMG World Congress of Sports.

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A Coca-Cola executive characterized economic slowdowns as ‘a huge opportunity’ for marketers to build market share by sticking close to fans who are spending even more time with their favorite teams.

An Anheuser-Busch executive said it was a bit harder for sports sponsorships and marketing deals to pencil out, but that the opportunity is still there to use sports ties to grow their businesses.

And MLB made the ‘sports helps you forget’ case in a video that showed baseball as the national pain reliever for such troubling times as the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II.

But there are signs that some sports entities will feel the pain generated by the troubled global economy.

General Motors Corp.’s Chevrolet brand is “significantly” reducing money spent on sports sponsorships as it struggles to combat falling sales. Similarly, Ford Motor Co. is cutting back on its NASCAR sponsorship.

ADT recently became the fifth LPGA tournament sponsor to announce its intention to leave the sport -- joining Safeway, Bobby Ginn, Fields and SemGroup.

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‘I think every property, whether it’s a pro sports team or a local [athletic] event is going to be feeling the pinch,’ said William Chipps, senior editor of Chicago-based IEG Sponsorship Report. ‘When you look at corporate marketing expenditures, sports sponsorships often are one of the first things to go.’

But Chipps, who spoke to The Times by telephone on Tuesday, believes that leagues, franchises and other sports entities can weather the storm by ‘doing everything in their power to make sure that their sponsors are accomplishing what they want to do.’

Chipps plans to release his 2009 sports sponsorship forecast in December.

-- Greg Johnson

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