Seth Godin interrupted my weekend by forcing me to get an entry up about his brilliant lesson on sports marketing: Much of it is completely meaningless and unrelated to the brand, product, or service that sponsors it.

Godin specifically takes aim at State Farm and its sponsorship of Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby. He makes the brilliant point that you could swap State Farm with Allstate and see no difference. Well, Allstate at least sounds better with “All Star,” but neither likely have an impact on anything other than general brand awareness. In other words, State Farm is admitting that its insurance is the same as everyone else’s – so it’s best to just make people think of State Farm first.

On the other hand, look what Nationwide insurance is doing. It created a marketing campaign called “Have the Talk” in which the brand is encouraging families to have difficult discussions in life. Examples include tough talks with teens and speaking with older parents about their living situation. At havethetalk.com, visitors can get coaching on breaking the ice and tackling tough issues. The consumer benefit is not explicitly tied to insurance. But Nationwide knows that a business issue with insurance is that many people who really should think about insurance are not doing so. By starting these conversations, Nationwide is kick-starting discussions that might help drive category growth, and drive brand affinity for Nationwide (rather than just boosting general brand name awareness).

Seth goes on to take a shot at one of the oft-ignored but real reasons that we marketers embrace sports sponsorships: We marketers love to personally be a part of them. He proposes a pretty tough test:

Here’s my number one fiduciary rule for big brand marketers: The executives involved in approving a sports or entertainment promotion should not be permitted to attend the event.”

I think this might be a little extreme, but it is something marketers should willingly confront. I’ll admit to being attracted to NASCAR sponsorships as a Brand Manager at P&G, and I gravitated to racing when I had a chance to market Mr. Clean AutoDry Car Wash (for the record, it worked, and we won a race). I’ve seen fellow marketers and clients fall much further under the spell of sports events. I’d rather not give examples – to protect the guilty.

At the end of the day, sports sponsorships can come to life in a meaningful way. One current example is what Visa is doing to stoke the passion of the Olympics. The brand is also adding value to visitors with an ATM locater and a downloadable tip guide. Further, Visa connects its brand emotionally through its sponsorship of the Paralympics in addition to the main show.

So the moral of the story is to make sure that your sports sponsorships are as meaningful to your consumer as they are to you….

UPDATE: Brandweek recently interviewed several marketers with MLB All-Star sponsorships.  Mark Gibson, Assistant VP of Advertising at State Farm spoke a great deal about how sports sponsorships help his company “break through the in the most media-congested marketplace that there is.”  He later praised sports sponsorships “because it is Tivo-proof.”  Net, Gibson and Allstate continue to seek eyeballs rather than provide meaningful marketing for their customers.