Thinking about what Ninja Kid said:
A lot of the value in a sponsorship comes from the way the contest organisers actually manage the event. Unfortunately bodyboarding in South Africa leans heavily on the generosity of people who are doing tough and time consuming work on these events, just because they have a passion for the sport. This is not an excuse for managing an event badly, but is also understandable/forgivable, since having an event is better than none at all.
If an event is organised really well then the involved sponsors should really be getting solid coverage such as owning the name of an event (eg. Wimpy/Rossi Pro or Sport Unlimited Cape Classic) as well as great brand exposure on the beach, on the website and in the print media. The sponsors should definitely not clash (eg. 2 board brands) and they will need to pay for that privledge. This exposure should overide any relevence to what gear the individual riders are using in the contest.
A typical scenario for sponsorship that I've seen in other industries is a sponsor can buy a package deal from the organisers, generally categorised as Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. The event needs a certain amount of cash to run and it will take either 1 platinum sponsor, 2 golds, 4 silvers, or 8 bronze sponsors to cover the event costs. The packages state what the sponsors will get for their money, (eg. platinum owns the name of the event and all branding etc, gold will share the name and branding spaces, silver gets demo space on the beach and logos on tees, and so on) this also creates the agreement between organisers and sponsors that if they don't buy the platinum for whatever amount, then they must be prepared to share the exposure.
Another point to be made is that it is the responsibility of the organisers to arrange all this coverage beforehand with the relevant media or authorities, the media guys should not be expected to just slap free ads in the mags or website, and likewise, having some ranger pull down the judging tower because its not been approved by local authorities would ruin the exposure opportunities of the sponsors (which also makes you realise why nomadic venues are hard to arrange).
Moral of the story: its a ball ache to organise these things, so until theres some reason (read money) for someone to do it properly and professionally the SA events are probably not going to compare with the Billabong Pro or some PGA million dollar challenge. And then again, it has to start somewhere, so whoever puts in the effort to run the best event of the year will probably have the least trouble finding money the next year...
Okay enough from me.
