How many people who queued to whoosh down the slides from the upper floors of Tate Modern gave a thought to Unilever? The manufacturing giant has sponsored the installations that have dominated the gallery’s massive turbine hall since 2000. Why? Because linking your logo with a prestigious cultural event makes big business sense.

UK businesses gave £153.4 million to the arts in 2005-06. The reasons for signing the cheques vary from company to company, says Colin Tweedy, chief executive of the charity Arts & Business.

“Through the years, businesses have become more and more sophisticated,” he says. “They are looking for the return, and looking to evaluate the sponsorship. It’s very much about who the audience is that they are trying to approach. Is it the City, White-hall or the public?”

Law firms sponsor the arts to make them appear creative and dynamic to prospective young staff, for example. And BP, the oil company, sponsors the Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery to develop its corporate reputation, not to sell more petrol, Tweedy says.

Bankrolling installations at Tate Modern is not about selling more washing powder, says Lisa Clough, the corporate sponsorship manager at Unilever. “It has been a massive success in terms of brand alliance. For us it is about our corporate brand.”

In 1999, when the sponsorship deal was agreed, Unilever’s products were household names but the parent company was relatively unknown. All that has changed thanks to the Unilever Series, Clough says. “Now there is the opportunity for people to go to Tate [Modern], appreciate the art and think ‘these are the people sponsoring the Tate – and who make Persil’.”

Backing one of the year’s arts blockbusters is also a good way to gain access to opinion leaders, she says. “It’s a once-a-year opportunity for senior Unilever people and people in other industries and government to get together.”

HSBC Private Bank sponsors Design Miami, a contemporary design show. One reason for this is to give its clients access to a growing market for investment, says Tony Joyce, the bank’s global head of marketing and communications. “It gives us the opportunity to bring clients together in an interesing way.”

Arts sponsorship is now such a crowded market that companies must work hard to make a splash. “Our clients are people deluged with invitations of one type or another,” Joyce says, so to get people to turn out it has to offer something special. In this case that means access to designers and other collectors in a private lounge at the show.

Culture appeals to a wider audience than that other corporate sponsorship favourite, sport. “A lot of sponsorship is about sport but that is quite a male arena,” Joyce says; the arts hold more interest for female clients and the partners of many clients.

Like sport, arts sponsorship gives companies the opportunity reinforce their corporate message. For example, HSBC Private Bank says that it looks at investment in the same way that designers look at everyday objects and reimagine them; Unilever says that the installations that bear its name are about vitality, and so are they.

But the partnership between business and the arts is not always interpreted favourably. Brian Sewell, the art critic, recently savaged Tate Modern and another of its sponsors, UBS. The investment bank, he concludes from its own collection, knows nothing about art: “[This is] a collection that suggests the fallibility of UBS, [in] a sector of operations in which UBS are world leaders who know nothing.” Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Works of art

Unilever initially invested £1.25 million in Tate Modern, but it puts the value of the press coverage it has created at £2 million up to 2006.

In 2005-06, the private sector invested more than £529 million in culture.

The lion’s share – almost £305 million from the private sector – found its way to arts organisations in London.

Employees, mostly from the legal, financial and business services sectors, contributed an estimated £3.9 million in time and expertise in 2005-06 .

www.aandb.org.uk

Next week: how arts sponsorship can create a buzz in the workplace.

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